Ex-Portlander ordained as Reconstructionist rabbi
By Paul Haist
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Former longtime Portlander Me'irah Iliinsky has graduated from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Wyncote, Pa., with a master's degree in Hebrew letters and the title of rabbi.
Before coming to RRC, Iliinsky earned her bachelor of arts in psychology from Antioch College and her master's degree in social work from Portland State University.
She was a psychotherapist and addictions specialist in private practice and with the Women's Psychiatric Resource Center in Portland.
As a new rabbi, Iliinsky has accepted a post at Temple Beth El in historic Williamsburg, Va. She said the 200-household congregation is "unaffiliated by choice," because "it's the only synagogue in town and there's a broad spectrum of Jews; they wanted to include everyone."
Iliinsky will assume her new post in August, succeeding Rabbi Syliva Skolnick who is retiring after 13 years as the former havurah's first rabbi. At present, Iliinsky resides in Philadelphia.
Iliinsky said her art will play an important role in her new career as a rabbi.
"I had thought I would need to give it up, because there wouldn't be a place for it in such an intellectual pursuit as becoming a rabbi," she said.
However, during her rabbinic studies she took a break to move to Israel for intensive study of Hebrew in the Arad Arts Project. She studied Hebrew all morning and worked on her art in the afternoons.
She discovered in that experience that there was a place for art in her life as a rabbi.
"I can use artwork as one of the venues for teaching. There are a lot of people like me, who are very visual people, and Judaism is really very intellectual, and, if you're not intellectual, some people give up. Being visual is another way to capture people's imagination," she said.
"I have the students, whoever they might be—adults, children, families—do artwork around a piece of Torah text," a process, she said, that opens new doors into Torah understanding and allows them "to express what they've learned."
Iliinsky's Jewish art appears elsewhere also.
She just completed the cover design for the forthcoming book "Daughters of Miriam, Women Prophets in Ancient Israel" by Wilda C. Gafney, an Episcopalian priest. Several of Iliinsky's illustrations also will appear in the forthcoming "Torah, A Women's Commentary," due out this December from the Women of Reform Judaism and the Union of Reform Judaism Press.
Iliinsky lived for more than 30 years in Portland, where she was a member of Havurah Shalom. She praised Havurah Shalom Rabbi Joseph Wolf, and said that Havurah Shalom was responsible for much of her spiritual awakening.
"I have so much gratitude for Rabbi Joey Wolf, who actually oversaw my tentative steps into Judaism in 1988. The whole Havurah Shalom community was wonderfully supportive and open, (a place) where I could really bloom," she said.
Having had no formal Jewish training as a child, Iliinsky became a bat mitzvah at Havurah 16 year ago. She volunteered at Havurah as the congregation's coordinator of adult education and morning services.
"I love Portland and I would have loved to come back," she said, "but there just isn't room for another rabbi in Portland."
Portland's Jewish community was fond of Iliinsky also.
In 1998, she received the Jewish Women's Round Table "Song of Miriam" award for exceptional leadership and commitment to the Portland Jewish community.
Beyond Portland, Iliinsky received RRC's 2006 Morton Schein Education Prize. Also during her time at RRC, she worked as a chaplaincy intern at the Philadelphia Geriatric Center (now the Abramson Center for Jewish Life in Horsham, Pa).
She served as the student rabbi at Temple B'nai Israel in Burlington, N.J.; Havurat Tikvah in Charlotte, N.C.; and the Houston Reconstructionist Havurah in Houston.
Iliinsky taught at Society Hill Synagogue and Congregation Or Ami in the Philadelphia area.
In Israel, she studied at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem and the WUJS Institute in Arad. She also completed the course in Compassionate Jewish Leadership at The HealthCare Chaplaincy in New York City.
In conferring Iliinsky's degree, Academic Dean Dr. Tamar Kamionkowski, said, "You fulfill the principle of hiddur mitzvah, of beatifying ritual objects and sacred spaces, of making Judaism beautiful. You have created so many works of art that bring us closer to the sense of the sacred. Your work is complex, colorful and fluid, just as you know that life is complex, colorful and fluid."
Learn more about Rabbi Iliinsky, how she uses graphics to enhance her teaching and see some of her art online at www.versesilluminated.com.