www.amishalom.org/about_our_rabbi.htm -
[Cached Version]
Published on: 3/19/2007
Last Visited: 3/19/2007
Rabbi Rick Brody is delighted to be serving the Ami Shalom community and to be sharing his love of Torah with the San Gabriel Valley.Rabbi Rick brings bi-coastal and international experience to his rabbinate and has also served or participated in Jewish communities that span a wide breadth of our people's diversity in both age and ideology.He is originally from a Long Island suburb of New York.As a teenager, Rick fused his social consciousness with a Jewish spirituality that he embraced as a member of the North American Federation of Temple Youth, which he served as Regional (Long Island) Social Action Vice President in his senior year.Rick was also a participant on the Bronfman Youth Fellowships in Israel, a program that brings together Jewish teenage leaders from across North America and from across a wide range of backgrounds.It was during this experience that Rick embraced his love for Israel, the Hebrew language, rigorous exploration of Jewish and secular thought, and traditional ritual practice.Rick also came to see the supreme importance of dialogue and understanding across ideological lines within the Jewish community, an issue to which he has remained quite committed.
As an undergraduate at Yale, where he was a National Merit Scholar and received a B.A. in History, Rick pursued his love for acting - a passion since early childhood - and was also a leader in the campus Jewish community.After college, Rick engaged in some professional acting and then received an additional fellowship from the Bronfman Foundation, doing community organizing at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles.Rick then attended the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC), located in Wyncote, PA, which graduated him as a rabbi in the spring of 2002.At RRC, he received the Judith & Ira Eisenstein Scholarship and the Dorothy & Sidney Becker Scholarship.Rick was also twice awarded the A. Walter Socolow Prize for outstanding essay on American Judaism - one exploring the role of the rabbi and educator in suicide prevention and the other offering an introduction to Reconstructionist Judaism.Rick spent 2 of his 5 years of rabbinical school in Jerusalem, studying at the Pardes Institute, Machon Schechter, and the Shalom Hartman Institute.He was a Rabbinic Intern with CLAL, an organization devoted to pluralism within the Jewish community, and he served for 2 years as the student rabbi at Congregation B'nai Tikvah, a small, unaffiliated community in southern New Jersey.
In his first two years in Los Angeles, Rabbi Rick served as Rabbi-in-Residence & Director of Jewish Programming at Milken Community High School, a pluralistic college-preparatory day school.Rabbi Rick has led High Holiday services for Congregation Beth Am, a Reconstructionist community in San Antonio, TX, and has become an active spokesperson for Reconstructionist Judaism on the regional scene.He has been a guest lecturer at the Academy for Jewish Religion, the University of Southern California, Cal State Northridge, and the Brandeis Collegiate Institute, in addition to synagogues and other smaller groups.He has remained an active alumnus of the Bronfman Youth Fellowships and has engaged in chaplaincy work for the Board of Rabbis of Southern California.Rick currently serves on the board's Executive Committee.
Rick is married to Rachel Kobrin, a student at the University of Judaism's Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies.
38 online sources [ view sources ]
