WINNIPEG — Rabbi Karen Soria, left, the first female rabbi ever to have served in the United States Marines, is the new spiritual leader of Temple Shalom, a Reform congregation in the city.

Rabbi Soria, who served in the marines from 1992 to 1996, was also the
second female rabbi to serve in the U.S. Navy, a position she held from
1992 to 2003.

She was Australia’s first female rabbi and served with congregations in Melbourne from 1981 to 1989.

Rabbi Soria arrived in Winnipeg a year before taking over the pulpit at Temple Shalom.

“My partner in the armed forces was transferred here a little over a year ago.” Rabbi Soria told the Jewish Post and News.

She told The CJN that as rabbi of Temple Shalom, she would be willing to perform same-sex marriages.

Rabbi Soria predicted that the temple’s congregation will grow because the shul’s services “have the best [live] music that touches people’s soul’s and we have such diversity and are open to such diversity.”

One of her areas of interest is working with people who choose Judaism as adults, she said.

Growing up near Chicago, Rabbi Soria graduated from the Hebrew Union College in 1981. After serving as a rabbi in Australia, she was the rabbi for two congregations in Florida.

She then decided to enlist in the U.S. Navy as a chaplain. “A friend convinced me that this it would be a good thing to do. I chose the navy because the navy’s application was on the top and the navy was the fastest getting back to me,” she said.

In 2003, Rabbi Soria said that she was ready to get out of the navy and “got an honourable discharge.”

While in the navy, Rabbi Soria met a number of Jews “who weren’t at morning High Holiday services because they didn’t feel comfortable asking their commanding officer to take off work. I had an overwhelming sense of duty to those people to pray on behalf of them,” she said.

“This was a defining moment. It can be very difficult to be Jewish in the U.S. forces, and some people that I knew were not confident to observe [Jewish holy days] as otherwise they would have liked to.”

She remembers one Jewish sailor who said that one of the reasons he was estranged from the Jewish community was because he was a sailor. “He said, ‘What Jewish parent ever wants their kid to be a sailor?’

“[It made me realize] that as a community, we have less tolerance than we should of the very different ways that people can work productively.”

Rabbi Soria said that her synagogue would be starting a chesed committee and an adult education committee.

In addition to acting as a part-time rabbi for the Temple Shalom congregation, she will work part time as the Jewish chaplain at the Health Sciences Centre.