Fabrizio Melis grew up in Sardinia with little Jewish upbringing. “I didn't even understand what it meant to be to be Jewish, even if my mum would cook some type of food or we had a Friday night dinner,” he recalls.
The only synagogue had been “knocked down hundreds of years ago and a church was built on top”.
But now in his 50s and having spent most of his adulthood in London, he has just started training to become a rabbi, one of four first-year recruits at the Leo Baeck College, the Progressive movement’s rabbinic academy.
The college, which celebrates its 70th anniversary this year, has always had an international reach, ordaining 219 rabbis from 20 countries. But this year’s group has a particularly cosmopolitan character and shows a breadth of interest as well: one played French horn in an ensemble, another is a published novelist.
Fabrizio says his Jewish identity “didn’t register” until he fulfilled his dream of coming to London to study at college in his early 20s. He remembers calling home to tell his mother he was not returning. “An Italian mother – you can imagine the drama.”
He found a job in the travel business, going on to develop software and working for companies which, as it happened, “were always Jewish and Israeli”. He began picking up words of Hebrew, leading him to enrol with an online ulpan in Israel. He continues to study the language.
Meanwhile, under the tutelage of South London Liberal Synagogue’s Rabbi Nathan Godleman, his quest to reconnect with his Jewish heritage deepened. “It was very intimidating, very scary to begin with because I didn't have that knowledge. I joined classes and I really enjoyed learning and then I decided then to do the ba’al tefillah [prayer leadership] course with Liberal Judaism [which] was Nathan's idea. ‘You’re very good on the bimah,’ [he told me].”
When his children celebrated their bnei mitzvah, it was a deeply moving moment for his father as neither he, nor his father, had been able to have one in Sardinia.
He also teaches in the synagogue’s cheder. “I want to be a community rabbi,” he says. “I don't want to be a rabbi that writes books. I just enjoy being part of a community, leading the service, teaching, and keeping Judaism, particularly Progressive Judaism, alive.”
Like Fabrizio, the other students have had a previous career. Gavriella Goldman was a musician. She grew up in an Orthodox family in Israel until, at the age of nine, they moved to Australia.
Gavriella Goldman [Missing Credit]
“My mother’s first job in Australia was working at the Sunday school in the local Reform community. She said to my dad: ‘Come and try it, maybe you'll like it.’ And my dad attended one service – he could sit with his three daughters and his wife and he said: ‘I'm never going back. This is this is my home’… I think he was always more progressive than his community.”
For her own part, “I was always interested in the literature, in the Torah, in the liturgy. When I was 16, my congregational rabbi was hinting that maybe the rabbinate might be for me. At the same time, the congregational cantor was encouraging me by saying: ‘If you become a cantor, it's a way to combine your musical interests with your love of Judaism.’ I was seriously considering cantorial school at the time.”
But then a prestigious music prize took the teenager elsewhere. “They handed me $20,000 and said: ‘Go study music’.” She returned to Israel and ended up taking a degree at Tel Aviv University’s school of music.
After a scholarship to do a master’s at York University, she pursued her passion for music, playing French horn with her sisters in the Goldman Ensemble. “We were travelling around the country and we did festivals and music societies and we recorded at the Wigmore Hall and things like that.” The family, who had moved here, started a music school in Bedfordshire, which she runs with one of her sisters.
But when RSI cut short her career, she was forced to rethink. “Every few years, I felt this pull. Maybe I should become a rabbi. And then the idea… became very loud and I couldn't ignore it.”
While resident in Bedford, she attends Sukkat Shalom in Redbridge. “I spent a lot of time at different communities trying things,” she says. But at Sukkat Shalom, “I found my people.”
Madeline Hoffman, 32, who is originally from Kansas City, was attracted to a role in the rabbinate because of the variety it can offer. “I heard it summed up very well actually during my induction week by a rabbi, who said that this was a job that had within it all of the jobs that she had tried or considered in the past. And that's very true.”
Like Gavriella, she has a strong artistic side – she is “a lifelong poet” and a lover of dance who learnt at the Kansas City Ballet School and later did ballroom dance competitions. She grew up in an interfaith household that was connected with the local Beth Torah Reform synagogue, but her parents did not keep their religious lives separate.
“My [Jewish] dad would go to church and say the parts of the prayers he believed in. My mum fasts on Yom Kippur, cooks the Seder meal, and they both really saw the ways that their values co-aligned,” she explains.
