San Diego, CA (special) -- A girl and boy from Congregation Beth Tefilah and Adat Ami Synagogue portrayed a bride and groom in a symbolic shtetl wedding last January to dramatize the coming together of the two Conservative congregations into a new congregation, Ohr Shalom Synagogue.

By all reports, the marriage is holding together well -- but the newlyweds have experienced some unexpected bumps in the road.

For starters, Ohr Shalom Synagogue was told by its landlord in Mission Valley that its lease was up, and that it was expected to vacate the premises -- pronto.

Next, Rabbi Arnold Kopikis took a position at Ner Tamid Synagogue, succeeding Rabbi Aaron Gold. After the briefest of retirements, Gold accepted the pulpit at Temple Beth Sholom.

Ohr Shalom Synagogue meanwhile set about solving its problems. It leased space for a sanctuary and school not far from Old Town San Diego at 1260 Morena Blvd., Suite 100, in the Morena Commercial District. Then its search committee began interviewing rabbis. 

What makes Ohr Shalom unique is its mixture of Spanish-speaking Jews -- many of whom own businesses in the border area -- and English-speaking Jews, who, in the main, either were raised in San Diego or come from other parts of the United States. The Spanish-speaking Jews comprised a large portion of Adat Ami Synagogue; whereas Beth Tefilah principally was English-speaking. 

When the search committee recently settled on Rabbi David Kunin, it chose a man to whom multiculturalism has become almost second nature.

Raised in Croton-on-Hudson in Westchester County, N.Y., Kunin grew up in the Reform movement, but switched to the Conservative movement after he and his twin brother, Seth, spent a high school year abroad studying and working at Kibbutz Ein Dor.  "We had classes from 7 a.m. to lunchtime and then we worked all afternoon in a wire factory," Kunin recalled during an interview in the Mission Valley area apartment that the bachelor shares with two Border Collies and a Siamese cat. "My job was to put wire onto spools using this machine."

Rabbi David Kunin at home with his pets

After high school, Kunin went to Brandeis University in Massachusetts where he majored in English medieval history. Next it was to theJewish Theological Seminary in New York, from which he was ordained after a seven-year study program. 

"The program takes between five and seven years," Kunin said. "Some people take longer, other people shorter. I ended up taking longer because I was working pretty much at several different jobs at the same time so I had to cut down on classes. It gets expensive."

While at seminary, he served as a student rabbi at the Lakeland Hills Jewish Center in Wanaque, N.J. The problem and opportunity for Kunin was that there was no senior rabbi. "The congregation expects a full formed rabbi and you are a student so you have to learn to function in a lot of different ways," he recalled.

While he was being ordained, so was his brother -- at Leo Baeck College in London. Seth Kunin also was in the process of studying for a PhD at Cambridge University. Eventually, the brother decided to go into the academic world rather than the pulpit rabbinate. But for approximately a year and a half, Seth Kunin served in a pulpit in Nottingham, England. At his installation as the rabbi of Nottingham, (Robin Hood fans please note), the sheriff of Nottingham attended the ceremonies. Today he teaches anthropology and theology at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland.

The brother suggested to Kunin that he take a pulpit in Glasgow, Scotland . The suggestion was irresistible because it meant being near his twin and also being able to explore areas with which he was familiar though his medieval history major.

He served for five years as a rabbi in Glasgow where, he said, "there is a wonderful community, very active, with 5,000 to 6,000 Jews, eight synagogues, kosher delis, kosher butchers. ...and very active Zionistically."

His congregation was called Glasgow New Synagogue; its members fairly similar to American Jews because they were descended mostly from "Eastern European Jews who came to Scotland about the same time most of the Jewish community came over to the United States."

There are a few geography-born differences between Scottish Jews and American Jews, Kunin said. The congregants "have picked up some of the Scottish melodies, which is sort of fun. Some of the younger people like to wear kilts and some were wearing them at a wedding. I didn't let them do that at services: I didn't think it was appropriate. I am not terribly into nationalism, and a kilt for them was a sign of nationalism. Occasionally people would wear kilts on the High Holy Days."

Another Scottish innovation: "Robbie Burns is the poet of Scotland and there is a celebration every February in his honor," Kunin recalled. "We actually had at the synagogue a Robbie Burns night where we had a kosher haggis and a bagpiper, and someone cut the haggis with a sword." For the uninitiated, he explained that haggis is "like kishka."

In Scotland, he said, overt anti-Semitism was rare, although there were some golf clubs which declined to accept Jewish members. Conservative Jews felt greater hostility from the Orthodox rabbis. 

