TORONTO — Rabbi Martin Berman, spiritual leader of Thornhill’s Shaar Shalom Synagogue, and his wife, Marylin, are being honoured by the Union for Traditional Judaism (UTJ) at the organization’s annual dinner.
Marylin and Rabbi Martin Berman
The Bermans are receiving UTJ’s Emunah v’Yosher (Faith and Integrity) award at the Nov. 10 event in Teaneck, N.J.
Actor Mayim Bialik (best known as Blossom Russo in the 1990-1995 television series Blossom) is also being honoured at the dinner. The UTJ is presenting her with its MTV (Media and Torah Values) Challenge Award. Bialik is working on the UTJ’s MTV Challenge curriculum, a program designed to respond to television and other media from a Jewish perspective.
Rabbi Berman, 60, who serves on the UTJ board, has been involved with the organization since its inception in 1984, a year before the first woman was ordained as a Conservative rabbi, an issue that was part of the reason the organization was formed.
At the time, it was known as the Union for Traditional Conservative Judaism, but later came to include elements of the left wing of the Orthodox world as well, the rabbi said.
Under UTJ’s umbrella, members created a rabbinic group called Morashah, of which Rabbi Berman was a founding member. The group brings together like-minded rabbis for study and chizuk (moral support), he said.
UTJ members part ways with their more liberal counterparts over issues including homosexuality, particularly as it relates to same-sex marriage and whether gays can serve as rabbis and educators, as well as over new prayerbooks that have eliminated or changed some of the traditional prayers.
The rabbi, who has led Shaar Shalom for 16 years, grew up in a Conservative home in Jacksonville, Fla., and attended afternoon Hebrew school. He and his wife – who now have three adult children and five grandchildren – met at Camp Ramah in 1967, when they were 17.
Later, he studied psychology as an undergraduate at Yeshiva University, considered the flagship institution of modern Orthodoxy. “They had a good program, and I learned a lot,” he said.
However, he says, he “wasn’t happy with what I saw in those days as a very closed-minded Orthodoxy.” His two younger brothers both work at Orthodox yeshivot in Israel, he noted. He described one as “black hat” (haredi) and the other as “kippah srugah” (crocheted kippah, or modern Orthodox).
Rabbi Berman was ordained at the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary in 1977 and began his career in Sioux City, Iowa, hometown of rabbi and liturgist Jules Harlow, as well as longtime popular advice columnists Ann Landers and Dear Abby (Abigail Van Buren).
Rabbi Berman also served congregations in El Paso, Denver, and Detroit before joining Shaar Shalom. In El Paso, he served as an adjunct associate professor of religion at the University of Texas, and in Denver, he taught Talmud and Jewish law at a local Jewish day school.
In Toronto, where Rabbi Berman has served as president of the Rabbinical Assembly of Ontario and of the Toronto Board of Rabbis, he has taught the “Introduction to Judaism” class of the Rabbinical Assembly, Canadian region, for many years.
He said that UTJ and Morashah have helped strengthen his traditional commitments. “You have a chevrah of rabbis you get together with most summers… We come at Jewish life from the same direction.”