Temple Beth-El’s new rabbi settles in to life in the States

Rabbi Howard Voss-Altman

Rabbi Howard Voss-Altman is in a good place.

He feels honored and blessed to take over stewardship of Temple Beth-El in Providence, with its 170-year history and remarkable sense of self and stability.

He’s happy to be in a place where Reform Jewish values are preeminent and people are secure in those values.

And he is “absolutely thrilled to be back near our family,” he says.

Voss-Altman became the senior rabbi at Temple Beth-El in July when Rabbi Leslie Y. Gutterman retired. He and his wife Annie and their three children, Adi, Judah and Emilie, moved to Providence from Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where he had been rabbi of Temple B’nai Tikvah for 13 years.

Now, he’s ready to get to know the congregation and the community.

“The most important thing I can do during my first 18 months is meet people and share stories,” he said.

“I feel blessed to be able to follow as beloved, as caring a mensch as Rabbi Gutterman,” Voss-Altman said. “Rabbi Gutterman has done an extraordinary job of establishing a culture of caring. That’s an inspiration.”

In a wide-ranging conversation recently in his office at Beth-El, the soft-spoken rabbi talked about life in Canada, his family and the importance of the personal connection in a congregation such as Temple Beth-El.

After more than a dozen years in Canada, the Englewood Cliffs, N.J., native has the boxes of his professional life stacked in his office, and he says the family is still unpacking at their nearby East Side home. Annie, who has been a Canada Crown prosecutor, grew up in Missouri. They met at Washington University in St. Louis while she was an undergraduate and he was in law school, and they have been married for 24 years.

Big film fans, they met over their mutual love of the movies. She ran the Washington University film society. He had done the same at Duke University where he’d gotten his undergraduate degree so he decided to check out the Wash. U. group. The rest is history.

The irony is that Voss-Altman said he was not happy as a law student or a lawyer. Annie, on the other hand, worked as a paralegal helping to put him through rabbinical school and decided she wanted to go to law school. That happened in Canada, and she graduated in 2011. After the family settles in, Voss-Altman said Annie plans to take the Rhode Island Bar.

Voss-Altman did use his degree, clerking in New Hampshire for two years before practicing law in New York and St. Louis. Ultimately, though, he found his calling at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati.  “I feel so blessed, that every day I get to help serve and shape a community of Jewish meaning,” he said.

Their three children are adjusting to their new lives: Adi will attend seventh grade at Lincoln School; Judah will be in 10th grade at Classical High School and Emilie will be a sophomore at Queens University in Canada.

Voss-Altman says that everyone is enjoying the ability to get in the car, drive a few hours and spend the weekend with family. “Everything is just so close,” he said.

“We are a road trip family. But in Canada, when we took a road trip, we’d drive five hours south, and we’d be in Great Falls, Montana.” Here, they can drive five hours and be in Washington, D.C., or three hours and be in New York. Trips to see his family in the New York area or his wife’s family in Missouri are no longer 2,000-mile endeavors.

Canada was a growing experience for the Voss-Altman family. “It brought us closer together as a family since we had no other family nearby.”

And it was a very different experience for an American Reform rabbi. “Jewishly, it’s a world away,” he says of Canada, explaining that the country is traditionally Orthodox and Conservative due to the lack of German Jewish influx in the 19th century as there was in the U.S.

“Reform Judaism fits in with the American ethos,” he said, explaining that in the U.S. you can live proudly as a Jew with an American identity. “Canadians want to maintain their [distinct Jewish] identity.”

At times, he had to remember to focus on Canadian issues, especially at the beginning of his tenure there. He moved to Canada from a congregation in the Chicago area.

And so, he is looking forward to the collegiality, once again, among Reform colleagues in the U.S.

And he’s looking forward to helping build on Beth-El’s strong supportive community, especially in the area of adult education and attracting young families.

What else is he looking forward to?

“Surfing,” he said. “I love the beach. I love to surf.”

FRAN OSTENDORF is the editor of The Jewish Voice.