There were so many signs pointing Elisa Klapheck toward a certain destiny when she began studying Torah some 20 years ago.
Problem was, Klapheck wasn’t observant and didn’t even believe in God.
Now, at 41, she is Rabbi Elisa Klapheck, one of a handful of women rabbis in her native Germany. Ordained this month as a Renewal rabbi by the movement’s spiritual father, Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Klapheck visited San Francisco recently to lead her first Shabbat service as a rabbi at Congregation B’nai Emunah.
Rabbi Ted Alexander, B’nai Emunah’s spiritual leader, maintains close ties to the Jewish community in his native Berlin, where his father and uncle were rabbis. He was one of those who most encouraged Klapheck to pursue the rabbinate.
Klapheck was born in Dusseldorf but was raised mostly in Holland. As a young adult, she felt compelled to return to Germany, where she was a journalist.
Then, in 1989, the wall came down.
“At that moment we felt as if we were getting our history back,” she said, meaning both West Germans and Jews, since the heart of Jewish Berlin had been inaccessible, as it was beyond the wall in the East.
Around that time, she began questioning what her German Jewish identity meant to her. Her maternal family tree went back 800 years in Germany, with many rabbis among her ancestors.
Klapheck was among the founders of Berlin’s first egalitarian minyan. She began studying Talmud at the university, as an intellectual pursuit.
She also hosted Torah study in her apartment. And she began to give divrei Torah — or biblical interpretations — at services.
“Because I learned without rabbis, I felt free to say whatever I wanted,” said the rabbi. And while she longed to become more involved with Berlin’s Jewish community, its politics, she said, prevented her and many of her peers from doing so.
Berlin’s Jewish community had a president and parliament. And in the post-Holocaust era, its president was always a Holocaust survivor, who had no other cause than to remind Germans how guilty they were, she said. “No one questioned it, but no one of the younger generation wanted to identify with them.”
Klapheck was hardly well known in the Jewish community then, but — secure in her Jewish knowledge — she decided to run for a parliament seat. She named her party “Renewal of Judaism.” She didn’t win, but she got enough votes to get some attention.
Then the Jewish community’s new president offered her a job: to write speeches and press releases, and edit a newsletter. She turned it into a monthly magazine.
“I wanted to change it to speak not about the guilty Germans, but about us,” she said.
She also organized the first conference for women rabbis and cantors in Europe. Called Bet Debora, the 1999 conference attracted 200 female rabbis, cantors and supportive lay leaders to Berlin. Two more followed.
That first conference was dedicated to the memory of Regina Jonas, the first woman to be ordained a rabbi in Germany, and who was killed in Auschwitz. Klapheck wrote Jonas’ biography, which has been translated into English and is due out later this year with the S.F.-based publisher Jossey-Bass.
In writing about Jonas, Klapheck read her thesis, in which she argued there’s nothing in Jewish sources that says a woman cannot be a rabbi.
It still didn’t resonate with Klapheck, however, until Jewish Renewal Rabbi Marcia Prager visited Berlin and told her about the Aleph program.
Although Aleph students study wherever they live, with approved instructors, Klapheck wasn’t sure the rabbinate was right for her. For one thing, she didn’t feel that she fit into any of the movements of American Judaism.
“I’m more traditional, but in a free way,” she said.
Prager nevertheless invited Klapheck to the Renewal movement’s retreat that summer. And it was there that something clicked.
She was ordained in January.
Reflecting on her path, she concluded that it was probably the challenge of becoming a woman rabbi in Germany that so appealed to her.
“If I lived in the States, I don’t know if I would have become a rabbi,” she said.
“It would have been too easy.”