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March 8, 2013
Passion for Jewish life
After 33 years, Rabbi Philip Bregman retires.
SHARON CHISVIN
Rabbi Philip Bregman has a lot of stories to tell. There’s the one about fighting off antisemitic taunts in his birthplace of Galt, Ont. There’s the one about marching in solidarity with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And there’s the one about his Vancouver synagogue being firebombed by a Molotov cocktail.
Sharing these stories and the life lessons culled from them has been one of Bregman’s great passions and pastimes in the 33 years he has been at the helm of Vancouver’s Reform synagogue, Temple Sholom.
In August of this year, the rabbi who took Vancouver’s smallest synagogue and turned it into one of the city’s largest, is retiring, and people are already starting to miss him and his stories.
“He truly is a rock star in the Vancouver Jewish community,” said Ellen Gordon, co-chair of the Temple Sholom committee planning a farewell event in his honor on April 28. “He is warm to everyone he meets. He has a brilliant sense of humor…. He remembers everyone he has ever met by name and … he is so much fun to be around.“
Bregman arrived in Vancouver in 1980 with his American-born wife Cathy and an idea of Vancouver as the Haight Ashbury of Canada. Although Canadian born, and raised in Galt and Toronto, Bregman had just completed a three-year term as the assistant rabbi of a large congregation in New Rochelle, N.Y. When he and Cathy ventured to Vancouver for his interview at Temple Sholom, they both were immediately smitten with the city.
“We came out for a weekend in May, and it was what we call a sucker weekend,” Bregman recalled. “The sun was out, it was gorgeous, you could still see some snow on top of the mountains, and people were sailing and boating in the bay. It was a perfect weekend.”
At the time, no one bothered to warn the Bregmans about the possibility of incessant rain, but it would not have mattered. By August of that summer they were settling into the city and into the synagogue, determined to make their mark on their new congregation, the Jewish community and their adopted home.
More than three decades later, the Bregmans have become local celebrities of a sort – a dynamic and charismatic couple renowned for their wisdom, activism, eloquence, kindness and dedication to Temple Sholom, and to building and reinforcing bridges between it and all other denominations and faiths in the city.
“Rabbi Bregman is a doer,” said Jack Lutsky, a Temple Sholom congregant for more than 20 years. “He makes things happen.”
In their long tenure at the synagogue, the Bregmans have been a source of inspiration, leadership and guidance and have raised awareness of and respect for Reform Judaism in British Columbia and across Canada. Most significantly, they have encouraged hundreds of members of Vancouver’s growing Jewish community to explore and rejoice in their faith, culture, history and traditions. They have, in other words, managed to accomplish exactly what they set out to do.
“I put my head down and began to work,” Bregman recalled about his first few months at Temple Sholom. “We were the smallest congregation in the city, we were the least respected congregation in the city and there was a fair amount of cleanup work I needed to do. I brought a very different type of Judaism to the congregation than they were used to.”
That different type of Judaism was still Reform in nature, but it was what became known in Vancouver circles as “Rabbi Bregman-style” Reform – a style of Judaism that has resonated with Vancouverites and swelled Temple Sholom’s congregation to more than 700 family memberships.
“My rabbinate and congregation is not something based on a doctrinaire philosophy that comes out of the Union of Reform Judaism or any rabbinic organization,” Bregman explained. “It’s what I feel is good and healthy for the sustaining, viability and promotion of Judaism.”
What he feels is good and healthy has altered little for Bregman over the years. He arrived at Temple Sholom with very explicit ideas about Reform Judaism, most of them developed and nurtured during his rabbinical studies at the Cincinnati-based Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion and his youthful mentorship with Toronto’s Rabbi Gunther Plaut.
“I chose to go into the Reform rabbinate based on my understanding of what Reform Judaism is really about, not what popular opinions thought of it,” he noted. “To many people, Reform Judaism was a way of saying ‘no’ to various traditions. This is not correct. Reform Judaism was and still is an expression of Judaism that questions, ponders, delves and challenges.”
