Congregation Beth Ami

Meet the Rabbi

When Rabbi George Schlesinger and his wife Paula moved to California in 2001, it was a long-awaited homecoming. Although new to Santa Rosa, both Rabbi Schlesinger and Paula are native Californians. “We always talked about coming home. We didn’t feel like East Coast people,” he says. “We knew that one day we’d move back, it was just a matter of when.”

And so, after 15 years in New Jersey, the Schlesingers relocated. “I was looking for a smaller congregation,” he says, “a congregation where I could know everybody by sight and by name.”

Since coming to Congregation Beth Ami, Rabbi Schlesinger has been busy getting to know us. We congregants already have been touched by his passion for Judaism and his devotion to congregational life. At Friday night services he lifts our spirits with his catchy L’Cha Dodi. At our nursery school he sits right down on the concrete pavement and plays his guitar for the children who have been learning new songs and melodies from him.

“Being involved in a Jewish lifestyle can give meaning and a sensitivity to life,” he says. “I love it so much and I’d like to help others love it, too.”

Rabbi George Schlesinger traces his passion for Judaism back to a time in his childhood in the San Fernando Valley when his father, Julius, at age 40 began to seriously study Judaism and to move the entire family toward a deeper level of religious observance. Rabbi Schlesinger was 10 at the time. His older brother, Lewis, was about to celebrate becoming a Bar Mitzvah and his younger brother, Joseph, was five. The Schlesingers were members of the conservative congregation Adat Ari El, but their involvement up to that point had been limited. “My father decided he was not going up for an aliyah at his son’s Bar Mitzvah without knowing something,” Rabbi Schlesinger recalls. His father, who worked in the family’s wholesale paper business, and his mother, a homemaker, both began studying Hebrew and taking adult education classes. His father became a regular attendee at both Friday night and Saturday morning services and went on to serve in various lay leadership roles in the congregation. Rabbi Schlesinger says the family lovingly nicknamed his father “Rabbi Akiba” in memory of the rabbinic scholar who also began his religious studies at age 40.

At home, the Schlesingers began lighting Shabbat candles every Friday night and slowly started following some of the laws of kashrut. “It was a major shift,” Rabbi Schlesinger says. “We saw as children that Judaism was an adult pursuit, not just something for children.”

Rabbi Schlesinger was swept up in his parents’ newfound enthusiasm for the synagogue. He began attending shul on Friday evenings with his father and, as a teenager, joined the youth choir and became a junior cantor leading services on Shabbat mornings. He had always loved music. He had been taking piano lessons since age seven and harp lessons since age 10. He played the harp in his school orchestra straight through high school. A gift from his parents of a Theodore Bikel recording of Yiddish music when he was still in elementary school ignited a lifelong love of Jewish music in particular. By his teens, he was performing Jewish music on his guitar at parties and United Synagogue Youth events. Rabbi Schlesinger recalls that his mother told him she thought he might grow up to become a professional cantor. Her son had a different ambition: He wanted to go to medical school. “First quarter of chemistry at Stanford put an end to that," he says. "I squeaked through by the skin of my teeth.”

Instead of premed, he ended up majoring in German literature and language, an interest that had been kindled by a year spent as a high school senior in Germany as an American Field Service exchange student. Looking back, however, he says he was always drawn to Judaic studies. At Stanford, just for fun, he took classes on “Judaism and Islam” and “Maimonidies.” “I enjoyed the Jewish study courses,” he says. “I felt it was me, my heritage. Somehow my identity as a person was wrapped up in Judaism.”

During college, Rabbi Schlesinger taught religious school on the weekends at Temple Beth Jacob in Redwood City. It was at Beth Jacob during his first year teaching that he met a young teacher’s aide named Paula Offenbach. She was a high school junior, he was a sophomore at Stanford. One night in April of 1969 they both ended up at the synagogue for a memorial service for Martin Luther King, Jr. “Afterwards I said, ’Why don’t we get some ice cream,’ ”he recalls. “It was sort of our first date.” They began their courtship that spring. “He’s the only guy I ever seriously dated,” Paula says. “He was only two years older than me but he was at Stanford and he had a car. It was like he was in another world.” Paula says her parents were a bit concerned about the romance and forbade her from seeing him during the school week. “My parents couldn’t really say much because they were married young,” she says. “And he was going to be a lawyer and they really liked that.”

