Rabbi Nancy Kasten
Nancy Kasten was born at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston to Jack and Shirley Kasten. Her mother grew up in Newport, Rhode Island, and was part of the Touro Synagogue, where her parents were married and where Nancy was named; her father was raised in New York City. All four of her grandparents were immigrants from Poland and Russia who came to the United States, most arriving through Providence, Rhode Island, in the early 1900s. After being born in Quincy and spending early years in Pittsburgh, the family settled in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1965, where Nancy grew up with two younger brothers and graduated from high school in 1978.
Although her parents kept a culturally Jewish home, they were not especially observant, and Nancy asked to attend religious school at Temple Israel of Boston beginning in fourth grade. A six-month exchange program in Israel during high school, sponsored through Rabbi Roland Gittelson's scholarship program, solidified her Jewish identity. She majored in natural sciences and public health at Johns Hopkins, then worked in health care in New Haven, where exposure to Jewish Studies through professor David Ruderman and encouragement from campus chaplains led her toward the rabbinate. She studied at Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem, Los Angeles, and New York, earning a master's in Jewish education and ordination in 1990.
Nancy met her husband, Rabbi David Stern, during their overlapping years at HUC, and the two discovered a long family connection between their fathers. They married in June 1990 and moved to Dallas, where David served at Temple Emanu-El. In Dallas she held positions with the UAHC, launched Hillel work at SMU, and served small congregations in Carrollton and New Iberia, Louisiana. She later became associate chaplain at SMU and served at Akiba Academy as director of Hebrew and Judaic Studies and then campus rabbi. She helped found the community Beit Midrash and remained active in interfaith and communal life. She and David have three children, Jacob, Nina, and Lily.
Full Transcript
19 2006 my name is Roslyn been jet we are at the JCC of Dallas to take the oral history of Nancy Caston our videographer is Rose Andrus and we have in presence of Jerry roost and Harriet gross who are writing articles Nancy tell me about your family you're from Massachusetts right yes I was born in Boston and to Jack and Shirley Caston my mother is from Newport Rhode Island originally actually born in New Bedford Massachusetts and then grew up in Newport and my dad was born and raised in New York City and Queens and they met when my mother was a nurse or in nursing
school in Boston and my dad was a health care administrator and they they lived in Quincy when I was born my mother grew up in Newport and was part of the Torah synagogue in Newport and my parents were married at the Touro synagogue and I was named at the Touro synagogue and my grandmother continued to live in Newport until I was about eight years old when she moved to Wednesday also and my paternal grandparents lived in New York until my grandmother died my both my grandmother's died when I was around 13 right around my button mitzvah and my turn my maternal grandfather died before I
was born and my paternal grandfather actually came and lived with us for some time and then ended up moving to Florida but I was born at the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston lived in Quincy as a baby and then we moved to Pittsburgh Pennsylvania for about five years two brothers were born in Pittsburgh and then moved back to Boston in 1965 and lived in Newton was raised in Newton and with lived there till I graduated from high school in 1978 how about your family's arrival in the United States tell me about your family's arrival in the United States do you know anything about when your
ancestors arrived yes all my grandparents were born out of the country they all emigrated to the United States my let's see I don't know a lot about my mother's father the one who died before my parents were married even but he came with he had a large family and they all came together sometime from somewhere in Poland or Russia in that next neighborhood and they well maybe from there let their name was Winograd so it was a town and I don't know if they went to grata or something like that they were actually from there or not but so my maternal grandfather came sometime in
the early 1900s and they came I believe they came all my grandparents came through Providence Rhode Island and my mother's father settled in Massachusetts area New Bedford area and then moved to Newport and my grandfather opened a small store in Newport and my maternal grandmother came the family's story is that she she was one of many children and she had an uncle who was going to be coming to the United States and she was a young girl at the time maybe 11 or 12 and her uncle said to her well if you sing me a song I will bring you with me to this to
the United States and she did so and she came to the states with him and left her whole family behind in Russia and and met my grandfather pretty soon after she arrived and she was pretty young bride I think and heard the rest of her family stayed in Russia and they lost contact during the war and after after the war actually one time afterward at that night in the 1970s just maybe a year or two after my grandmother died her family found my and my mother I guess through the Red Cross they reestablished a relationship and my aunt went to visit my family our family
