It is truly a season of new beginnings at Congregation B'nai Israel. In addition to breaking ground on its new sanctuary building (see sidebar), the 270-family Conservative congregation in Basking Ridge has a new cantor, Shana Onigman, the first graduate of the Cantor-Educator Program at Hebrew College in Newton, Mass.

Onigman took up the position at the beginning of July, and, she said, she is loving it.

"The congregation is relatively new —it's only about 17 years old —so everyone has the feeling that they can be part of shaping things," she said. "They're not locked into old ways of doing things, and even new people can join and jump right in."

That openness was one of the first qualities that attracted her to the congregation. She said a number of congregations wouldn't consider hiring a woman, especially one with her unfamiliar qualifications.

But B'nai Israel's leader, Rabbi John Schechter, responded with enthusiasm to her application. After all, his wife, Erica (Riki) Lippitz, is a cantor at Oheb Shalom Congregation in South Orange, and was one of the first women cantors invested by the Conservative movement's Jewish Theological Seminary in 1987.

"Ninety percent of what makes a job like this enjoyable is working with a good rabbi, and working with someone like Rabbi Schechter is a joy," Onigman said, reflecting on her first two months in the position.

Brought up in Boston by a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother, Onigman and her sister were converted to Judaism as infants. She did her time in religious-school classes and had a bat mitzva ceremony, but her parents got divorced and she drifted away from the religion altogether. The door didn't reopen until, during her years as a theater major at Bennington College in Vermont, her father persuaded her to sing at the Shaharit service for Rosh Hashana at his little shul, which had lost the congregant who usually did it.

Onigman studied all summer for that first performance, listening to tapes and studying musical scores. She could read Hebrew, but understood no more than a few words, and was terrified. She survived, and was elated by how moved the congregants were by her singing, and she agreed to do it again the next year, and the next.

"As I started studying the liturgy, I discovered something that had been missing in my life, in my thinking, and my relationships. I became an overall happier person," she said.

Then a very simple question changed her life. Recounting the experience in her vivacious, forthright way, Onigman said a woman in the congregation approached her: "She asked me if I was nervous. She said, ‘Well, you shouldn't be. This isn't a performance. You're just a vessel, a conduit for God's word.'"

Much as she had begun to delight in this role, it hadn't dawned on her before just how meaningful this singing was. "I thought, ‘Whoa! —What am I doing for the rest of my life?' It made me realize this was much more of a responsibility than I'd realized, but it also became much less nerve-wracking."

There was one potential problem. She was in love with a guy she had met at 18 when they first started college, and Matthew wasn't Jewish. But as she plunged into studying Hebrew and Judaism, he began his own exploration of the religion.

In 2002, Onigman enrolled at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and went to study for a year in Jerusalem. Matthew went too and continued his Jewish studies. He not only converted, when they got married, he took on her last name. He is now one of her principal voice coaches and almost as familiar with the liturgy as his wife.

Onigman switched to Hebrew College when it launched its Cantor-Educator Program in 2004 and completed a master's degree in Jewish education and a certification in Jewish special education. With a chuckle, she acknowledged that it was a very busy period. She worked part-time as a cantor, and also gave birth to her daughter, Lila Ruth. She then went on to serve as cantor at Temple Ohabei Shalom, a Reform congregation in Brookline, Mass., and —toward the end of her time there, this past spring, had her second child, Ilan Moshe.

She and Matthew and the children have settled into their "fixer-upper" house in Morristown. Matthew, who recently qualified as a piano tuner and rebuilder, is working his flexible schedule around child care and home repair, learning the latter as he goes, with help and advice from another man who is good with his hands, Rabbi Schechter.

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