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Rabbi Debrah Cohen was drawn to religious study
by an interest in women's ritual and history.
JULIE WIENER
Staff Writer
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18 Detroit Jewish News
.
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s
ack in the 1970s, while
Debrah Cohen was preparing
for her bat mitzvah at Temple
Israel, Rabbi M. Robert
Syme said he hoped she would become
a rabbi. His pupil didn't take the idea
very seriously — at first.
"I thought that was about as crazy an
idea as me becoming an astronaut,"
recalls Cohen, 33. "I didn't think about
it until college, and I think that had to
do with not seeing women role models
up until that point."
While a scarcity of women role mod-
els may have dissuaded Cohen from the
rabbinate as a child, it was her interest
in women's ritual and history that drew
her there in the end. She is now
Michigan's only Reconstructionist rabbi.
As an undergraduate at Oberlin
College in Ohio, she recalled, she found
"a lot of excitement" on campus about
feminist approaches to Judaism. Judaic
Studies Professor Elliott Ginsburg, now
a professor at the University of
.
Michigan, and Cohen's Hillel advisor,
an Orthodox rabbi, suggested she apply
to the Reconstructionist Rabbinical
College (RRC) in Philadelphia.
"RRC at that point in time was real-
ly the place to be if you were interested
in feminist midrash, creating women's
rituals and studying Jewish women's his-
tory," said Cohen. "I knew very little at
that point about Reconstructionism
itself In fact, it wasn't until my first year
that I had a real grasp of what
Reconstructionism was, and that was an
experience that many of my classmates
had. We all kind of said in our
Reconstructionism 101 class, 'Oh good,
I am a Reconstructionist after all.'"
Founded in the 1930s by
Conservative Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan,
Reconstructionism defines Judaism as
an evolving religious civilization and
combines traditional Judaism with
democratic values. It does not strictly
adhere to Jewish law but encourages
Jews to consider a wider range of tradi-
tional practices than under Reform
Judaism.
Cohen, who was ordained in 1993,
entered RRC with little interest in
becoming a pulpit rabbi. For the most
part that's still how she feels, noting that
she prefers "hands-on, people-oriented
work" to administrative duties. Instead
of being a full-time spiritual leader of a
congregation, she balances two part-
time jobs in the Detroit community:
rabbinic consultant at the Jewish
Association for Residential Care (JARC)
and rabbinic facilitator for
Congregation T'Chiyah.