in the former Soviet Union sometime around 1976 and then in around 1978 one of my grandmother's sisters and brother-in-law and their son immigrated to the States and lived in Brooklyn and then in 1988 another brother my grandmother's brother moved here with his daughter and son-in-law and wife and there in the end two grandchildren and there actually they live now in Chicago I just saw them this weekend I was at in Chicago for but mitzvah so I saw my grandmother's brother who was now around 90 years old and his wife and their kids and and then two other brothers no that's not true I think if
everybody else stayed in the former Soviet Union but some of the younger the next generation emigrated to Israel so there were two brothers who went my mother's cousins who emigrated to Israel so that's my mother's side of the family my father's parents met in Russia and my grandfather had been in the Russian army they immigrated 19:17 and my grandfather came with my grandmother's family so he came his family also stayed behind and I have no idea what happened to that part of the family the name was cached early on in the former Soviet Union and he came with my grandmother's family my grandmother two sisters
and her parents and they came through Providence but then settled in his first well they they started a laundry somewhere run Beekman place in New York City and my dad was born in Harlem and then they lived near the laundry and then eventually moved to Queens and he was an only child my mother had one sister my father was an only child they're both still living and and my grandfather my father's father was a furrier and that was his trade but he never as far as I know he never established any contact with any of his nuclear family he had cousins and other relatives here
in the states that we let's talk about your schooling where did where did you see did you start school in Pittsburgh or back I was in nursery school in Pittsburgh but we moved to Boston to Newton when I was in when I was going into kindergarten so I I started in kindergarten in the Newton public school system went all the way through high school attended Mason rice elementary school which still exists as an elementary school and then weeks junior high school which now is an assisted-living so maybe I could go back there someday and high school and I was a major it was a natural
sciences in public health major at Johns Hopkins not for never thinking about the rabbinate and worked after graduation worked for two years in New Haven the OU Medical School working with their faculty practice plan kind of going into my family's business you know the health care field and after a couple of years in New Haven that's when I started thinking about applying to rabbinical school well let's go back and talk about the Jewish experiences that you had while you were in school did you go to Hebrew school sunday-school family belonged to a synagogue well my you know my parents both grew up in traditional Jewish
homes not particularly observant or ritually oriented but certainly by culture you know kept kosher kept the holidays etc and and so but my parents were you know very typical I think of first-generation Americans and really were not particularly connected to Jewish institutions as a young couple raising their own family and not living you know near their parents so we you know we knew we were Jewish obviously again Newton was a very heavily Jewish community so I went to school with a lot of Jewish kids and we had Jewish neighbors and all of that but not a particularly observant household I actually asked my parents if
we could go if I could go to Sunday school in Hebrew school when I was in fourth grade I started and we joined Temple Israel of Boston which is a old established reformed synagogue in Boston and we lived in Newton so part of the fun of it was that we took I took public transportation and I went 2,000 Thursdays at in the afternoon and I guess usually on Sundays my parents would drive us into to Sunday school but but I have again strong memories of taking the tea to Hebrew school on Tuesdays and Thursdays and so I fairly quickly regretted my request of my parents
like most kids I did particularly love Hebrew school or religious school but I was I guess I felt a strong connection to Judaism and then and again we did not who not particularly observant didn't observe Shabbat in our home and growing up we always had Passover and Chanukah the High Holidays and that was that was pretty much it again you know but but very culturally connected to the Jewish community and I had a friend who I met in seventh grade is still a very close friend his family was Orthodox and they always celebrated Shabbat and went to synagogue and I spent a lot of time
in her family's home and that's really where I learned you know what it meant is to observe Shabbat on Friday night and and she's still very very close friend we kind of grew up his sisters and and then in confirmation I really connected to I had a good relationship with the rabbi's in the cantor and and my rabbi at the time was rolling to get Olsen who again was one of the sort of legendary rabbis of his time and a huge scientist and he was part of the movement to make the reform movement a Zionist movement when it had not been originally and he had
established a program where he gave scholarships to confirmation students to become exchange students in Israel in junior year of high school it's the Eisendrath international exchange program through the Union for now Union for Reform Judaism then the union of American humor congregations and and the program still exists actually for high school students but it's a lot different now than it was then but at the time I got this scholarship to go to Israel for six months and I went from the I guess junuh well actually I left for Israel on the day of the Entebbe hijacking they are my jacket was exactly thirty years ago
