Rabbi's Going the Distance to Lead the Faithful Across America

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Emily Jane Fox

Rabbi Raysh Weiss will be leading services on Cape Cod during the High Holy Days.

Rabbi Rami Schwartzer, a Connecticut-born fourth-year rabbinical student at Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, won’t be spending the High Holy Days as he usually does. Instead, he has traveled nearly 1,600 miles to spend the Jewish New Year, which began Wednesday evening, in Cypress, Tex., leading services for a bunch of strangers with a borrowed Torah in a rented clubhouse. Cypress is among the many communities throughout the country with no full-time rabbi of their own. About 40 percent of the 350 Jewish congregations in the 11 Southern states (plus Oklahoma and Kentucky) do not have a full-time rabbi on staff, according to a 2011 study by the Institute of Southern Jewish Life, a nonprofit organization based in Jackson, Miss. [link]