Ohioan becomes 1st black female rabbi in US

Forty-five years ago, Alyssa Stanton was born into an African-American, Pentecostal family in Cleveland. On Saturday, Ms. Stanton is to become a rabbi — the first African-American woman to be ordained as a rabbi by a mainstream Jewish seminary, said Jonathan D. Sarna, professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University.

Ms. Stanton is scheduled to assume the leadership of an overwhelmingly white synagogue in Greenville, N.C., in August. In interviews, many observers drew parallels between her joining the rabbinate and November’s presidential result.

“It is of incredible importance to note that her ordination coincides with the election of Barack Obama,” said Rabbi David Ellenson, president of Hebrew Union College, who will ordain Ms. Stanton at the college’s Cincinnati campus on Saturday. “It offers a ray of hope that the world can become a better place.”

Ms. Stanton and members of her new synagogue, Congregation Bayt Shalom, say they were surprised by the overwhelming national interest in her ordination. To them, her race and sex are footnotes to the more important story of a rabbi and a congregation finding themselves to be a comfortable fit.

“I’m just a little person trying to pay my bills and raise a daughter and help others on their spiritual path,” said Ms. Stanton, a single mother who adopted an infant girl 14 years ago.

The Greenville congregation is small and values diversity as a matter of choice and necessity. It is one of just a handful in the United States that is affiliated with both the Reform and Conservative branches of Judaism. Among its 60 families are “three or four” African-Americans, said Michael Barondes, Bayt Shalom’s president.

“We are a one-synagogue town, so we are trying to be inclusive,” Mr. Barondes said. “Naturally it’s unusual to have an African-American leading a Jewish congregation. But when she came here and spoke from the pulpit, it felt surprisingly natural.”

Ms. Stanton’s transformation from a young Christian seeker into a Jewish spiritual leader spans an era of sometimes difficult change, for herself and for her chosen religion. She grew up in a Jewish neighborhood in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. It was a time when most Jews in the United States were white European immigrants or their descendants, said Rabbi Stephen C. Lerner, director of the Center for Conversion to Judaism in New York. Women were not yet allowed to be rabbis.