we were in Israel this summer so really relived some of those experiences you know from thirty years ago thinking about [Music] so at that summer and how intense that was and seeds I saw some of the people who are on that program with me and the rabbi he took us and all of those kinds of things and it was really it was really very nostalgic but so we left I think it was the 4th of July actually of 1976 and I we spent two months in a intensive Hebrew language program in Oakland at the Ben Shemin youth village which is a fairly well-known place in
Israel right near the airport in Ludd and a place where several it was a school for kids whose parents really couldn't afford to educate them well and a lot of notable Israelis actually went through that Shemin but in the summer there was this old pond set up and Hebrew traveled all around the country and then after about 2 months in the old pond we moved into cities and keep it the same and I lived in Jerusalem with a family and went to high school in Israel or in Jerusalem for four months experience and very much an experience that solidified my Jewish identity but and at
the time I do remember that I visited Hebrew Union College which was their pinnacle school branch in Jerusalem and there was one young woman from my congregation in Boston who was in the rabbinic program but I was there in 1976 and women began being ordained in the reform movement in 1972 so it was a very very new thing very unusual thing not something that I thought about doing myself at all but once I got back to the States after this experience in Israel I did get much more involved in my synagogue and was active in my youth group through high school and then when I
went to college I taught religious school and and when I graduated it was heaven I also was teaching in religious school and connected with the Hillel at Yale and there was a rabbi named Jim pan that there who was very encouraging of me and the other key thing that happened when I was in New Haven is that David Ruderman who is a professor of Jewish history also a rabbi but also professor had just started the Yale's program and Jewish Studies academic program and Jewish Studies it was one of the first academic programs in Jewish Studies of the new genre there were some long-standing program Near
Eastern Studies programs at Harvard and at Johns Hopkins actually which I never took advantage of but but this was the first maybe the first Department of Jewish Studies in a major Ivy League institution or major College in the United States and so he was just beginning that program and I audited a course in modern Jewish by he was teaching and it was a great course and I really loved it so I took this Jewish Studies course that I loved and then there was a woman who was the Jewish chaplain at Yale Yale has I think still has a Jewish chaplain and a Catholic chaplain and
a Protestant chaplain perhaps now they have others as well but that were officially hired by the University the Jewish chaplain was a woman who you know one of the first women Orkneys from the reform movement and Laurie Ruderman and I got to know her as well and started thinking about some options for my future and and ended up thinking starting to think about the rabbinate so and David Ruderman by the way had subsequently moved to the University of Pennsylvania and runs one of the premier Jewish Studies programs in the world really at the University of Pennsylvania he's going to be a scholar in residence at
Temple this year and my sister-in-law now works for him so everything comes back you know let's let's go back to your teenage years what was this synagogue and the congregation and the service like at the time that you were growing up well as I said I didn't really go to services that Temple Israel was right you know on the Brookline Boston border so an urban congregation in you know right in the heart of actually the medical area in Boston walking distance to the hospital where I was born and and services were classical reform but again because roland Gilson was a Zionist and very interested in
Hebrew and we did we used the union prayer but the old union prayer bug but did have you know considerable amount of Hebrew in the service it was not entirely in English the way I think temple manual Dallas at one time was much more English oriented I think if I don't know but and we did have a cantor Maurice Simon was our cantor who came I guess he came after around the same time we joined the synagogue and there was always an assistant rabbi who was the young rabbi who who the kids you know tempted to identify with more and I mean I knew that
congregation that building backwards and forwards you know there was a la mía placed on decorum and services you know kids came you know at a fairly young age I remember going with my parents when I was you know fourth grade and and up and my brothers were younger and you know but I have two brothers two younger brothers we're all fairly close in age about three years between me and my youngest brother so were close in age and but I do remember I think about this a lot because now my kids you know my son became apartments but in March and my daughter will become
