By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
The day before JTNews spoke with Yohanna Kinberg during the middle of Passover, she was at home making charoset cupcakes for one of her sons to take to his school’s bake sale.
“I didn’t want him to feel left out,” she says.
Such is life as a working mom who happens to be a rabbi. But it’s her job — if something so intertwined with a community can be considered a job — as associate rabbi at Temple B’nai Torah that informs so much of the way Kinberg lives her life, from her family to her pulpit to her community activism.
The activist in Kinberg comes from a very early age — in 1973, while still a baby, she attended the ordination of the first woman rabbi. Her late father, also a Reform rabbi, was ordained at the same ceremony. Growing up in Eugene, Ore., where the women’s rights movement was very active at the time, also had a strong influence.
“My whole life has been in this reality of feminism, and of women breaking boundaries, and so in high school and in college I was involved in activism,” she says.
“She’s definitely an advocate for human rights and for social justice,” says Jim Mirel, Temple B’nai Torah’s senior rabbi, who has known Kinberg since her birth. “That’s why she fits in so well with our temple. She’s just a social justice advocate in all its ways.”
Kinberg’s vision of boundaries broken comes from beyond Eugene, however. Her mother, Chana, was born in Morocco and immigrated to Israel as a teen. Seeing how that move allowed her mother to grow and thrive, Kinberg says, “has allowed me to be the full person I have become.”
Throughout her life, Kinberg has also had strong commitments to reproductive rights and the environment, as well as to Israel. That manifests itself these days through her involvement with J Street.
“Working on issues that pertain to peace and justice in Israel is something that I’ve been doing since I was a teenager and has always been an important part of my life,” she says.
Then came the responsibilities of adulthood, and with it a fresh look at tikkun olam.
“There was a resurgence of feminist energy in my life when I became a working mother and when I was ordained as a rabbi,” Kinberg says. “[I] came into the workplace and realized that there’s still a very strong need for feminism in our world and within the Jewish world.”
As Temple B’nai Torah’s director of education, Kinberg puts her own family’s experiences front and center. Her husband, Seth Goldstein, is the rabbi at Temple Beth Hatfiloh in Olympia, which means that both parents must navigate similar schedules and demands — not unlike working families where the parents aren’t rabbis. For Kinberg, sometimes what some people once called radical is really the mundane.
“We have the same two kids, we do a lot of shared parenting, and that’s really important and part of our shared feminist vision,” Kinberg says.
Kinberg has also become active in a group called Women of the Wall, which protests the ban on women praying with a Torah at the Kotel, the western wall of the old Temple. When she leads trips to Israel, she spends a lot of time focusing on the issue and educates at home.
“In Asia, in Australia, everywhere, there are women who are reading and engaging with Torah,” Kinberg says. “If you go to the Wall, and want to be at the Wall, the holiest place for the Jewish people, you don’t have that option…. It’s the last holdout for a place for full egalitarianism for women.”
It was with this in mind that she provided educational opportunities for the Women’s Torah Project, one of the first Torahs scribed entirely by women, completed its scroll last October.
At her temple, being sandwiched, as she put it, between the generations of parent and children gives her more insight into the issues her congregants, many of whom have been facing financial, health-related and educational difficulties, face.
“I see myself as a preacher, a pastor and an educator,” she said. “I can help people receive support, set them in the right direction, or just give them someone to listen or to provide spiritual support.”
She’s also a baker — those charoset cupcakes were a sellout.