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`Coming Home': Congregation Beit Tikvah hires its first full-time spiritual leader.
EMILY DEUTSCHMAN
Special to the Jewish Times
Emily Deutschman is a Baltimore-based free-lance writer.
Roland Park
For members of Beit Tikvah, Baltimore's only Reconstructionist congregation, the up-coming High Holiday season not only presents an opportunity to explore their movement's first new prayer book since 1948, titled "Mahzor Layamin Nora'im." It also offers a chance to meet the synagogue's new spiritual leader, Rabbi Elizabeth Bolton.
Rabbi Bolton, a 1996 graduate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Wyncote, Pa., calls her relationship with Beit Tikvah a good "shidduch," or match. She says she is "thrilled with the challenge" of serving as the first full-time rabbi for the tight-knit congregation of 80 families and individuals. (Beit Tikvah's most recent spiritual leader, Rabbi David Sulomm Stein, was part-time.)
"My goal is to forge connections within the Beit Tikvah community," says Rabbi Bolton, 43, a Montreal native who lives with her two children in Rodgers Forge. "I will not be up there on the bimah, far away and high up, saying, `Believe, pray, listen,' but rather, `Think, participate, sing, connect. Connect to each other, connect to the prayer book, connect to the tradition.'"
Esther Miller, Beit Tikvah's president and...