a button that's next September and I do remember that there were uh sure's in the congregation and if there was any disruption of any kind the ushers would come and kind of give you the hook or the rabbi would come down off the beam a you know they didn't have ha cuff but then you didn't they didn't come off the Pima automatically at the time of the tourist service but the rabbi would occasionally if you know warranted come off the Bema and come and stare at the offender which was very intimidating experience even though rolling gitelson was a very short man but very authoritarian and
so and what kind of activities were you interested in as a teenager I played a lot of tennis I worked on the school newspaper I did quite a bit of writing I did some stevia turn mostly direct not acting but directing I played the cello until well until my twenties basically and so I was always in the school orchestra played for all the school music lows our school our high school did a lot of the Arts and you know I like to be involved in that and so that was I mean what kind of interactions did your family have with other Jews well um well
I mean my family was in the medical field and they when we lived in new so we were kind of set up to interact on a regular basis with other Jewish families and and Jewish people but nothing my I didn't I didn't I remember my mother especially my dad you know was working he weren't did that that this were lost but all for the first I guess seven years or legit Boston and then he became a vice president at Arthur D little which is a consulting firm and but my mother was involved with a bit with community politics and environmental issues I remember we had
a campaign to save the veil there was a you know bail in new that was being encroached upon by developers and so you know she did some community activities so long those like she also worked as an RN she worked all the way through my growing up part time and so she would work nights when I was younger at the hospital and things like that but I do not remember them being involved in any and he they were not involved in Israel or cjp or you know any of those kinds that they were not involved particularly in the cotton in the synagogue they became more
involved later on when rabbi gitelson retired and then rabbi Bernard Melman became the senior rabbi and our congregation when I was I guess he came maybe when I was a see either a senior in high school or freshman in college and he and my parents really enjoyed each other they are close friends now as well and and my parents got more involved in the congregation at that point but they they were not involved I don't remember them being involved in any specific Jewish causes as when I was a child now you've talked a little bit about some of the influences that set you off thinking
about the rabbinate and but you what was it that made you decide well it happened over time really but what really initiated my interest there were maybe two or three factors that that came into play I really had loved my Israel experience and wanted to go back to Israel and one of the big draws for me for a thorough vetting program the Union College rabbinic program was that the first year would be in Jerusalem and I also felt that I had minimal Jewish education that I really wanted to know more about you know Judaism Jewish life Jewish history Jewish ritual that I really had not
gotten a background in that in my upbringing and my joy and in the Jewish education that I have had and that there was also I've been exposed to this you know intellectual tradition that I had no concept of before through this you know class in modern Jewish thought and so they were it seemed that there was a lot of richness there to be mined and a lot to be gained by entering into this program and I really didn't know if I would finish it when I started and I think now I mean I'm actually on the board of the governor's of age you see now
and I know that you know students go in with a lot more direction and a lot more understanding than I did at the time you know again I started when the Yale program Jewish Studies program just started at me there were none of these Jewish Studies programs that now exist even here at SMU now you know I mean and now you you know you see women and students coming in with much deeper knowledge academic knowledge especially and also a different experience that they've had of Judaism through camps which I never I never attended Jewish camps since we're camping through their campus experiences but not you
know when I went to this school FEMA the only way to be involved in college was through Hillel and I was not particularly enamored of the Hillel it and Johns Hopkins like a lot of other places it was primarily geared toward much more observant Jews so I had some interaction but that was I did not really connect that through that I thought so oh I know so so I wanted I thought there was a lot to be gained by delving into Jewish education on a more serious basis I could do it in a place that I wanted to go back to that I love which
was Israel and I thought that being a rabbi would be a great way of I saw a potential for me to connect the richness of Jewish tradition to people who like me may have grown up in in an environment where they didn't even know that this richness was available to them and so so those were the kinds of things that intrigued me and I also I think I always always thought I would do something unusual you know growing up I thought I would do something unusual that was not the usual thing for a woman to do and so this but the bill and it will
