When Rabbi Yonatan Cohen and Frayda Gonshor Cohen moved to the Bay Area in their early 20s, the couple found instant community at his first rabbinical job leading Congregation Beth Israel, a Modern Orthodox synagogue in Berkeley.
Twenty years later, the much-larger community they have built at CBI is celebrating a milestone year. To mark the occasion, the congregation hosted a series of events, services and panels culminating in a gala on June 14.
“What I see as a privilege is the last 20 years of my life have been defined by my service of reaching for something greater than myself, and I know that that’s the vision that my wife Frayda shares as well,” Cohen said.
Former rabbinic interns, community members and teachers joined the weekend’s celebrations to reminisce on their experiences with the Cohen family, which now includes their four children.
Rabbi Dov Linzer, president of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, the New York rabbinical school where Cohen was ordained, flew in for the festivities.
“The profound impression it made on me was he has grown this synagogue from like 170 families to 270 or more,” Linzer said. “But with all of the growth, what really struck me was the degree of warmth and intimacy and connection and love and caring — the tight-knit community.”
There are 280 member households to be exact, Cohen said. The couple said they’ve learned a lot as the congregation has expanded.
“We were very, very young, in our early 20s when we moved out here, so pretty naive but really excited,” Frayda Gonshor Cohen said. “We learned a lot from the different rabbis and rabbinic families… so we kind of jumped into modeling what we felt were really important aspects of community.”
She works as managing director at Berkeley-based Rosov Consulting, a research firm that advises Jewish nonprofits. During the 20th anniversary weekend, CBI hosted a panel discussion about the first major study of the U.S. rabbinate, which she helped shape.
Rabbanit Meira Wolkenfeld, who works as director of education and community engagement at CBI, said it was meaningful to see her explaining research about the clergy, including the quantitative analysis of what the American rabbinate looks like.
“I think a lot of people in this community know Frayda as someone who cares for them, someone who always has parenting advice, someone who is so excited to see everyone and greet people. And many people don’t realize that she also has this very rigorous and impressive job,” Wolkenfeld said.
Emma Schnur, director of CBI’s Gan Shalom Preschool, said that from the time she started working at the congregation in 2020, she could tell that the preschool had a special place in the Cohens’ hearts. The rabbi had said that one of his early priorities was to bring in more children to the synagogue, which was accomplished in part by reconstructing the building that holds the preschool and CBI’s youth center.
“I turn to the rabbi and Frayda often for advice, and I am able to walk away each time I turn to them feeling comforted, while also feeling confident in any decision that I made because I know I’ve talked it through with them,” Schnur said.
Deena Aranoff, a professor at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union and a CBI congregant since 2006, said the rabbi and his wife helped emphasize the intergenerational nature of the community at CBI, where it is common to see people of all ages sitting together.
“I feel that their family and their household is an extension of the synagogue community,” Aranoff said. “Their front porch is like a Jewish community center. They extended my feeling of home.”