Go south, young rabbi:
New challenge for Beth Chaim’s Batsheva Appel

by Marilyn Silverstein
NJJN Bureau Chief/PMB

A prominent local rabbi has traded her pulpit in Princeton Junction for a one-of-a-kind rabbinic role in the Deep South.

Rabbi Batsheva Appel, who formerly served as one of the two religious leaders at Congregation Beth Chaim and as president of the Board of Rabbis of Princeton Mercer Bucks, has been named the director of rabbinic services for the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life in Jackson, Miss.

Like the circuit-riding preachers of yore, she will be ministering to isolated and underserved Jews and Jewish congregations of every denomination in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, and Tennessee.

“It’s a very different way of being a rabbi,” Appel said as she sat in the lobby of the Princeton Hyatt Regency just before departing for her new job in early July.

“I’ve sent letters to all the congregations inviting them to request my services for holidays, life-cycle events, teaching, lectures to interfaith groups — all sorts of things,” she said. “It’s bar and bat mitzvas, conversions, calling on shut-ins. I’m excited by the variety of services I get to offer and the impact I can make on so many communities. It’s like being the rabbi of a large congregation with lots of little campuses. There isn’t another position like it in the United States.”

Appel was at the Hyatt Regency to touch base with Rayman Solomon, dean of the Rutgers University School of Law in Camden and a vice chair of the board of the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute. Founded in 1986 by Mississippian Macy Hart, founder and former longtime director of the Reform movement’s Henry S. Jacobs Camp near Utica, Miss., the institute is a private, not-for-profit corporation. Initial funding for the enterprise came from the New Orleans-based Goldring Family Foundation and Woldenberg Family Foundation — named, respectively, for the late Southern businessmen Stephen Goldring and Malcolm Woldenberg. The institute is dedicated to providing educational and rabbinic services to isolated Jewish communities, documenting and preserving history through its Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience, and promoting a Jewish cultural presence throughout a 12-state region.

“We look at ourselves as being a challenge to the status quo on just about every level of Jewish life,” Hart said in an interview from his office in Jackson. He expressed excitement about bringing Appel on board as its peripatetic rabbinic director.

“I couldn’t be happier,” he said. “It’s an old idea in America. Jewish life in America started with itinerant rabbis. There are so many communities today in the United States that don’t have the benefit of a rabbi on a full-time basis.”

Appel also pointed to the uniqueness of the institute and its approach to Jewish life.

“It really is its own thing,” she said. “It is, I think, a paradigm shift — an innovative way of answering the major challenges that face the Jewish community.”

The challenges of being a circuit-riding rabbi are going to be immense, Appel acknowledged — but so will the satisfactions. “I think communication is a big challenge. Everybody’s so widespread. And making connections with everybody — that’s going to be a challenge,” she said. “That’s why I’m going to be spending so much time on the phone.

“The satisfactions are going to be immense, because I’m going to be the rabbi to congregations that can’t wait for the rabbi to be there,” she added. “They really, really want a rabbi, and this is a way for them to get that. I may not spend a lot of time in a community, but I’ll have a lot of connections, because they so much want a rabbi.”

Even as she looked forward to her future at the institute, Appel looked back with nostalgia on her five years at Beth Chaim, where she shared the pulpit with Rabbi Eric Wisnia. “I have really loved my work at Beth Chaim. I love the community. It’s been wonderful. I’ve learned immense things from Rabbi Wisnia,” she said. “But I also started to feel like I wanted to grow a little more in my rabbinate.”

Working at the institute will offer her that kind of growth, Appel said. “I think what I’m seeing is the possibility of being involved in this paradigm shift, this innovative program that really answers these challenges,” she said. “I think I’ll grow as a rabbi in terms of working with congregations that have very different outlooks on Judaism, on observance, and on Jewish life. I think I’ll be able to grow in a lot of different ways.

“I’m really incredibly excited about taking on this position,” she said. “It’s going to be an adventure every day.”