in in a lot of ways it was a big surprise for my parents they were very they didn't ever think about that you know for me and you know said what kind of job is that for a nice Jewish girl and it was it was a sort of pioneering area at the time so you went to school in Cincinnati or no yeah I went first the first year I went to Israel and then there were three stateside campuses of HEC one in Los Angeles one in Cincinnati one in New York and so I attended the Los Angeles campus for two years of rabbinical school and
then I added a year and got a master's in Jewish education in Los Angeles and then I transferred to the New York campus to be ordained at the time I went to rabbinical school you could not be made on the LA campus now you can't time you had to transfer if you went to LA you transfer to one of the other two campuses to do your final two years in the ordained so so I had the LA experience and the New York experience what was your favorite topic thing you studied in bed then at that point you have anything that intrigued you the most well
I always loved studying Hebrew all the different kinds of p3 now as well as biblical rabbinic and I I was very interested in Midrash I wrote my rabbinic peace assignment rash how did you meet your husband and I met my husband well he and I have different memories of this but he does not remember that we actually met very briefly in New York when he had just come back he was a year ahead of me and rabbinical so we men were pinnacle school and he was a year ahead of me in rabbinical school he came back from his year in Jerusalem and made a presentation
to the students who were leaving for their year in Jerusalem at the New York campus and so he spoke about the experience and so I met him that and I mean I heard him then I'm not sure we actually met but we were actually I at that same time when I went to New York for this orientation that they did and where David spoke I met a woman Gail Pomerance who ended up being my my roommate injures and she had made a connection through David's man girlfriend Elaine's ecker who's now a rabbi at Temple Israel in Boston she knew Elena from Brandeis and she had
arranged for us to rent David's the apartment that David had lived in with his roommate in Jerusalem so we were supposed to actually Gail and I were supposed to actually live in the apartment that David had lived in in Jerusalem but what happened was that when Gail got to Gail got to Jerusalem before I did and when she saw the apartment that David had lived and she decided that it was not suitable for us that it was it not in good condition and so she found us another apartment before I ever even got there so that's a source of some joke in our household in
time he lived in this pit or made it into a pit he claims that it was the person who lived there that summer that did the damage but but then he went on to LA for his second year and in my second year I also went to LA so we met in Los Angeles we really met in Los Angeles and that program in LA was pretty small there were about eight students in his here and eight about eight in my year and there were just two years of her medical school there so everybody knew each other very very well and we were friends just friends
and he for his second and third year he was in a student congregation in Santa Rosa California and then when he did the education year as well in LA so the year he did his education year I ended up being placed at the congregation in Santa Rosa so we talked a lot about the congregation and he helped you know me understand some of the things I would be doing there and so it became even better friends through that and and then he left and went to New York and it was just in our in his last year of medical school in New York which was
my I went to New York as well so it was my fourth year his fifth year for medical school that's when we started dating and and the but shared part of the story is I don't know if you've ever heard this but we were dating kind of undercover because HUC is a fishbowl we had also kind of we had both been involved with other people and you know we didn't really want to make a big deal out of this relationship it was his last year and and it was also fun to have a secret relationship so and nobody you know really guessed anything cuz we
were always together anyway his friends and the week that I in EDHEC you give your quote-unquote senior sermon your major sermon that gets critiqued by the whole community you give that in your fourth year of rabbinical school and in your fifth year you write your thesis and your thesis is due in March and in order to be placed in a congregation you have to have already turned in your in order to go through the interview process you have to turn in your thesis so pieces was due sometime in the middle of March and my senior sermon was sometime in the middle of March and so
my parents came in to New York to hear my sermon and they took me out to dinner and our friend Gayle Pomerance who was in by then in David's class because she had not postponed her ordination by going through the education program so she was she was now David's in her fifth year as well and she did it actually work Oh interns in central synagogue in New York so they were very good friends and so Dale came out to dinner with my parents and with me she had already finished her thesis and David of course had not because neither one of us ever finished anything
until the last minute and so Gail and I were in a cab with my parents and she was telling us where she was going to be interviewing for positions for the following year and she got to Westfield New Jersey and my father pipes up and says Westfield New Jersey that Rabbi still their rabbi Jack Jack Jack Stern and I'm thinking okay because rabbi Jack Stern is David's father and I'm thinking how does my father know my secret boyfriend's father and of course that my parents had heard David's name because we were always doing things together whatever and so my father proceeds to tell us and
