Conservative movement's Rabbinic Assembly gets new president
Efrat resident Rabbi Barry Schlesinger says he hopes to strengthen religious pluralism in Israel.
By MATTHEW WAGNERbarry schlesinger(photo credit: Courtesy)
Rabbi Barry Schlesinger was chosen to succeed Rabbi Peretz Rudman as the president of the Rabbinical Assembly, the international association of Masorti-Conservative rabbis, on Tuesday.
Schlesinger, 53, from Efrat, said he hoped to strengthen religious pluralism in Israel.
"I'd like to present another voice of Judaism no less engaging, exciting and compassionate as Orthodoxy," said Schlesinger, who was raised in an Orthodox home in Englewood, New Jersey.
He moved to Israel in 1972 and studied social work at Bar-Ilan University. He subsequently was director of Project Renewal and then of the community center in Safed's Caanan neighborhood. Schlesinger also directed the Moross Community Center in the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem's Old City.
In 1993 he enrolled in the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies' masters program in informal education. He was ordained by the Schechter Rabbinical School in 2001.
Since 2001, Schlesinger, a father of six, has been rabbi of Kehilat Moreshet Avraham in the East Talpiot neighborhood of Jerusalem.