Rabbi Bonnie

About 15 years ago an American church group invited me to participate in a Reconciliation Conference in Germany about prejudice and the Holocaust. The German organizers expected the rabbi to be an older gentleman with a black hat and a beard. On the first day of the conference they were so disturbed by the appearance of a woman that they tried to block me from speaking. Fortunately there were some younger members of the German group who intervened on my behalf and since they had paid my expenses from New York to Germany they reluctantly let me speak and my talk was well received.

Over the past twenty years I have lived and worked in Europe and South East Asia and everywhere I go most people are expecting the rabbi to be an older man with a beard and black hat. As an American rabbi living in NY I was rarely confronted by a perception problem but as soon as I left the United States it became a daily inconvenience and opportunity to educate. In SE Asia many people didn’t believe that I was Jewish because I wasn’t Israeli!