Despite the lure of Judaic studies, Rabbi Schlesinger had been planning to go to law school after graduation. His older brother was finishing law school at the time and it seemed like a sensible career option. By the spring of his senior year at Stanford he was moving ahead with law school applications and interviews. Then, during a Washington’s Birthday weekend at Mammoth Mountain with Paula and his parents, he got “a better idea.” “Somehow during that weekend we engaged in a conversation, my parents and I, about the various options in the rabbinate. We talked about how rabbis could work in congregations, rabbis could teach at colleges, rabbis can get involved in community organizations,” he recalls. “At first, I kind of shelved it. ‘Okay, interesting conversation. So, what’s the point?’”

Back at Stanford, with less than three months to go until graduation, “the light bulb went on,” he recalls. Instead of law school, he says, “I decided to go to rabbinical school. It absolutely fit.” He called Paula to tell her about his revised career plan. “I said, ‘That’s an interesting idea,’” Paula recalls. “I found it kind of ironic because when I was growing up I had always wanted to become a rabbi. This was before there were any female rabbis. Everybody used to laugh at me.”

In the fall of 1971, Rabbi Schlesinger enrolled in the newly-established rabbinical program at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. Seven months later he and Paula were married. Six years later, after transferring to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and spending a year in Israel, Rabbi Schlesinger was ordained. And the first thing the Schlesingers did was head back to California.

In 1977, Rabbi Schlesinger took a job as an associate to Rabbi Jacob Pressman at the 1,000-member-plus Temple Beth Am in Los Angeles. It was the beginning of a long career of working in large synagogues. After three years as an associate rabbi, he took over the pulpit at the 750-member Temple Beth Emet in Anaheim in August of 1980. He went on from there in 1986 to the Marlboro Jewish Center in Marlboro, New Jersey where he was the sole   rabbi for a congregation of 950 families. “The pace was exhausting,” he says. “I had 100-plus bar mitzvahs a year, 25 to 30 weddings a year and somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 funerals a year —  that’s one a week — plus committee meetings, adult education. It was just an incredible pace. I don’t know how I did it.”

And life at home was equally demanding. By the time the Schlesingers moved to New Jersey they had had their three children:  Ariella was born in 1977, Yoav in 1979, and Avital in 1982. Paula, who had supported the family while her husband was completing rabbinical school, now was pursuing her own career. When their youngest child was two, Paula went back to school to prepare for graduate studies in Industrial Psychology. She finished her doctoral dissertation two months before turning 40 and she eventually landed a position at Merrill Lynch in Princeton, New Jersey. Along the way, Rabbi Schlesinger accepted a lifetime contract at the Marlboro congregation.

Yet, Paula says, “We never stopped talking about going back to California. In fact, we held California Muni bonds and every year the accountant would call and say,  ‘You know you really should dump these muni bonds,’ and we’d say ‘No no, we’re going back.’ And the kids would roll their eyes and say, ‘Yeah, Yeah,’ but we talked about it all the time.”

The Schlesingers had been returning to California every year to visit their families. Along with both sets of parents, they each have siblings, nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles and many cousins scattered throughout the state. Paula’s family has lived in the Bay Area since the Gold Rush era. Other than Paula, the farthest east anyone in her family had moved had been Walnut Creek. “Every time we flew out of San Francisco, I would cry,” Paula says.

In the end it was the Schlesinger kids who led the way back to California. Ariella went to college at Stanford and, in August of 2000, married Michael Radwin, a Los Altos native who is a software engineer at Yahoo. They now live in Los Angeles where Ariella is about to begin a doctoral program in Talmud at UCLA. By the time of Ariella and Michael’s wedding, the Schlesingers’ son, Yoav, was at Stanford and their youngest daughter, Avital, was about to leave home for college as well.

