Kolot’s Rabbinic Transition

Rabbi Search Updates

Update as of January 2025/Tevet 5785

We are extremely pleased to report great news about our rabbinic search. Twenty-seven – 27!!! – rabbis applied to be our next rabbi and we are pleased to share a bit about the pool and about our next steps. 

Sorry this is a long email, here is a TL;DR: 

• Of the 27 rabbis who applied, 21 sent complete applications.* Our pool includes rabbis who are women, men, trans, cis, queer, straight, of color and white, from every Jewish denomination. These are all reasons to celebrate and to appreciate. We wouldn’t have it without the love and work of people inside and outside Kolot.

• For months, we have gotten to hear from people how beloved and important Kolot is far beyond our membership. We hope you feel the vicarious love and support, especially because this has been a hard few years for our congregation. That so many people want to be a part of Kolot is a real affirmation of what Kolot has been, is now, and what we might make it.

• Below this is an explanation of next steps and some information about the pool and our recruitment. Lots of detail for those who want it, and in service of transparency, openness, and for you to get involved. If you read only these bullets, dayenu and thank you.

• On January 11 the Congregational Engagement Team and the Rabbinic Search Team held a joint event to share the results of the congregational survey as a support and resource for Kolotniks in the search process. Members can find the recording link from this event in your inboxes under the subject line “A Rabbi Search Update” (contact HaraConnell@kolotchayeinu.org to be re-sent this email). Members who would like to access the full survey (analyzed and raw data), and express interest in further analyses can do so here.

• Thanks, see you at all the rabbi-search events in the next few months. Please opine sooner rather than later, and definitely by mid-April. 

For the Rabbi Candidate Search Committee
BC Craig, Co-Chair, Board Member + Dania Rajendra, Co-Chair

What’s next in rabbi hiring
In January and February, the Candidate Search Committee will assess candidates in three rounds, to present the congregation with up to three finalists while offering events for Kolotniks to prepare and participate in decision-making.

In March and early April, Kolot will host up to 3 Shabbatonim. Each finalist will join us to lead services, meet congregants and answer questions—all events will be hybrid. Each will also meet in-person with the board, senior staff, and the rabbi search committee, including a final, in-person interview. The Candidate Search Committee will collect Kolotniks’ responses, opinions, and questions during and after each Shabbaton to inform our decision-making. This is the last point to contribute your opinion on the candidates! 

• Shabbaton 1: March 7-9

• Shabbaton 2: March 21-23

• Shabbaton 3: April 4-6

In late April, the Candidate Search Committee will choose a top candidate to recommend to the Board. The Board will then vote on whether to approve our recommendation.  If the Board votes yes, the Board will announce the proposed candidate to the congregation. Then in June, the congregation will vote on whether to accept the Board’s recommendation to hire the candidate. This vote is not an election—we are not choosing between candidates. The vote is a yes-or-no on hiring the recommended candidate.** If we vote yes, the Board will commence negotiations. If we vote no, the rabbi search fails and the congregation will begin the entire process again. That is, the Board will constitute new search committees and put in place a new plan for interim clergy leadership.
 
But right now there are important opportunities to weigh in as a whole community, therefore we ask you to join us at the upcoming events to prepare for the Shabbatonim: 

• Saturday, Jan 18 before and after services, chat with Candidate Search co-chairs BC Craig and Dania Rajendra. BC will be in-person and Dania will be on Zoom. 

• Tuesday, Feb 4, at 7:00 p.m. Panel discussion on differing approaches to the bimah. Moderated by T Wise and featuring three rabbis who are not applicants for our bimah. Zoom only. RSVP here.

• Monday, Feb 10, at 7:00 p.m., an “office hour” with rabbi search co-chairs BC Craig and Dania Rajendra to discuss the search. Zoom only. RSVP here.

• Tuesday, Feb 18, at 7:30 p.m. on how a congregation supports a rabbi. Moderated by George Sarah Olken with three rabbis who are not applicants for our bimah. Zoom only. RSVP here.

All Zoom events will be recorded and available to Kolot members. (Now is the time to pay your dues, so you can participate fully!) 

About our rabbinic candidate pool
First, a thank you: to every Kolotnik who helped recruit candidates by posting, emailing or telling people! Also a special thank yous to our interim clergy team, without whose indefatigable efforts we would not have such good news to share! 

Second, a caveat: it is our congregation’s responsibility to ensure the privacy and anonymity of the candidates until we announce finalists, and our committee takes this very seriously. At this time, not even the search committee knows the individual identities of the candidates, in keeping with the best practices for anti-racism and anti-bias in hiring. After our initial review, we’ll learn the identities only of those candidates we interview in the first round. We ask you please not to ask us about individuals who may or may not have applied. Thank you. 

About our pool: We received 27 applications, and 21 were complete.* The following reflects the 21 complete applications as a whole and are based on applicants’ materials: 

Identity

• The pool includes rabbis with Reconstructionist, Reform, Conservative and Orthodox training.

• The pool applicants hail from 9 states - just under half of the pool applied from New York State.

• The pool is one-third women and two-thirds men. 

• A quarter of the applicants are queer. 

• Two are trans. 

