A Woman Shall Lead Them : Laura Geller Will Break Ground as the First Female Rabbi at Temple Emanuel

It was the summer of 1967, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was meeting in a sweltering Memphis, Tenn., church hall.

Laura Geller, a college student and one of only a few whites to attend the civil rights meeting, had stepped outside for a breath of air.

She was beginning to feel that she didn’t belong, she confided to a veteran SCLC organizer. His reply helped turn her life around.

“You’re right,” he said. “You don’t belong. You should go home to your own community and organize there.”

Geller has been working in her community ever since, as campus rabbi at USC for 14 years, and most recently as the highly visible executive director of the American Jewish Congress, a civil rights and political action group.

Now, at 44, Geller is about to step into national prominence as the first woman rabbi to head a large congregation--Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills.

The third woman ever ordained as a rabbi in the liberal Reform movement, which claims the allegiance of an estimated 40% of synagogue-affiliated Jews, she has even made a name for herself among some traditionalists who reject her ideology and do not recognize the right of women to be rabbis.

“She’s a very warm, engaging person, with a brilliant mind,” said Rabbi Daniel Landes of B’nai David-Judea, an Orthodox congregation in the Pico-Robertson District.

Geller has counseled students, helped found a feminist center, worked to establish a dialogue between Jewish and Arab Americans in Los Angeles and spoken out for abortion rights and against violence here and in Bosnia. She has also created various rituals to help congregants deal with life crises such as abortion.

“She’s a great person,” said another Orthodox leader, who declined to be quoted by name, “but she will stand up when the buttons are pushed to fight.”

Emanuel has seen its share of fighting. It has been racked by years of conflict over a previous rabbi, who left amid controversy over synagogue expansion plans, and, more recently, by a thwarted merger with the larger and richer Wilshire Boulevard Temple. Leaders say they hope the fighting is over.

“We’re just flying on a cloud. The response (to the hiring) has been tremendous,” said Bruce Corwin, president-elect of the temple, who helped lead the fight to keep the 56-year-old institution independent.

With a flourishing day school and a prime location on Burton Way, Temple Emanuel has lost a few hundred families since its membership hit a high of 1,200 families in the mid-1980s.

At about 900 families, however, it is still one of the largest Jewish congregations in the country and clearly the largest to be served by a woman as senior rabbi, said Rabbi Lennard R. Thal, regional director of the Reform Movement’s Union of American Hebrew Congregations.

Other large congregations are in suburban San Diego, with 650 families, and downtown Boston, with 575 member families.

With $500,000 in pledges in hand to help counter a reported debt of $2 million, Corwin said he expects Geller to bring in new members and rally the existing ones, “people who are willing to step up and say, ‘Here’s my money, I want to support this place.’ ”

Some veteran congregants may drop out, said Rabbi Emeritus Meyer Heller, who came back from retirement two years ago, “but we’re going to gain many more than we lose.”

“These are people who would find it difficult to accept a woman as their rabbi,” said Heller, who plans to stay on part time. “I understand that feeling, but I hope they will meet her, hear her preach, hear her teach, before they make their decision.”

Of the 16 candidates for the post, Corwin said, Geller was “the most rabbinic . . . with a feeling of spirituality that none of the others had.”

The other co-chair, Harry Helft, whose side lost the merger fight, said she was “the best and the brightest, one that would . . . be able to heal our temple.”

Helft said that gender was not a major factor in the decision to hire Geller. But Corwin said there were some questions before the committee made its unanimous vote, which was announced May 9.

“First, is our congregation ready for a senior rabbi who happens to be a woman? And secondly, are her views too far to the left? And she answered the questions,” he said.

“She said, ‘I have strong points of view and I respect other points of view.’ She handled everything with grace.”

Geller was not sure of her calling until the early 1970s, when she worked with college students as a volunteer chaplain at Vassar College during her second semester of rabbinical school at the Hebrew Union College’s New York campus.

After her ordination in 1976, she went to USC, where she met young people of every stripe of Judaism, from secular to Orthodox. She also started looking to Jewish tradition for new ways to deal with the crises, challenges and turning points of modern life.

During her first year at USC, one young woman startled her by seeking a Jewish way for dealing with the emotional aftermath of abortion.

“Here was a live Jewish woman in need of healing. (The abortion) was appropriate, but she was surprised at the feelings of loss and guilt. She asked if she could say kaddish (the prayer for the dead). I said she could not. Then we talked about her feelings of guilt.”

Over the years, such pleas led to the creation, by her and others, of ceremonies for naming a newborn girl, dealing with miscarriage and marking events such as divorce, menopause, significant birthdays, children leaving home and retirement.

Sometimes the ceremonies have to be invented. In other cases, Geller says, they can be glimpsed in the Biblical text, such as Abraham’s feast on the weaning of Isaac, which inspired a Seder-like party when Geller weaned her own son, now 11. A daughter, now 5, was similarly feted.

Divorced from their father for four years, Geller recently married Ben Bycel, executive director of the Los Angeles Ethics Commission, which monitors city government and politics.

Although some of the rituals have been published in book chapters and magazine articles, Geller said she hopes to finish her own book on them before her Aug. 1 starting date at Emanuel. “Fat chance,” she adds.

“Judaism speaks to the real issues of our lives,” she said. “How we live. How we love. I’ve learned . . . that the real challenge to the Jewish future is not intermarriage, Arab propaganda or anti-Semitism--it’s boredom.”

The answer to that, she suggested, lies in community and spirituality, two themes that worshipers at Emanuel will be hearing a lot about in coming years.

“People look for that in a lot of weird places,” she said. “We have to realize that Judaism can provide it for us.”

As one of the first female rabbis, Geller says she has relied on male role models. The small Reconstructionist movement opened its doors to women in 1974, while the middle-of-the-road Conservative movement did not ordain a woman until 1985.

As other women have donned rabbinical robes, she said, “I’ve been mentored by some of my younger colleagues, and they by me.”

At Mishkon Tephilo, a Conservative synagogue with 240 families in Venice, Rabbi Naomi Levi said that Geller has been a model for her. But, she added, “for both me and Laura, ultimately, hopefully, the day will come when people make such a fuss not because we’re women rabbis but because we’re good rabbis. Hopefully, perhaps when the Messiah comes, that won’t be a big deal.”

Busy with campus problems and larger community relations issues since moving to the American Jewish Congress three years ago, Geller said that being “the first woman” has not been a big deal for years.

Now, however, “there’s no question that I’m the first woman to be the senior rabbi of a synagogue this large, so again it’s an issue. . . . People will want me to prove myself, and I will prove myself.”

Twenty years of life experience will help, she said, along with a sense of humor--”I don’t think I would have survived till now without it.”