“We were so ready for a major change in our lives,” Paula says. “The kids were out of the house. George had been working so hard. And we looked at our parents — my parents are in their 70’s and George’s are in their 80’s. We didn’t want to be 3,000 miles away. We wanted to be closer to family.”

The Schlesingers also wanted a smaller congregation. “We were looking for a place with a greater sense of intimacy,” Rabbi Schlesinger recalls. “Paula and I decided we wanted to recreate ourselves. We wanted to open ourselves up more to the congregants, which we know is risky business, but we decided we didn’t want to be so closed off.”

Through a series of connections, Rabbi Schlesinger ended up corresponding with Rabbi Jonathan Slater, who in August of 2000 had announced his intention to leave Congregation Beth Ami after 18 years to return to New York. Rabbi Slater encouraged Rabbi Schlesinger to apply for the position. By summer of 2001, the Schlesingers were braving the rough waters of the Santa Rosa housing market.

The Schlesingers were in town less than a month when the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon occurred. In response to the crisis, Rabbi Schlesinger tossed the sermon he had been planning for Rosh Hashanah and delivered a riveting, heartfelt speech that quickly gave his new congregation a sense of the emotional depth and political erudition of our new spiritual leader. The congregation responded with thunderous applause and a standing ovation — a response that in normal times would be considered improper at a High Holiday service.

Since then Rabbi Schlesinger has been working long days and evenings to guide our congregants though the calendar of Jewish holidays and life cycle events and to help us move toward our long-held goal of building a vibrant, prospering Conservative congregation. To better understand his new congregation, Rabbi Schlesinger began the year by attending focus groups in private homes all over the county to listen to congregants’ needs, wants and opinions. He has since revitalized Friday night services by establishing the monthly catered congregational Shabbos dinner that is followed by a special family service with songs, prayers and stories. He participated with the Board of Directors in a retreat to develop a five-year plan for the synagogue and he has encouraged renewed efforts to raise funds to renovate and expand our aging facility. Both he and Paula have gotten to know many congregants by holding monthly Shabbat afternoon get-togethers at their home to which the entire congregation has an open invitation. “We’re still new to the congregation and the congregation is new to us,” Rabbi Schlesinger says. “But we’ve remarked that, in the first nine months that we’ve been here, we’ve been in more homes and had more people to our home than we did in many years in Marlboro.”

Rabbi Schlesinger says he’s enjoying the time he has to spend one-on-one with students preparing to celebrate becoming b’nai mitzvah and the time he often has in shul on Shabbat mornings to delve into the meaning of the week’s Torah portion — a luxury a rabbi doesn’t have when there are more than 100 Bar & Bat mitzvahs a year. “I interact with the kids here in a way that I never was able to do in New Jersey,” he says. He’s also enjoying serving as both rabbi and cantor. “I find it energizing,” he says.

The pace at Beth Ami hasn’t been quite as relaxed as he perhaps had envisioned. The congregation was shaken by the death of Victoria Victory, the manager of the Friedman Center, and by the resignation of long-time Executive Director Sid Burwell. And yet, through it all, the Schlesingers remain positive about their move and are happy with their new home. Paula, who recently accepted a position at Autodesk in Marin County, says she’s so happy to be back in California that she feels like she won the “life lottery.” And Rabbi Schlesinger says, “We love being here. I’m thoroughly enjoying it. I’m having fun in the rabbinate again.”

Rabbi Schlesinger has a clear vision of where he would like to lead the congregation. “I’d like to make the synagogue such a vibrant place through a vast array of programs that it becomes more central to the lives of our members,” he says. His priorities are to bring more music into the shul and to expand the opportunities for spirituality, worship and education. He notes, “You can be a wonderfully committed Jew without ever stepping foot in the synagogue because Judaism is a home-based religion. But one who is educated in Judaism and committed will automatically gravitate toward the synagogue because they would want to be involved.”

Whether he’s playing his guitar at Friday night services, choreographing an inspiring Yom Yerushalayim program or involving students in engaging discourse, Rabbi Schlesinger has brought new ruach to Congregation Beth Ami. And for that, we say, “Todah rabah.”

— Susan Milstein

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