of course by that time Jack Stern had been in Scarsdale New York for about 20 years and been in Westone for a long time but that when my father was a young man after he graduated from college and he was working in New York he had a college fraternity brother who lived in Great Neck and David's father was sister rabbi in Great Neck and he ran the singles program and so my father's fraternity brother had brought him to something in Great Neck and he and my father-in-law had hit it off and they were very good friends in the 50s and and in fact when my
father went to Korea in the war he brought back coasters from Korea for my father-in-law which my father-in-law still had so so we're sitting there and thinking you know this was just incredible that they knew each other and so we get to the restaurant it was before the days of cellphones and I go down to the pay phone and I called David who's hard at work writing his thesis and I said David call your father and ask him if he remembers a guy named Lou went Lou went was the fraternity brother who connected my father and and so David calls his father and says Deb
do you remember a guy named Lou wind from Great Neck and his dad says yeah he was a friend of a guy named Jack Caston so they had lost touch you know many years before they had known each other before either of them was married and so when we got together and when David and I got together and eventually got married that was a way for their the two old friends to reconnect it at my parents and my in-laws have been very very very close friends as well as very grateful now when were you married we were married in 1990 David was ordained in nineteen
nine and he came to Dallas to work with Shelley Zimmerman and I was not happy about the idea of coming to Dallas I was a coasts person I had lived on the East Coast the West Coast I was not interested in living in Texas had never been to Texas and we were not even engaged at the time but I was not happy about that decision but it was his decision and as it turns out it was a great one but I was in my last year of her medical school so David came in 1989 he proposed I was that year I I served a congregation
in New Iberia Louisiana so I would fly down to new I Barry once a month I would stop in Dallas and visit him and continue on to New Iberia so during the High Holidays in between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur David came surprised me he actually another little connection that I don't know if any of you remember Max and Rosa Goldblatt from Dallas he was I think a city councilman and and their daughter has lived in New Iberia for a long time and Leah and Steven Lahav ski and so Liam Stephen and Rosa and Max helped David figure out a way to come surprise me
and propose while we were while I was in New Iberia for the holidays so we got engaged in New Iberia Louisiana and that was in the fall of 1989 and then I was ordained I guess May of 1990 and then we were married in June and I moved it Alice what were your impressions of Dallas when you moved here um you know I it was hot wasn't very pretty but nice people I mean very very nice people from the very beginning everybody was really wonderful to us and very welcoming and helpful and we're very happy that we were here and and you know pretty it
became clear that we could do a lot of things here because there were so few Jewish professionals that also was a liability in certain ways because our options are personal development and rabbinic colleagues and all of that were not as great although we had wonderful colleagues of course and I was in Keith Stern when we first came here and we had a close relationship with them ever since and then of course others have come since Debi Robbins and her husband Larry and and all of the other rabbis who who've been at Temple Emanuel and elsewhere since we came in 1990 how do you think the
city's changed then since then well it's expanded considerably you know never went north of well we lived north of LBJ so I shouldn't say never when LBJ if ever we were to do anything social or fine you know everything was always south and now everything is everywhere you can't go everywhere I think so it feels like Dallas has just developed you know particularly north like a lot of our life now it's north rather than south you know I was having this conversation a few days ago that when we first moved here there was a lot of interest in interfaith dialogue and inter-communal dialogue I remember
being part of a community discussion a black white brown discussion that went on for a couple of years actually that wouldn't meet on a regular basis that you know no longer exists I was very very fondly thinking about am Sikora and what kinds of work she did with the Jewish Community Relations Council to connect the Jewish community in important ways to the non Jewish community those efforts have really fallen by the way you know they exist in certain with certain individual relationships but communal relationships I think there has not been as much and invest and I think that's part of you know the trend that
we see in our society in general with people being less connected to their institutions and their communities and so there's less to build from when you want to reach out or have kind of order to have a dialogue but you know I think that those kinds of things have changed you when you arrived in Dallas how did you envision your career going um well when I first came here I had I actually took on three positions and there was somewhat self defense I thought okay David's gonna be really busy I know that for a fact I'm gonna be busy too and I'm just not gonna
