joe eskenazi | staff writer
Rabbis Allen Bennett and Harry Manhoff are ready to show everyone how they do things on the East Side.
The pair — spiritual leaders at Alameda’s Temple Israel and San Leandro’s Beth Sholom, respectively — are the new executive director and president of the Board of Rabbis of Northern California, respectively. And they’re hoping to make being a Northern California rabbi as much fun as being an East Bay one.
Both rabbis were (and are) active participants in the East Bay Council of Rabbis. Bennett says he’ll often clear out his schedule to make those monthly meetings (and be sure to crowd his schedule to ensure missing other Jewish community meetings, he says with a wry grin).
So the two have decided to spice up Board of Rabbi meetings by bringing in Torah experts such as Stanford’s Arnold Eisen and U.C. Berkeley’s Daniel Matt. Manhoff also hopes to break the rabbis down into regional groups, such as the North Peninsula or Marin, which can meet and address local issues. (Manhoff, a devout baseball fan who often wears New York Yankees or New York Giants caps as a yarmulke, laughs when this plan is compared to creating regional divisions in the National and American Leagues after the 1968 season).
Bennett, the interim executive director “until they find someone else,” does not come to the job with the same grandfatherly air as his immediate predecessor, Rabbi H. David Teitelbaum.
Teitelbaum, who officially stepped down Wednesday, Feb. 1 after a decade on the job, devoted the bulk of his time on the board to being a “rabbi’s rabbi.” His predecessor, Rabbi Malcolm Sparer, was an ace when it came to interfaith matters (largely because, noted Bennett, high-ranking Catholic, Protestant and Eastern Orthodox religious leaders filled out his golf foursome).
Bennett, though not a golfer, will probably tack closer to Sparer’s model than Teitelbaum’s. While not neglecting the work Teitelbaum specialized in — providing an ear to stressed rabbis or forming beit dins to mediate disputes between rabbis and their boards — Bennett can’t hide his love for interfaith outreach.
A former director of the East Bay Jewish Community Relations Council, Bennett hopes to morph the board into a rabbinical equivalent of the JCRC.
Bennett and Manhoff also hope to build on Teitelbaum’s work to make the Board of Rabbis more prominent in the lives of Bay Area Jews. The two will continue to field hundreds of calls and emails from concerned Jews querying about halachah or looking for a referral. The board was a strong advocate for disabled access to Bay Area synagogues, and, if you’re reading this article from your cell, it’s the board that serves as the endorsing agency for your Jewish prison chaplains.
But the program that could, perhaps, have the greatest impact for Bay Area Jews is the board’s launching of a program aimed at pairing Jews over 40. Thanks to a grant from the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation, the board, working with synagogues, has gotten into the matchmaking business.
The Board of Rabbis started informally back in the early 1850s when, as Manhoff joked, “both of the rabbis got together.”
The organization grew more organized thanks to Sparer’s 18 years of volunteer leadership starting in the 1970s and, in 1995, Teitelbaum became its first paid executive director.
On a trip to a local archive, Teitelbaum was disappointed to find precious little history of his Board of Rabbis predecessors.
“But David, that’s what all your paperwork will be,” joked Manhoff.
And Teitelbaum could only smile about that.