Rabbi Meir Azari does not possess the lineage of the prototypical Reform rabbi. To start with, his great uncle had two wives — simultaneously.
“I remember in my youth how every Shabbat before we went to the soccer game, we’d go to my uncle’s to have Shabbat brunch. I’d say hello to Uncle and then to the two women who used to live with him,” recalled Azari, the spiritual leader of Beit Daniel, Israel’s largest Reform congregation.
“I am from a Sephardi family that has spent several hundred years in Israel. I cannot explain to my uncles what I do, even today.”
It has been a whirlwind decade for the 43-year-old Azari, who was in San Francisco last week on a national trip to “say todah” to past donors and elicit new ones.
To many Israelis — even secular ones — the sight of men and women sitting together at shul or women handling the Torah are still jaw-dropping experiences.
Yet Azari’s 11-year-old temple has grown to be one of Israel’s busiest. The synagogue hosts more than 200 bar or bat mitzvahs and 500 weddings a year, with Azari personally performing 100 weddings yearly. That’s quite a haul for a man who must fly 1,300 miles to Kiev to visit his wife, Anna, the Israeli ambassador to the Ukraine. Then again, Azari had to fly 7,400 miles to San Francisco when his wife worked in the consul general’s office in the late 1980s and early ’90s.
The explosive growth is none too shabby for a temple that initially had to go to the Israeli supreme court three times in order to obtain a scrap of land in Tel Aviv, said a grinning Azari.
While he used to find himself forbidden to set foot in schools by headmasters unwilling to stir things up with Orthodox religious authorities, now Beit Daniel operates schools out of seven city-owned buildings. Additionally, 10,000 students from 41 different area schools took field trips to Beit Daniel this year.
While fewer than 10 couples chose to wed at Beit Daniel in the early years, now weddings are so plentiful Azari actually has to farm them out to his assistants.
And while Azari was the only Reform rabbi studying at Hebrew Union College in his school years, now nine HUC student rabbis — including three women — assist him.
“Many in Israel are upset by religious services, religious leaders in Israel: the corruption of Orthodox leaders, the coercion that exists,” said Azari, an extremely animated man who was tapped to lead the Israeli Reform movement at the tender age of 27.
“People discover they don’t want to be Orthodox and don’t want to be just secular, they want to be something in-between. Through the Reform movement, people have discovered something else between black and white — a full stream of color.”
While Beit Daniel had to scratch and claw to obtain land 11 years ago, the municipality of Tel Aviv recently gave the group a large property in the south of the city. Via “the Jaffa Project,” Beit Daniel hopes to build a synagogue, youth hostel and community center on the land, and has already amassed $6 million of the project’s estimated $10 million price tag.
The location of the project is key for Azari. While Beit Daniel’s home in the north of the city serves mostly “Ashkenazi yuppies,” opening a southern headquarters would bring liberal Judaism to poorer communities full of recent immigrants.
“Women holding the Torah — in San Francisco it happens every day. In Israeli terms, it’s a revolution. But many people now say ‘Why not? The Torah belongs to me,'” said Azari.
“We’ve brought people a taste of Reform Judaism for the first time. For many of them, it is the right Jewish option.”