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San Francisco’s only Reconstructionist congregation welcomed a new rabbi this month, a relief, synagogue leaders said, following a trying period marked by pandemic isolation and significant staff turnover, including the loss of their beloved rabbi of 15 years, Rabbi Katie Mizrahi, who moved out of state.

Faryn Borella, a 31-year-old recent graduate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College outside Philadelphia, led her first Shabbat service on July 7. She becomes the spiritual leader of a 325-member congregation known as particularly open-minded and progressive even for the Bay Area, and one of the region’s few outposts of the Reconstructionist movement.

The appointment comes amid a major transition period, less than a year since Or Shalom purchased its first permanent home on Cortland Avenue in Bernal Heights. It’s in the same neighborhood where the community got its start in the late 1980s as a small group of like-minded parents and children who met in a living room. (The community incorporated as a synagogue in 1991, the year Borella was born.) For decades, congregants held services and study sessions where they could: in private homes, at a nearby Unitarian church, at the Brandeis School, Ner Tamid and then Congregation Beth Israel Judea.

“It’s just a really important moment in Or Shalom’s story,” said Matthew Rudoff, synagogue president, after the congregation experienced “a lot of trauma, and a lot of issues” during the height of the pandemic. “To be able to get through that, and be at a place now where we have a new building … and a new rabbi like Rabbi Faryn coming in with a lot of new ideas and a willingness to work with the community — we’re just very excited.”

Borella has been drawn to social justice work throughout her adult life, which made her a match with the “soul” of Or Shalom, one synagogue leader said. Her student biography on the RRC website begins: “Faryn Borella was raised on unceded Abenaki land, also known as Vermont.”

She took a nontraditional path to the rabbinate. She grew up in Londonderry, a town of fewer than 2,000 people with no Jewish community to speak of. “There was a synagogue a couple towns over that I went to growing up,” Borella said. The daughter of an interfaith couple (her dad is of Italian heritage), she celebrated both Jewish and Christian holidays.

“Honestly, I loved Christmas,” she said with a smile. “I thought it was the best holiday ever. I would deck out the house. I was like the Christmas queen.”

Both Borella and her sister celebrated their bat mitzvahs at Israel Congregation of Manchester, a nearby town of just over 4,000.

She went on to earn her bachelor’s degree at Occidental College in Los Angeles, majoring in religious studies, and studied abroad in Israel during both her junior and senior years. She was on the board of her college Hillel.

Developing spiritually as a Jew in the Bay Area was really formative. I think there’s a freeness of spirit, a freeness of body that I don’t experience elsewhere.

While in Israel, in addition to studying with the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, a prominent, collaborative academic institute in southern Israel, she also worked as an intern for the Palestine-Israel Journal, a nonprofit publication in East Jerusalem founded by Palestinian and Israeli journalists in the ’90s.

What she witnessed in Israel impacted her views in a major way.

“When I was living there I was seeing so many things that I disagreed with being done in the name of Judaism,” Borella said, adding: “I don’t know if I would have found my way to the rabbinate if not for that work.”

After college Borella settled in Portland for a year, working at a center for sexually exploited children. She made her way to the Bay Area in 2015, becoming active with a number of “alternative” Jewish institutions here, she said, like Wilderness Torah, Urban Adamah, Kehilla Community Synagogue and Camp Tawonga. She is a believer in and practitioner of earth-based Judaism and eco-Judaism, combining environmental perspectives with Jewish thought, and once worked as a volunteer chaplain at San Quentin State Prison.

“Developing spiritually as a Jew in the Bay Area was really formative,” Borella said. “I think there’s a freeness of spirit, a freeness of body that I don’t experience elsewhere.”

“My politics are deeply integrated into who I am as a rabbi,” she said, adding, “I don’t see that as something that I’m trying to force upon the community.”

In a 2015 essay, when she was in her early 20s, Borella expressed support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement and for Jewish Voice for Peace, the anti-Zionist group. She told J. in a recent interview that she has not been active with JVP for years.

Even so, Borella is certainly not alone in the Reconstructionist movement in having questioned the ideology of Zionism, even as Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of the movement in the 1930s, was an outspoken and firm Zionist.

About one in 10 Reconstructionist rabbis “embrace the Palestinian solidarity movement,” according to Rabbi Laurie Zimmerman, a graduate of RRC and a leader within the movement, writing in the 2021 essay “Standing in Solidarity With Palestinians: Reflections of a Reconstructionist Rabbi.”

Wavering support for Israel among rabbinical students, particularly outside of Orthodox institutions, has been documented in the American press, including in a lengthy feature story in the New York Times magazine two years ago, “Inside the Unraveling of American Zionism.”

“Most RRC students were not raised in the Reconstructionist movement; therefore, deciding to attend this rabbinical institution requires them to question key elements of their Jewish upbringing, ask difficult questions and seek a different path for their rabbinates,” wrote Zimmerman.

In conversations with a handful of Or Shalom congregants and board members involved in the rabbi selection process, none expressed worry that Borella’s political past would impede her in her new role. Some thought it might help, and even be welcomed.

“I think the fact that she has been openly pro-Palestinian rights, and just really has a different vision, is something that we were very excited by,” said Betsy Strausberg, one of the original founders of Or Shalom, an activist in progressive politics for decades and a self-described secular humanist.

Rudoff, the synagogue president, said there is “a range of perspectives in our community, whether it’s on local issues, or on Israel-Palestine. We don’t, as a community, have a set political stance.”

During the search process, “our main concern was not necessarily the rabbi’s own personal views, but that the rabbi — whoever it is — could work with a congregation that had a variety of viewpoints, and respect that,” he added.

For her part, Borella said she is looking forward to continuing Or Shalom’s legacy as an open, welcoming community. Not only does Or Shalom count among its members a number of non-white Jews, queer Jews and atheist Jews, it has non-Jewish members, too. In fact, non-Jews have served in leadership positions, including synagogue president.

Borella struck the selection committee as warm, knowledgeable and enthusiastic about Jewish spirituality, ritual and traditions, multiple people said.

“We really wanted somebody who brought joy — that kind of special factor,” said Madeleine Levin, a five-year member of the shul who was on the selection committee. “We really wanted somebody who inspired us. Who we really learned from. We really felt that Rabbi Faryn, as a person, is just very deep, spiritually.”

Pierre Barolette, a son of Haitian immigrants who converted to Judaism in his 20s, is active at Or Shalom and was also on the search committee. He echoed Levin’s sentiment about Borella’s joyfulness. He also said her progressive values were a plus.

The rabbi is “sensitive to the importance of Jews standing up and bearing witness for other communities, for all types of communities,” he said.