• The pool is overwhelmingly, but not exclusively, white. 

Experience

• Time on the Bimah ranges from 0 to 33 years, with the median at 7.4. 

• Almost half the pool self-identify as artists, disciplines include the visual arts, music (several with cantorial experience), and literary arts.

• About 60 percent of the candidates also bring professional training and/or experience beyond the bimah, including in social work, the law, secular education, fundraising and finance, and executive leadership (top leadership of a non-profit or business). 

Notes
*Every candidate who submitted an incomplete application was immediately notified about what was missing and informed that we would not consider incomplete applications. 

**This process is mandated by Kolot's bylaws and designed to reflect our values. There are good reasons we are not electing a rabbi, here are two. 1. Inviting rabbis to electioneer amongst our membership would introduce and/or exacerbate division and acrimony that would be difficult for the congregation and the new rabbi to mend. Similarly, inviting the congregation to campaign for rabbis would also cause this harm. It is a set up to fail. 2. Humiliating one candidate with a public rejection is awful unto itself, as well as a deterrent to recruitment. We would cause harm to the candidate and impair our opportunities with future candidates. 

Update as of November 2024/Cheshvan 5785

The Rabbinic Search and Community Engagement Teams have been hard at work gathering and analyzing responses to the recent congregation-wide Survey and developing a process for vetting rabbi candidates. We were pleased to have had 256 individuals respond to the Survey, including more than 100 people who gave us narrative responses to open-ended questions. We are planning to present the Survey results to the entire congregation on January 11, 2025 and we will solicit questions and suggestions from attendees to help shape an evaluation tool that we can all use to assess the best fit once we meet the finalist candidates at Shabbatons (weekend Shabbat events) in the Spring. Please hold the tentative dates - March 22 and April 5!

In addition, the Membership Engagement Committee and the Israel/Palestine Task Force have asked that we discuss the survey results with them before the end of the year and we expect to schedule those discussions. If you're part of a group of members that would like to schedule such a discussion between now and the end of 2024, please contact RabbiSearch@KolotChayeinu.org.

The deadline for submission of rabbi candidate applications is January 1, 2025. We have worked with anti-racism, anti-bias consultants to ensure we’re living our Kolot values as we develop our candidate screening process, including tools to screen applicants to be sure they satisfy the basic requirements of the job description. As we meet with members of the congregation in December, January, and beyond to discuss community input, we will conduct interviews with qualifying candidates after January 1st with an eye to choosing a few of them to lead Shabbat services (Shabbatons) in the spring. Watch the Weekly for further information. And in the meantime, please use the job description and the congregational profile to help spread the word to potential rabbi candidates!

Update as of September 2024/Elul 5784

1. Thanks to the contributions of 200+ Kolotniks, we have a position announcement and a congregational profile! 

2. All hands are needed for recruitment! Please find sample recruitment language and our visuals for Kolotniks to invite applications by email and social media here. Let us know how it’s going or if you have questions, complaints, or concerns here (we’ll check this weekly) — and stay tuned for some Kolot-wide conversations after the High Holy Days.

Update as of August 2024/Av 5784

1. We are blessed by the continuing leadership of Cantor Lisa B. Segal, a founding member of Kolot and our lead clergy member; we are also so blessed that our full clergy team for 5784 includes: Rabbi Abby Stein, Student Rabbi Hadar Ahuvia, and Student Rabbi Madeleine Fortney. Working alongside and in support of them all is Kolot’s Rabbi Emerita Ellen Lippmann.  

2. From mid-May through mid-July / Nissan/Iyar through Sivan/Tamuz, the Community Engagement Team developed, received training for, and supported a community engagement plan that included listening sessions, which reached over 100 participants, and a survey that engaged more than 250 individuals. This “all hands” endeavor succeeded thanks to the generous efforts of the hosts, facilitators, participants, members of the Rabbi Candidate Search Team, clergy, and Board. At the Annual Meeting, members of the Community Engagement Team presented a very preliminary summary of the listening session feedback. You can review that presentation here. If you are interested in reviewing a complete summary of the survey data let us know in this form. Please use the same form to request access to the survey data and to let us know if you are interested in being part of the ongoing “deep dive” analysis of both the listening session and the survey data to inform our understanding of who we are as a congregation and how to plan for our needs and for the new rabbi in the year(s) ahead. 

3. Using the data and the preliminary findings from both the survey and the listening sessions, as well as comprehensive reading and interview research about the rabbinic hiring landscape, the Rabbi Candidate Search Team is developing the recruitment and discernment process and documents, including the congregational profile (with thanks for the starting draft created by Ellen Lubell and Trisha Arlin) and the position announcement.

Please look for those documents as well as sample recruitment language to join in the announcement in mid-August.

All hands — and also funds — are needed! To support the work of finding a new rabbi, please click here. 

All ideas are needed, too! Send us yours at RabbiSearch@KolotChayeinu.org.

Update as of June 2024/Sivan 5784

At Kolot’s Annual Meeting on June 9, 2024/3 Sivan 5784, members of both rabbinic search teams presented the process as of that date. The slide presentation about the Listening Sessions and search process plans can be found here.