"There was a Jewish Representative Council of Scotland that discussed issues of importance and there was a committee of that -- which was a synagogue body -- and non-Orthodox Jews were not welcome," Kunin said. "At other times, Orthodox rabbis would not sit with non-Orthodox rabbis, but in general the people themselves got along perfectly fine. It was just with the rabbis where the problem existed."

At the end of 1994, Kunin returned to the United States to work for two years in New York at the offices of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism. There he served as director of congregational programming, a position in which he developed syllabuses to teach about the holidays, to help prevent intermarriage, and to reach out to singles.

 He said he believes "that the Jewish community has to do the best it can with its young people to develop a very strong identity as Jews. 

"If they think it is important and something they value, then they will look for Jewish partners," he said. If, nevertheless, such youth fall in love with Gentiles, "then hopefully they will bring their partners into Judaism rather than being lost," the rabbi added. 

He said his approach differed somewhat from the program favored by the United Synagogue which was "to teach them to just say 'no.' 

"Alan Silverstein who was president of the Rabbinical Assembly a number of years ago wrote a series of books, one of which was called It All Begins with a Date, really trying to get kids to think about who they date. If you make it a habit of only dating Jews, it increases the chance of only marrying Jews."

The rabbi said that approach is likely to have better results in a large metropolitan area, where there are many Jews, than in a small city, "where there might be one or two Jewish kids in a class. ... So my approach is creating a strong Jewish identity as something that is important to them."

What kind of singles programming did he do? "It was mainly looking at synagogues as being places to bring together Jewish singles," he replied. "If you are going to try to encourage Jews to marry within you have to provide the opportunities." Kunin said he tried to encourage Conservative synagogues to create joint organizations for singles, rather than each synagogue trying to do all the programming on its own.

Developing theory was one thing, putting it into practice another. Kunin got his chance three years ago when he became the rabbi atCongregation Shomray Hadath in Elmira, N.Y. -- his last position before accepting the Ohr Shalom pulpit.

The congregation had about 160 families, slightly more than the nearby Reform congregation. "It was satisfying working on developing education, trying to develop Jewish commitment, working with the synagogue and helping it grow in the kind of programming it did, and the kinds of ways it reached out to young families," said Kunin. "We had a very good reputation. People would join us rather than the temple because they knew that our Hebrew school was much better. 

"That was a positive thing because we went three days a week, and they went one day a week, so for them to decide to join us, and give up the idea of soccer and all the other things that kids have to give up for a strong Hebrew education, is very positive."

 * * *

Kunin was at his most animated in an interview with HERITAGE while discussing a program he pioneered in Elmira to promote inter-religious tolerance.

Elmira, located in upstate New York near the long Pennsylvania border, experienced anti-Semitic and racist graffiti incidents while Kunin served there. Additionally, there was a great deal of Christian missionary effort with the Gideon Society passing out Bibles in front of public high schools. In response, Kunin cooperated with a Muslim imam and a Christian minister to develop a program for 4th through 6th graders and their parents to teach about religious diversity and the benefits of pluralism.

Divided into three, three-hour sessions, the program includes "icebreaker" activities in the first session; games emphasizing commonalities among the religions in the second session, and demonstrations of differences to be treasured about the religions in the third session.

Fifteen children and their parents make an ideal group size, Kunin said. During the three sessions, parents and children will participate in some activities together, and participate in other activities exclusively with their age group.

One of the first-night "icebreaker" activities is called "Diversity Bingo" in which participants are given identical game cards. As in bingo, they must fill in all the boxes in a line -- whether the line be vertical, horizontal, or diagonal. 

The boxes said such things as "fasts for Ramadan," "doesn't eat pork," "has given up something for Lent"; "has attended a seder"; "likes to ski"; "likes MTV"; "likes Chinese food" and so forth. Participants introduced themselves to each other and signed their names to an applicable box on each other's game card until someone called out "Bingo."

"The goal of the game is two-fold," Kunin said. "The first is to show how much they have in common. What we found is that the Jewish community is fairly assimilated and knows a lot about the Christians and not so much about the Muslims; the Christians don't know so much about the Jews and the Muslims, and the Muslims are the least assimilated, or were in Elmira. But they all had things in common: all the kids loved soccer, most kids liked MTV, some kids had one or two brothers. It pointed out the similarities which is our main goal on the first night of the program."

In one of the separate activities for the children, they are divided into two groups--one which wears blue shirts; the other which wears shirts of other colors. "There are a lot of games like this used in schools; where one group of kids is identified as 'superior' and another group of kids is identified as 'inferior,' and they learn what it is like."

