The New American Judaism

In November 2021, Temple Israel in Springfield, Missouri, began looking for a new rabbi. A quick perusal of job listings from other Reform synagogues left the search committee stunned: Scores of congregations, many offering higher salaries in larger cities, had been unable to fill their positions for months, sometimes longer. Eventually, Temple Israel entered into a fee-for-service agreement with a rabbi two hours away. He would come in for Shabbat, High Holiday services, and adult-education classes, but he wouldn’t attend community meetings, collaborate with local faith leaders, or recruit new members to the synagogue. For only the second time in its 125-year history, Temple Israel wouldn’t have a full-time rabbi.

Their experience is no outlier. A Conservative congregation just outside New York City, offering $150,000 a year plus benefits and a free three-bedroom home, spent three years trying to find a replacement for its rabbi after he announced his retirement in 2019. (Like other rabbis I spoke with, he delayed retirement to tide over the congregation.) There were simply not enough interested candidates.

In the past 15 years, the number of American Jews choosing to become rabbis has plummeted, and so has the share of rabbis interested in serving congregations, as more and more end up in nonprofits, hospitals, universities, and elsewhere. This has threatened the vitality of hundreds of synagogues as well as the future of the schools that have ordained rabbis for more than a century.

Without a rabbi, synagogue membership tends to dwindle to the very dedicated. Enrollment in the Hebrew school goes down. Fundraising becomes harder. Nobody gets a hospital visit from the rabbi or a call of comfort during a difficult time.

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