give myself a lot of time to think about what else I could be doing somewhere else and and I had some great opportunities here so when I first came I was part time director assistant director of the UA HC with Larry Tchaikovsky and I then the other hat it was kind of half there half at SMU starting her hell out and so I would say those were my main positions and then I served a small country that the Carrollton Connery's in their time he'd I went out there about every two weeks and did various kinds of things with them so I was busy I just
kept very busy and I really enjoyed my work at SMU I enjoyed my work at the UHC as well but we wanted to start a family and involved a considerable amount of traveling and that didn't seem like a long-term realistic position so after two years at the Union I was offered the position of Assistant chaplain I think at SMU Bob Cooper retired and that position became open and well finished chaplain at SMU and invited me to apply for that position so at that point I was very eager to do that and I became the chap the associate chaplain assistant associate I think I started out
as assistant ended up his associate chaplain and that was half time and then my other half was the hello so I was in one place basically full-time and served coming carrollton one more year until Jacob was born and then and then I retired from that as well so I was focused at SMU for most of my years in Dallas and I really enjoyed that a lot what was it like working with students Jewish students in a university that has Methodist and it's named it was challenging you know quickly adjust your expectations to the reality that most that most highly identified Jews would go to a
place with us a larger Jewish population in somewhere other than Dallas where you had more communal opportunity for Jewishly but but what I also learned fairly quickly was that in a play that for some kids being in a place where they really felt like they were minority intensified their identification with Judaism so that was an opportunity as well and so it was nice to be able to provide a place for for Jewish students who didn't even necessarily know they were that interested in identifying when they came on campus a place for them to feel connected connect them to the Dallas Jewish community and and to
also help translate Jewish life to others on campus now you also worked at wise Academy the last three years it worked it was a cavity yeah what were your feelings about the school and what the students were learning in that kind of environment you well I my first experiences were as part of a proto board which was established before the school actually was formed and I served on that and then the next experience I had was when my son Jacob became a first grader at wise that was in I guess 1978 it was the base I mean it was 1999 I think eight or nine
he was not in the first class of students that began but in the second it was he was part of the second year of the school and then my daughter Nina started the next year in first grade so I was a parent and then after the original director Susan Horowitz left and Karen Edelstein was hired she asked me to come as director of Hebrew in Judaic Studies and I served as that in that position for two years and then became my position changed somewhat and my title changed to campus rabbi for the last year and you know I think that wise was was a school
that had a lot of potential there were a lot of people who really would have liked it to succeed I think that it was in some ways an idea whose time had not yet come I think Jewish day schools are very very important and and the Reformed community really needs day schools in order to create a strong identified community reformed church for the future and a reformed Jewish leadership for the future so it's sad that it didn't it didn't work and but I also think that a lot of good things didn't come out of it and hopefully those things will be capitalized upon in the
future tell us about your family my family you mean my little family yeah but my own family is well David and I have three children of course David is my husband so we've got the temple Emmanuel family to which we love and we have three kids Jacob was born in 1993 he became a Bourbons but in March he's in eighth grade at Green Hill and he's currently in football season and he's a big football star so his his element right now he loves sports and he loves to travel and we are enjoying getting to know him as Anna does he grows into adulthood and starts
to be able to communicate more more like an adult and it's a lot of fun so that's Jacob and then we have Nina just turned 12 and she is a 7th grader at Levine Academy and she's our social butterfly she loves her friends and she loves to be with her friends she's very creative and she's very graceful and she did gymnastics for a long time she's not doing that any longer but she's she's very graceful very compassionate person great artist and we have Lily who is 7 and she is now in second grade at the Levine Academy and she's running the world on trying to
run the world and what suggestions would you make to other parents regarding their children's Jewish education I think that the biggest advice or the best advice I would give is to create to do their best to create a Jewish community for their family you know different people make different choices about Jewish education and frankly I mean in terms of Jewish education in some ways one might say that day school is the way to go and I think that that there's definitely a strong case to be made for day schools both in terms of the immersion into Jewish knowledge and Jewish life Jewish calendar and written
