From torts to Talmud: Meriden shul welcomes new rabbi
By Cindy Mindell
(CJL) MERIDEN - Rabbi Michael G. Kohn had been practicing law for nearly 30 years when he realized that he was spending about as much time "doing Jewish stuff" as he was on his cases.
He calls his career change a "confluence of issues." While litigating commercial cases like securities fraud and anti-trust around the country, Kohn, who took over the pulpit at Temple B'nai Abraham in Meriden in September, was also becoming increasingly active in the Cincinnati Jewish community - the Federation, various agencies, his synagogue, the Bureau of Jewish Education.
"Some people started to say, 'You're getting good at this,'" he recalls. "'If you're frustrated with your cases, you should consider the rabbinate.'"
It was the late '90s and Kohn felt that he wasn't doing his clients much good. "Cases were taking too long, judges had their own dockets to deal with, and by the time my cases were over, five to six years after the fact, the settlements didn't help my clients much," he says.
The Philadelphia native and graduate of Seton Hall University School of Law became more active in his synagogue, serving as ritual committee chairman, leading services, reading Torah. Then he started to take courses at Hebrew Union College (HUC) in Cincinnati. "By 2002 I said, 'If I'm going to do this, I have to do it now,'" he says.
But he couldn't stay at the Reform HUC. "I'm a lifelong Conservative Jew," he says. "HUC's charter is to ordain rabbis to serve the Reform movement. My good friend, who was then HUC's national dean of admissions, was a little frustrated because at that time, greater Cincinnati had five Conservative rabbis, with four ordained from HUC."
Although Kohn says his social views are in line with the Reform movement's philosophy, he migrated to the Academy of Jewish Religion in Riverdale, N.Y. He lived in Nanuet and filled in for a local rabbi who was also one of his professors. He had a student pulpit in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and was ordained in 2003. For the next three years, he served as an unpaid rabbinical intern at Congregation Sons of Israel in Upper Nyack, N.Y.
Temple B'nai Abraham is his first fulltime paid pulpit position.
"It was a matter of finding the right community," he says of his decision to accept the offer. "It's a very comfortable place, the congregants seem to like one another, and they're warm and welcoming. B'nai Abraham is the kind of synagogue I belonged to in Cincinnati and the kind I wanted to serve."
Kohn sees his role as an educator first. He plans to continue to build on the strong foundation of adult education at the temple. He also hopes to engage post-bar/bat mitzvah teens and high school-age congregants.
Kohn also takes special interest in keeping alive the stories of Holocaust survivors. Both his in-laws received "Chiune Sugihara" visas, named for the Japanese vice-counsel in wartime Lithuania who issued more than 2,000 family visas to Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe.
Then there's the rabbi's lighter side. A longtime fan of the comic strip, "Bloom County," Kohn shares his office with an unusual figure, a gift from a fellow rabbinical-school student: a four-foot-high stuffed penguin, like Otis in "Bloom County," sporting a tallit and kippah. "It seems to catch the attention of congregants," Kohn says. "I call him my rabbinic intern."
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