By Janis Siegel, JTNews Correspondent
After a two-year effort by its search committee and as many unaccepted job offers to East Coast candidates, the Sephardic Congregation Ezra Bessaroth in South Seattle has finally hired its new rabbi. Ron-Ami Meyers, who came to Seattle in 2009, teaches many of his new congregation’s children at the Seattle Hebrew Academy — and will maintain a full teaching load. He officially comes on board August 1.
“We started with surveys and focus groups,” said Elana Zana, one of eight Ezra Bessaroth search committee members told JTNews about the lengthy process. “The most important quality respondents were looking for was spiritual leadership.”
The historic 100-year old synagogue hired Meyers, who is currently the head rabbi of the K-8 Jewish studies program at SHA, and an Ashkenazi Jew. Meyers will continue a 50-year legacy of two of EB’s more recent Ashkenazi rabbis, William Greenberg and Isadore Kahan.
The survey also revealed that the membership felt that having a “Sephardic” rabbi was far less important than having a spiritual leader who was wise, could communicate well, could care for the sick, and would engage the younger members.
“We have a great [cantor] who is Sephardic,” said Zana, referring to Yogev Nona. “Rabbi Meyers has the stability in his own life, he’s already a member of the community, he’s shown a commitment to learning about our [customs], he can communicate well, and his speeches are filled with good content. The synagogue is really rallying around him.”
Meyers grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and met his wife, Miriam Geffen, in Israel in 1983. They lived abroad for 20 years while raising their 10 children, who range in age from 4 to 25 years old, and three grandchildren with one on the way.
“Rabbi Meyers is an amazing teacher and spiritual leader,” Rivy Poupko Kletenik, head of school at the SHA told JTNews. “We are really thrilled to engage in a partnership.”
According to Kletenik, among the 200 students enrolled at the SHA, 90 percent are affiliated with the Orthodox community. Many of them who have Meyers as their teacher at school will also see him at Shabbat services and other religious events.
“It’s exciting for our students to see the connection between [their] synagogue and [their] school,” added Kletenik. “It will be an enhancement for them to see their teacher as the rabbi.”
Meyers will spend a block of time every day, including evenings and weekends, dedicated to synagogue business, and meeting every family.
As one of the tech-savvy pioneers of Webyeshiva.org, an online and live Jewish education Web site, and a former assistant editor and broadcaster for Israelnationalnews.com’s Arutz Sheva Radio, Meyers told JTNews that his Canadian upbringing in a “traditional” family, and his foray into an Orthodox life while living in Israel, exposed him to a “potpourri of different kinds of people.”
“I think the influences in my life merge well with the Ezra Bessaroth community,” Meyers said. “The exposure to modernity and the openness in that influences your personal outlook.”
Meyers started writing a blog that’s linked to the Ezra Bessaroth website. It got 350 hits in the first week it debuted.
“I’m a big communicator and I use a lot of different high-tech tools that we have available to teach,” he said. “The teachers I loved growing up were people who engaged the students. My classes are not so frontal, but interactive.”
Meyers believes that a sense of humor and a “light approach” fits well with Ezra Bessaroth, whose congregation spans generations with many different levels of observance.
“It’s humor and also the ability to talk to someone on a personal level,” Meyers said. “The way to reconnect with the tradition is through relationships.”
Although it is an Orthodox synagogue, many of Ezra Bessaroth’s members are not observant. The congregation is a diverse group of people of varied ages and backgrounds who have one thing in common — to enjoy a Jewish life that preserves the unique Sephardic customs, worship, language, and food of the Rhodes community that founded it in 1904.
“We have an extremely diverse congregation where there’s no such thing as denominations,” said Michael Behar, a longtime member and descendant of the Rev. David J. Behar, who served as Ezra Bessaroth’s spiritual leader and cantor from 1918 until 1939, and as cantor until 1966.
“Some are more observant, some are less observant. We consider ourselves a shared family on a shared journey,” Behar said.
A congregation that, decades ago, once held daily services in the Spanish-Hebrew hybrid language of Ladino, now uses nearly all Hebrew and English content with a few prayers in Ladino.
“We are the last stand from the Rhodes tradition,” Behar said, who is also one of the parents at Ezra Bessaroth whose son is in one of Meyers’ classes at SHA.
The response from his child tells him that the synagogue made the right choice.
“He loves Rabbi Meyers’s class,” Behar said. “He energizes the kids.”