In this case, those wearing blue shirts are deemed "superior" and they get to play a game of "Jeopardy' testing their knowledge about the three religions, while children wearing other colored shirts have to take a test. 

"What is interesting -- we point it out because kids don't notice it -- is that the information in the Jeopardy game and the test are exactly the same," Kunin said. "The kids are using the same material and answering the same questions, but with a different format. Formats are everything. It is a way that they get to understand. They see the arbitrary nature of intolerance. So it worked very well."

Yet another game is "Religionary," similar to "Pictionary," in which parents and children together must come up with fake but plausible definitions for words gathered from different religious traditions. "Tefillin," "rosh chodesh," "beatitude," "Ramadan" are some examples of terms they had to define.

Having broken the ice in the first session, the emphasis switches in the second session to the similarities among the different traditions.

"One of the programs which the kids do alone: they get a sheet with three prayers on it, one from each of the different traditions," Kunin said. "They have to first figure out which prayer comes from which tradition, and then they have to brainstorm as many similarities as they can." Each group starts with a leafless tree and adds a leaf to the tree each time a similarity is discovered. "There is sort of a competitive element: they want their tree to have more leaves than the other kids' trees have."

Another second-session activity is to "break into groups of kids and parents and give them a story from each of the different traditions and have them act out the story and give a moral," the rabbi said. "The real purpose of that is to show how each of the different traditions uses stories as a way of teaching ethical messages."

From the Jewish tradition, the program selected a Talmudic story about Rabbi Meir and his wife Beruriah, who was a very wise woman. After Rabbi Meir was accosted by bandits, he said to his wife "I wish they were dead." His wife replied, "You shouldn't wish that. Maybe they will have a chance of repenting." The rabbi therefore prays for their repentance and, in fact, they do repent.

From Christian Scriptures came the story of the Good Samaritan, who though considered a member of a low caste at the time, was the only person to come to the aid of a traveller lying injured along the road.

From the Muslim tradition came the story of Omar Ibn al Khattab, "who used to go around incognito to see how his people were faring and came upon a woman who was criticizing him for unfair taxes on the poor," Kunin said. "He solves the problem because he sees that the woman was right."

Kunin noted that Jordan's new monarch, King Abdullah, recently has been following in that Islamic tradition by disguising himself in various ways and going out among the people.

The final three-hour session is "the most important night where we focus on the differences," Kunin said. "We want people to understand that while there is a lot that is similar, there are differences, and we want you to respect and value each other's differences."

In one activity, "we give the kids and parents a list of terms from the three religions and they have to identify which term belongs where, and what are the differences that are highlighted by the groups of terms we selected

"Another program on the third night: we break the people into groups and ask them to put together info-mercials on the different holidays, focusing on difference again."

Kunin said the program ends on a positive note, with kids and adults in separate groups asked to complete two sentences: "What I like about my religion is _____" and "What I want to know more about from another religion is ______"

The rabbi explained that "we want people to think positively about differences and not be afraid of them. "

Thus far the program has been run for three different groups, hosted the first time by a church, the second time by a synagogue and the third time by an Islamic Center. "We have good relations with the Human Relations Commission (in the Elmira area) and we are looking at getting it into schools as well," Kunin said. "Since we are not promoting any one religion, the schools are comfortable that we are promoting tolerance."

Additionally, Kunin has demonstrated his program at a training conference in England and has "been in discussion with the United Synagogue which is interested in finding a wider application."

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When Kunin was interviewed by Ohr Shalom's search committee he learned that "they work very hard to create a warm, family-oriented service and that was something which I felt was very important." 

He said he also was impressed that the congregation was offering "a variety of services to meet the different needs of the population; so that the Friday night service is done in one style; the Saturday morning service is done in a different style and the weekday minyan in a third style."

He noted that members of Ohr Shalom daven every morning at the Jacob Health Care Center in an area adjacent to the dining room. "I have noticed and people have told me also that when we say the Shm'a, some of the residents will put down their fork and say the Shm'a too, so that is very positive."

Even though Ohr Shalom is newly forged from two distinct congregations, Kunin said, "there are always more things that bring us together than separate us as Jews. I think it is great to have a diverse community with people coming from different backgrounds and different approaches. I think that can only be a strength."

As for his role in congregation building, "the more things that you can do to help people meet each other, learn about each other, learn about each other's different cultures -- I think that is good. 

"I think Ohr Shalom has a unique possibility of creating a very strong and cohesive community where people are different, yes, but people are coming together, knowing each other, and feeling comfortable together. We have the opportunity to actualize that."