For most students, school was back in session earlier this month. Future students at a new rabbinic seminary in Los Angeles will have to wait at least a few months.
The Academy for Jewish Religion — originally hoping to open its doors in September — now is aiming optimistically for a January kickoff.
When classes do begin, it will further mark Southern California as an emerging center of Jewish scholarship.
The seminary, which has its main campus in New York City, will be the third full-fledged rabbinic training institute to open in Los Angeles in the last five years. It will join the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and Ziegler Rabbinical School at the University of Judaism, which serves the Conservative movement.
The Academy of Jewish Religion’s claim to fame is its pluralistic and nondenominational philosophy, which sits well with Rabbi Natan Segal, one of three Bay Area Renewal rabbis on the seminary’s academic council.
“They’re looking to engage all branches of Judaism — Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Jewish Renewal, Reconstructionist, everything,” Segal said earlier this month. “They’re looking to cut across stereotypical affiliated lines and just become a place for holy sharing — which I think is quite admirable.”
The spiritual leader at Shabbos Shul in Larkspur, Segal is precisely the kind of rabbi the new school wants on its team. Not only is he a rabbi, but he also is a cantor, a painter and a sculptor as well as being into yoga, Jewish mysticism and Buddhism.
“They reached out to me because they realized I was right up their main street,” Segal said. “I’m pretty eclectic — and that’s why they wanted me on their board of directors.”
The school’s spiritual director, Rabbi Stanley Levy, is hoping Segal elects to become a teacher as well, although Segal isn’t sure.
Levy, a lawyer, is the leader of Congregation B’nai Horin-Children of Freedom, a Jewish Renewal minyan in the Los Angeles area.
Rabbi Victor Gross of the Berkeley-area Aquarian Minyan, also on the academic council, said he’ll probably teach a class, “most likely in Chassidism and spirituality.”
Segal and Gross are joined on the academic council by Rabbi Michael Lerner of Beyt Tikkun in San Francisco. Gross and Lerner lead Renewal congregations; Segal’s congregation is independent.
The three local rabbis are part of an academic board numbering about 40.
“It is made up of rabbis from across the whole spectrum,” Gross said. “They’re each going to contribute a vision of what they would imagine to be the best rabbinical training one could get — and they’re going to fashion the school from there. They’re going in with no preconceived ideas.”
About 15 people have applied for the five-year rabbinic program, said Levy, who has received another 45 inquiries, including some from the Bay Area. There are also eight cantorial applicants.
“We’re very pleased with what’s happening,” Levy said. “What we need now is money.”
If they can pull it off, starting in January instead of September is no big deal, according to Levy, who is currently working on such things as setting tuition, establishing scholarships and finding a campus.
Regarding a site, Levy said he has had “a lot of offers” from various synagogues that could be used temporarily. He added that some classes will be held at night to accommodate working students and some on Sundays so that Bay Area rabbis can fly in and teach. He also wants to set up video-conference classes with the New York campus.
The AJR campus in New York City, which was established in 1956, draws its faculty from all movements of Judaism, but is not formally affiliated with any of them.
It has a current enrollment of about 60, including both rabbinic and cantorial students, and ordains about six or seven rabbis per year. Graduates serve in Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Renewal, Reconstructionist and independent synagogues.
Although about three-fourths of the students come from the East Coast, “We have students from all over the country,” said Steven Friedlander, the senior vice president of development and operations. “But clearly a branch on the West Coast would make it much more feasible for people out there to attend.”
Some potential AJR students are saying that the other two Los Angeles rabbinic seminaries — the Reform and Conservative ones — don’t offer the kind of training they want, yet they’re not in position to move to the East Coast, Levy said.
“In virtually every course, there’s going to be a focus on the spiritual, deciphering the personal relationship each Jew is supposed to have with God,” Levy said. “That’s one of the reasons some students have gravitated toward us — perhaps they weren’t finding in their current schools sufficient focus on the spiritual aspects of Judaism.”
The West Coast dean is Rabbi Wayne Dossick, a member of the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly and the Reform movement’s Central Conference of American Rabbis. Dossick, who has written several books, also teaches at the University of San Diego.
Levy and Rabbi Stephen Robbins, the founder of a Southern California congregation called N’vay Shalom, conceived the idea of a West Coast AJR branch two years ago. Both sensed a growing demand for a pluralistic, spirit-centered school.
One unusual aspect of the AJR will be training those who are interested in “going into the rabbinate with an emphasis on healing arts and personal healing,” said Levy, adding that a number of Jewish chaplains are interested in becoming rabbis.
Levy said one of his favorite things about AJR’s New York program is that many of the classes there are co-taught — by “an Orthodox rabbi and a woman feminist,” for example.
“I talked to some of the students and they said it was just a phenomenal experience,” he said. “We plan on doing similar things.”