VANCOUVER — Growing up in an Orthodox community in New York City, Rabbi Don Pacht recalls that he had never met a Conservative Jew. 

That changed when he moved to Vancouver to head the Vancouver Hebrew Academy years ago and found himself in a milieu where rabbis of many different denominations collaborated openly, willingly and in an atmosphere of friendship. 

“There’s a culture of collaboration that I recognized immediately when I came to this community,” he says. “It wasn’t about keeping your nose down and minding your own business, but about how we could all contribute to the community as a whole.” 

The Rabbinical Association of Vancouver (RAV), which formed in the 1980s to represent Vancouver’s synagogues and Jewish life in the Lower Mainland – home to an estimated 23,000 Jews – is one formalized example of this, Rabbi Pacht says. 

“But it really goes beyond that. As a mohel, I often find myself in congregations other than the one I daven in, and there’s always a very congenial atmosphere. It’s not territorial. I’ve seen comparative communities of similar sizes and demographics where there isn’t this kind of collaboration.”

Rabbi Philip Bregman, a Toronto native who serves as executive director of Hillel BC and was previously senior rabbi for 33 years at Vancouver’s Temple Sholom, a Reform congregation with about 700 member families, agrees wholeheartedly. “We’re not plagued by the infighting that occurred and occurs in other communities, nor with an unhealthy history, because we’re a relatively young Jewish community compared to Toronto, Montreal and Winnipeg,” he reflects. 

As a new arrival in 1980, he recalls a call he received from Rabbi Zev Solomon, then the spiritual leader at Congregation Beth Israel, a Conservative shul. “It was a phone call of welcoming and collegiality, a call that every newcomer would want to receive from a colleague,” he says. 

Like Rabbi Pacht, Rabbi Bregman says he came from a community in New Rochelle, N.Y., where “if you threw a stone, you hit a synagogue!” Not long after he arrived, he and Rabbi Solomon formed RAV. The association of rabbis representing Hillel and synagogues throughout Vancouver – with the exception of Chabad, which has declined to participate – meets monthly in the offices of the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver. (“Chabad doesn’t play in the same sandbox as the rest of the community rabbis,” explained one rabbi who asked not to be named. Chabad declined to comment for this article.)

“We realized, coming to this much smaller community that we didn’t want to be isolated, and that as rabbis, we share much more than what our differences might be,” says Rabbi Bregman. As new rabbis arrived in Vancouver in the 1980s and ’90s, the group that constituted RAV found they had a lot in common, growing up in the same culture and in the same age demographic. Deep, profound friendships among the rabbis formed naturally and organically.

RAV’s operating budget is zero, but what happens in their meetings is “an example of what collaboration and dialogue is all about,” Rabbi Bregman says. “We have discussions and we know there will be differences of opinion, but it’s a rare occasion that we can’t come to agreement on something. We discuss poverty in the community, anti-Semitism, Holocaust education and the nuts and bolts of Jewish life in Vancouver. I’m not aware of the cross-pollinization that occurs in other communities as it occurs here, and it’s provided for a much healthier community.”

Rabbi Bregman says the mikvah is a prime example of how the collaboration among Vancouver’s rabbis has led to benefits for the entire community. “When [the Orthodox] Congregation Schara Tzedeck decided to refurbish their mikvah, the rebbetzins started collaborating, too. The end result was that this wasn’t seen just as a mikvah at Schara Tzedeck, but rather, a community mikvah,” he says. 

“It was renamed the Community Mikvah at Schara Tzedeck. Find me another community that has done this,” he adds. “I don’t think you can. You’ll find communities that say ‘This is our mikvah and you can’t use it – go build your own!’ It’s not to do with whether one group recognized the converts of another group. Rather, this is a facility we need in the community and it needs community support.”

Rabbi Andrew Rosenblatt at Schara Tzedeck, which has a membership of almost 500, says the rabbis involved in RAV are very supportive of one another and careful to sidestep denominational complications that might trip them up. Instead, they work together on things of interest to the whole community. 

“There’s a real sense that we jointly shoulder some community needs issues,” he said, referring to specific campaigns and individual cases of need that RAV works on in collaboration with Jewish Family Service Agency.

The co-operation among the rabbis goes well beyond the perfunctory, adds Rabbi Jonathan Infeld at Congregation Beth Israel, which has about 650 families. 

“Our group of rabbis likes and cares about each other, and we’re all supportive of the community organizations and co-ordinated in our support of them.” 

Just last summer, he says, when the three Israeli teens were kidnapped and murdered, RAV sponsored a program to bring the community together in solidarity. “The most important aspects of our co-operation I can’t speak publicly of for reasons of confidentiality,” said Rabbi Infeld, who is the chair of RAV this year, alluding to the individual cases of poverty and hardship they deal with. 

“But because we have a connection with one another we’re able to communicate in a way that facilitates doing our job with different aspects of community life, and no friction or confrontations have arisen.”

This culture of collaboration makes Vancouver a vibrant Jewish centre on the West Coast, says Rabbi Pacht. “Vancouver wouldn’t be Vancouver if we didn’t have this collaboration,” he insists. “There would be far fewer programs, supports and resources for the Jewish community.” 

Says Rabbi Bregman: “There was and is a deep, abiding respect and love that we have as rabbis and colleagues for Judaism and the Jewish people. When you’re talking to each other, you can then open all sorts of doors.”