At the same time, good and healthy Judaism for Bregman has always implied a fusion of meaningful worship, egalitarianism, social activism, interfaith networking and Israel advocacy. Bregman is passionate about Israel and about sharing it with others, Jews and non-Jews alike, and has led dozens of tours to the Jewish state.
“The rabbi’s passion for life is equal to his passion for Israel,” said Gordon, who participated in a Bregman-led tour of Israel in 2009. “He and Cathy have taken over 1,000 people on trips to Israel and each person on the trip is made to feel like he or she is part of one big mischpacha.”
In addition to nurturing a respect and love for Israel among his congregants, Bregman has encouraged among them a respect for and appreciation of other streams of Judaism.
“I refer to myself as post-denominational,” Bregman explained. “These nomenclatures of Reform, Conservative and Reconstruction, to me, have very little meaning. We’re Jews and we share much more of what we have in common that what differentiates us.”
This commitment to recognizing and rejoicing in commonalities prompted Bregman to co-found the Rabbinical Association of Vancouver with his Conservative colleague, Rabbi Wilfred Solomon, just a year after settling into Temple Sholom. Thirty-one years later, Bregman remains chair of that committee.
“We have something quite unique to Vancouver and to Canada, and that is a group of rabbis who honestly clearly respect and care for each other,” said Bregman. “We have our differences as to what we believe and observe but the line of differentiation is almost non-existent.”
Many Temple Sholom congregants concur that this kind of community building is one of Bregman’s greatest achievements.
“Rabbi Bregman is the senior rabbi in Vancouver and works with all the Jewish denominations with respect to mikvah [ritual bath] and burial society policy,” Lutsky noted. “He has created an atmosphere of trust and respect with all the denominations and elevated the status of Reform Judaism in Vancouver.”
Bregman also has generated a relationship of mutual trust and respect with the city’s other faith communities. He meets regularly with Catholic, Anglican, United Church, Ismaili, Buddhist and Hindu religious leaders, and is a co-founder of the Metro Vancouver Muslim Jewish Dialogue and, with Rev. Richard Leggett, of the Vancouver Jewish Christian Dialogue group. He regularly welcomes children from other faith communities and schools into his synagogue.
St. Patrick Regional Secondary School has been bringing students to Temple Sholom for several years.
“The trip to the synagogue is one of the highlights of our Christian education department,” said St. Patrick teacher Ann Marie
McGrath. “The rabbi is great with the kids and relates well to them. It is obvious he has been a teacher. He has endless patience in answering their questions.”
Bregman’s ease with children derives largely from the 30-plus years he has worked with bar and bat mitzvah students – including nine who have gone on to pursue the rabbinate – and taught at Temple Sholom Religious School. Typically, however, he is quick to attribute the success of the school to its former principal, Anne Andrew.
In fact, Bregman deflects much of the credit for Temple Sholom’s many achievements to his dedicated and diligent staff, and to his partner, Cathy. He emphasizes that he could not have accomplished what he has without her support and advice, and credits many of the synagogue’s ongoing and most successful social action projects to her vision and determination. These include the Shabbas in a Bag program, the Chevra Tefillah prayer circle and the Temple Sholom Centre for the Healing of the Soul.
“In so many ways, Cathy and I have worked together as a team when it comes to the synagogue,” Bregman said. “Cathy has an incredible ability to identify what needs to happen – physically, emotionally and, yes, even spiritually – to enhance the life of our shul, and then she points me in the right direction and says, ‘OK rabbi, now do it!’”
“Doing it” for Bregman has meant spending more than three decades providing his congregants with meaningful liturgical services, sermons and stories, and alternately mentoring, teaching, praising, counseling and consoling them. It has meant instilling in them a commitment to community, Israel, social justice, tolerance, tradition and change, and it has meant helping them become proud Jews and proud members of Vancouver’s largest and only Reform synagogue.
Sharon Chisvin is a Winnipeg journalist, editor, book reviewer, documentarian and oral historian who contributes regularly to the Winnipeg Free Press. She is the author of the children’s picture book The Girl Who Cannot Eat Peanut Butter.
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