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Aug. 24, 2012
A roving rabbi reaches out
Lindsey bat Joseph has started a new Jewish education centre.
MICHELLE DODEK
Many of us living in Vancouver take for granted the numerous opportunities in the city for Jewish enrichment and education. We may not attend all of the lectures that interest us, or take the Hebrew classes we’ve always been meaning to take, but they exist. For Jews living outside of a major centre, there are dramatically fewer options to live Jewishly. Rabbi Lindsey bat Joseph is trying to change that.
Having been a pulpit rabbi in Edmonton for 11 years and, most recently, the part-time rabbi in Kelowna, bat Joseph is now focused on bringing Jewish education and lifecycle celebrations to remote areas of British Columbia and Western Canada, as well as providing opportunities for those who are unaffiliated with a Jewish community to become more informed and fully rounded Jewishly. In November 2011, she launched the website of the Sol Mark Centre for Jewish Excellence and, in early 2012, the centre became a registered nonprofit with a five-person board of directors. Its mandate is to provide Jewish outreach.
Bat Joseph, who lives in Port Moody, hopes to organize more services for the Jews who live there. For example, she is in discussion with the Jewish Family Service Agency, in an effort to broaden JFSA’s presence in an area to which more Jews are bound to move, with such high housing costs in Vancouver. Currently, she is assessing the area’s needs, after which she plans to move forward with projects run jointly with the JFSA, including adult education classes.
With respect to other educational options, bat Joseph is set up to provide bar and bat mitzvah training and other Jewish education via Skype. As awareness of the service increases, the rabbi – who was ordained in 1996 by the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College – believes more people will take advantage of what she has to offer. Bat Joseph also plans to reach out to as many small communities as she can to provide experiences like Shabbat weekends. Already, she has led services in Comox for a group of Jews there and did a funeral last year for the last affiliated Jewish man in Campbell River. As well, she is currently in contact with someone in Gibsons, B.C., who is trying to organize a group of people for Jewish enrichment. “Chabad does a great job of outreach but I am a non-Orthodox alternative,” she said.
As for her fees, “We’re Jewish! Everything is negotiable, I can always work something out,” she said, adding that she considers as a benefit the fact that the Sol Mark Centre has no set location. “I’m the rabbi that can travel to where the Jews are,” she commented.
And that includes the “big city.” Bat Joseph will be giving a number of courses this fall at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver, including one called Two Grandmothers: Right to Life?, which is a bio-medical ethics course dealing with end-of-life issues from a Jewish perspective. She will also be conducting a series on Topics in Talmud and, in January, a JCCGV course on Judaism, Cosmology and Physics that will focus on the Higgs boson particle, also known as the G-d particle.
For more information on bat Joseph and the Sol Mark Centre, visit jewishexcellence.ca.
Michelle Dodek is a freelance writer who grew up in a small Jewish community and values accessible Jewish programming.
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