rhythm of life which you can't get anywhere else in the United States I mean if you move to Israel that's another story but but here you really only get that if you're in a Jewish day school so that's a very strong endorsement although even that in and of itself isn't enough I mean you need to have a family a home environment that also is at least aware of those cycles and seasons and rituals and commitments and and you also I think really need a community whether it be through your synagogue or through your neighborhood or through the other people you met at your preschool where
you can share simcoe's and holidays and you know some people do have local family where they do that and that suffice is some people have friends and that's of Isis and some people have both but I think that you can't do it alone basically as parents we can't do it alone and it takes some work to find people who share the same commitment one of the most rewarding things I'm doing right now I mean this year I've said that this is my year for my midlife crisis I don't know how long it'll take it may take more than a year but I'm not working but
I am teaching one Mellon class and it's a class made up of preschool dogs and I teach up Thursday mornings and I'm so impressed with the fact that they've committed this is the second year of the program so they've already gone through a full year of every week coming to study for two hours on Thursday mornings and this is their second year they're back again doing it again and they in the community through that and also learn more about what it means to have a Jewish community and so I'm really I'm so thrilled that I was asked to do this class because it really it
strengthens my belief that that really is part of the key that you you know that you share those kinds of commitments with other people who are going through some of the same things that you're going through as parents what are you most proud of and who are you role models well I think that I'm most proud of sort of forging a life in Dallas you know and creating a real life for myself and my family here it was not a place that I would have ever expected to be as I was growing up but moved here when I was 30 and and I'm very proud
of the community that that I'm a part of and the friends that do come together to support each other and the community members that come together to support each other and I feel like hopefully I've been a part of that I just saw Isis turn a couple of weeks ago at the wedding of good friends here in Dallas and she definitely is a role model in terms of keeping a perspective on being a rabbi and being part of a family and he'll being human so she is a definitely a role model Ruth Laurie is a great real role model for me she's a great friend
she has been a spiritual guide for me and just a model of what it means to be committed to family be committed to community and also to be committed to oneself in a way that really benefits everyone else but especially me my father-in-law is a great role model he is now 80 turned 80 this year he's been a rabbi for 50 over 50 years now and and he again is a person who as committed as he is to his work as a rabbi and to the Jewish people and to Jewish ideals he also is a very down-to-earth you know able to communicate kind of person
and actually the biggest thing I've learned from him which I'm still working on but he's really able to express what he needs ask for what he needs identify what he needs to ask for what he needs and and and that's something that I have a hard time with and I think a lot of us have a hard time with so he's been a great role model as well is there anything you would like to add he know the Beit Midrash was an idea that we came up with Jordan off sire and Moe Stein and I had this idea must have been around 1999 something like
that somewhere around that time and we thought it was time for Dallas to have an independent adult education menu that was more academic in nature and that we had some university professors and other potential instructors of high caliber considered this was after choice of Jewish learning had been dismantled and the JCC wasn't really engaging in the don't earning and there was no community there was not a lot of communal learning at the time other than data and we felt like there needed to be some kind of other alternative to data and so so we had this idea and we worked on him for a long
time and I became the first president of the board and I was the president of board for a long time as well but most I really kept it going and it was the heart soul and got the professors and you know I mean I did some of it Rhian Heller did some of it but he he was the motor for the Beit Midrash and always has been and continues he continues to be very involved I I am no longer involved but I think they're doing great stuff and and even with the other alternatives that are now available which are more than there were we have
you know we have Melton now and we have the community Cole well but the Schultz remember campus so we're there are some other options but but the Natraj persists so I think to most credit for Ellie there anything else you'd like to add I'm very honored to be part of this project and to be part of the Dallas Jewish Historical Society so thank you thank you could we hit on a resume is something that there's something that has all your dates