By Diana Brement, Jewish Sound Columnist
“I was always looking for the mountains,” says Rabbi Sarah Niebuhr Rubin of her return to Seattle last month.
Raised in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, she grew up attending Temple Beth Am. A Roosevelt High School grad, she left town to attend Ohio State University, where she developed an interest in anthropology and archeology through a volunteer job at a local museum. She got the job of documenting a collection of Native American burial artifacts, including human bones, as part of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
“I thought I was going to be looking at rocks,” she says, but instead became an osteology (bone) expert and “very passionate about it.” She then went to Indiana University to begin doctoral studies in biological anthropology.
Working at archeological digs in Israel and in Birecik, Turkey, on the Euphrates River, she found that the desire to leave human remains undisturbed was universal.
“It was clear there were issues,” even though the remains were ancient, she says. She struggled with the ethics of the situation, says Sarah, and it was then that she changed course.
“I dropped my application for rabbinical school in the mail on the way out of the country,” as she left Turkey in 2000.
Ordained at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, Sarah served congregations in New Hampshire and Connecticut, but “I always had a desire to come back,” she says. After her son was born three years ago, her desire to be closer to her parents, Julia and Michael Eulenberg, increased.
In May she found a position as the second grade Judaics teacher at Seattle Jewish Community School, where she’s found a “warm welcome back to Seattle,” from families and staff. With students whose Hebrew skills range from zero to fluent, she enjoys teaching them not just to read prayers, but “to be strong leaders in the community.”
The part-time position also allows her to do other things. She’ll be leading Reform services at Kline Galland, teaching a writing class at Herzl-Ner Tamid’s Torahthon, and will have more time to spend with her son Jonathan and husband Robert, an academic historian who is currently working on a book (www.conflictharmony.blogspot.com).
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Allyson Kolan returned to Seattle to become the company manager for the 5th Avenue Theater. The “linchpin role,” she explains, connects “the production department with the artistic department,” taking care of the cast’s needs from “flight arrangements and hotel accommodations to helping them find medical care and even to…being an ear if somebody’s having a rough day.”
The southern California native lived in Seattle until three years ago, when she left to work in London for Mi7 Records as a tour manager for British singer-songwriter King Charles. While there she completed a master’s degree in music business at the University of Westminster, doing most of her schoolwork “from a tour bus.”
Before England, she worked here as a music director for a Clear Channel hard-rock radio station, but left that job because “you can only go so far in radio unless you want to be a nationally syndicated host,” which she didn’t.
“A funny turn of events” led to the job at the 5th, her first in musical theater. Checking the theater’s web site on an instinct, “they happened to be looking for a company manager,” she says. It’s rare, she notes, “to just be able to jump into a field like that,” and she feels fortunate.
Seattle has a density of creative talent in all fields, notes the fan of electronic music. “It must be something in the water,: she quips, “because the number of creative and talented people is super high.”
Allyson is getting her theatrical feet wet with the classic “A Chorus Line,” running through Sept. 28.
“It’s incredible,” she says, to work with a cast of “triple threats”: Performers who can “sing, dance and act, which is truly rare.” She’s enjoyed watching the cast members she worked so closely with during rehearsals “and see the progress everyone has made.” (www.5thavenue.org)
The company manager has plenty to do while the show is in performance mode, and she’s already at work on upcoming shows, “working on things months in advance,” she says. “I don’t like surprises.” (“Kinky Boots” starts Sept. 30.)
Allyson, who just adopted a rescued hairless Sphinx cat, enjoys weight lifting and ceramics.
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Short takes: Chef, teacher and cookbook author Becky Selengut has a new book out, “Shroom: Mind-bendingly Good Recipes for Cultivated and Wild Mushrooms .” Find out more and see recipes at her new website www.beckyselengut.com.