Congregation Beth Torah has hired Rebecca Reice to fill the position of rabbi educator that is being vacated by Rabbi Vered Harris in June. Reice, who will be ordained by Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles at the end of May, will assume her duties at Beth Torah on July 1.
Rabbi Mark Levin said Reice is very immersed in her Judaism and comes with only the highest of recommendations.
“I’m very excited to be working with her. She is very talented,” Rabbi Levin said.
Reice was born and raised in Chapel Hill, N.C. She attended the University of Texas at Austin, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree with special honors in Plan II (honors liberal arts) and psychology. After completing her undergraduate studies, she worked for the Hillel of Silicon Valley as a Hillel Steinhardt Jewish Campus Service Corps Fellow.
She began her rabbinical studies with HUC-JIR in Jerusalem in 2006. Since then she has earned a Master of Arts degree in Hebrew letters (2009) and a Master of Arts degrees in Jewish education (2010), both from the HUC-JIR Los Angeles campus.
The rabbi-to-be said she is especially interested in music, storytelling, liturgy and the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible). In addition she loves to cook and garden. Her husband, Asher Lazarus, is an engineer with IBM and a passionate triathlete.
Reice said when she first learned about the opening at Beth Torah, she consulted her hometown rabbi and personal friend, Rabbi John Friedman of Judea Reform Congregation in Durham, N.C. Coincidentally, Rabbi Friedman is close friends with Rabbi Levin and grew up in Kansas City, attending The Temple, Congregation B’nai Jehudah.
“He (Rabbi Friedman) said don’t miss this opportunity to meet with Rabbi Mark Levin,” Reice said.
She was also attracted to the way Beth Torah described the congregation and the position in the job posting, saying it used “visionary language.”
“There was a certain attitude about life-long learning and about how a community could function that was really exciting to me,” she continued.
Reice, who will be 29 when she joins the congregation’s clergy staff, said she had a fantastic initial conversation with Rabbi Levin and Michelle Cole, the congregation’s president, on the HUC-JIR Cincinnati campus.
“I felt it was a really clear and open community, which is something I value and was very exciting. At the end of my interview they handed me a giant bag of of Beth Torah things, including the citizen band, which I had learned about in my research from a great video that is on the home page of the Beth Torah website,” she said.
She said she has been telling her friends she’s already been embraced by the community.
“I come from the South and I talk to strangers. I’m just naturally friendly, that’s my attitude toward the world. Then I walked into a congregation where it seems like everybody talks to strangers. Everyone was friendly and open and sweet,” she said.
“That to me is an incredibly precious part of synagogue life that isn’t available everywhere. I’ve been to plenty of synagogues in this country where nobody talked to me at the oneg,” she continued.
Reice is excited to work with the staff at Beth Torah, who she already calls family.
“That’s the kind of commitment that I see the professional staff and the lay leadership have to each other," she said.
"I think that relationship between laity and clergy says so much about a congregational culture, and it’s a question that I kept asking congregations during my interviews this year and I was so moved to see what it looks like at Beth Torah.”
Reice and her husband plan to return to Kansas City to become more acquainted with the area the weekend of March 23.