Simon Rocker
1 July 2018
The Jewish Chronicle

Students at the Progressive academy are making an impact in the UK and beyond.

Leo Baeck College is “stronger than ever”, its new chairman Jill Todd told guests at its annual dinner.

Since the Progressive rabbinic academy opened in 1956, more than 180 rabbis and 90 educators have graduated from its courses.

“I am difficult to impress but I am impressed with Leo Baeck,” she said. “I am impressed with our academic standards and with [principal] Rabbi Deborah Kahn-Harris and her team who have turned the place around and are putting forth great rabbis and great educators.”

The fundraising event received the bonus this year of free use of the venue — the atrium of Middlesex University in Hendon, which validates the college’s degree programmes in Jewish studies and Jewish education.

Last summer, the college qualified seven rabbis and its five-year ordination course currently has 20 students.

It has been the main supplier of ministers for Reform and Liberal communities in the UK. There is one Masorti student on the roll and it continues to provide spiritual leadership abroad, particularly for developing Progressive communities in Europe. It has six students from France and, for the next year, will welcome a student from Poland,

Mati Kirschenbaum, who will become the first Progressive rabbi from the country since the fall of Communism. Mr Kirschenbaum devoted his early professional life to working for Jewish organisations in Poland, an experience which strengthened his interest in Judaism and motivated him to study for the ministry.

Igor Zinkov, a fourth-year rabbinic student from Chelyabinsk in Russia, is already working with the estimated 6,000 Russian-speaking Jews who live in the UK, many of whom are unaffiliated to existing communal institutions.

He leads festival events for families with young children and an education programme comprising short talks broadcast over Facebook.

“Many Russian-speaking Jews say they are cultural, not religious. But I think what they really mean is they don’t know much and it’s scary to come to a place of knowledge,” he said. “When they come with children, parents ask more questions than the children.”

As well as integrating Russian expats into the Jewish community, he hopes to strengthen the bond between Russian-speaking Jews everywhere. “I’d like to introduce the idea that strong Russian-speaking Jews in the diaspora will support Russian-speaking Jews in the FSU,” he explained.

The college continues to attract home-grown students too, such as Daisy Bogod, who currently works at Alyth Reform and is due to begin rabbinic training in 2019. Her father’s family has been associated with Cardiff’s Reform synagogue since its opening 70 years ago.

Becoming a rabbi would “combine everything I love and am passionate about”, she said. “It’s a culmination of everything I have wanted to do with my life.”

Gail Flesch, chair of the dinner committee, has, for the past five years, attended a weekly Bible shiur at the college as an adult education student. She said it was “the best formal education I have ever had — and I have been to three different universities”.

The guest speaker was Philippe Sands, the international human rights lawyer and author of East West Street, an acclaimed memoir about his grandfather’s city of Lviv in Ukraine.

He offered a sober warning of the “the xenophobia and nationalism coursing its way through the veins” of Europe and elsewhere.

But on an optimistic note, he believed the legacy of men like Leo Baeck — the influential German Reform rabbi after whom the college is named, — “will not easily be undone”.

The dinner raised £66,000.
 
Photo: Leo Baeck’s Rabbi Dr Charles Middleburgh and Rabbi Deborah Kahn-Harris
 
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