Her Jewish involvement developed through her teens. “I was 17 the first time a rabbi suggested that I might look into the rabbinate, and I knew that for me, I needed more life experience for that to be a choice.”
Madeline Hoffman[Missing Credit]
At Kansas University, where she studied English and philosophy, she was an intern at Hillel and
“I also had friends in Chabad and spent time with them. That was just a really wonderful time exploring Jewish leadership.”
After graduating, she worked remotely for a tech start-up while travelling round Europe and Asia. As a student, she had spent a year abroad at Exeter University, and when a friend from there invited her to London, she went, meeting her husband there.
She has gained an MA in creative writing from Manchester University and worked for a coffee company, moving up from barista to head of communications. But a crucial step proved to be her decision to study for the batmitzvah she had never had.
“It was something that, as I grew older, I realised that I definitely wanted to do. But I was travelling and it's something that I believe is done in a community.”
That firm conviction was also why she turned down a suggestion from one rabbi to study for the batmitzvah online.
“After I finished my masters, we started going to services at West London Synagogue, and we were finding community there, and I was feeling like [it was] time. Then we got engaged. It was my husband's idea – [as] I had lots of family coming over for the wedding, [he said:] ‘What if we did the batmitzvah right before the wedding?’”
The guests who flew over for the marriage two years ago “definitely got good value,” she says. “I had my adult batmitzvah the day before we got married.”
It was during her studies that her tutor, West London’s Rabbi Emily Reitsma-Jurman, “saw how much I just absolutely fell in love with the study. I've always been involved in the study end of Judaism. But I was going very deep and really enjoying myself. She then brought it up again that she could see the rabbinate as being a potential path…
“I was looking for something that would both sustain me and that I could find sustainable meaning in. Judaism has really been a constant in my life, and with all the multitudinous aspects of a rabbi's life, it was something that I saw I would be able to give myself to.”
She has also been broadening her community experience as a member of the Liberal Jewish Synagogue (LJS) and as a cheder teacher at New London (Masorti) Synagogue.
The fourth student, Ariel Kahn, 53, has a different Jewish background – a Hasmonean High School graduate, who studied for three years in yeshivah in Israel and then went on to do a BA and MA in literature at Cambridge and SOAS respectively and a PhD in creating writing at Roehampton. His 2018 novel, Raising Sparks, set in Jerusalem and drawing on kabbalistic ideas, was listed for the Guardian’s Not the Booker Prize.
Rabbinical studies normally take five years full-time to complete including a year in Israel. But Ariel, because of his previous studies, will be able to graduate sooner and as a part-time student.
What also differentiates him is that he comes from a Masorti shul – he belongs to New North London Synagogue, where he runs the conversion programme.
As well as taking part in group classes, Ariel will enjoy tailored sessions with leading Masorti rabbis. He also remains senior lecturer in creative writing at Middlesex University this year and is an affiliated artist at the Woolf Institute for the study of Muslim, Jewish and Christian relations in Cambridge.
Ariel Kahn[Missing Credit]
His wish to be a bridge-builder, both within and beyond the Jewish community, is important to him. “I’ve just had a conversation about building an interfaith succah at Middlesex,” he says.
“I noticed, post-October 7, the need for more interfaith work on campus, both at Middlesex and also at Oxford, [where] I had a fellowship last year at Exeter College. I did quite a lot of teaching… both at the Jewish studies faculty but also in chapels and other spaces, and I saw how important it was for members of the Jewish community from different denominations to work together. I saw that Liberal and Progressive Jews were doing really interesting things in the interfaith space.
“I could see how valuable this space was and how all of the people there were driven by their own faith and values, to seek to heal, to build bridges and to overcome hate and stereotypes. For me, personally, as a writer and pedagogue, I see literature and learning as engines of empathy.”
At Oxford, for example, he collaborated with a Christian scholar who had set a number of Psalms to music, underlining his belief that “there's a real appetite across universities to hear Jewish voices”.
Ariel hopes the contacts he will make at Leo Baeck will add to his experience, which also includes having taught at the Orthodox London School of Jewish Studies. “It’s so easy, I think for us to respond to external challenges by hunkering down in our silos,” he says. “Whereas, I think we need to be braver and take the opportunity to talk to one another across these boundaries.”
The quartet will also be joined by a fifth student, Zachary Carruthers-Rothberg, who after four years study in New York, will be completing his rabbinic training at Leo Baeck this year. He is the husband of Rabbi Zachary Bernstein-Rothberg of SHEMA, South Herts and Edgware Masorti.
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