Now, here is a little information about our leaders –
LEADERSHIP OF THE HALF-JEWISH NETWORK
The Half-Jewish Network has leadership whose varied backgrounds reflect the diversity of our members’ identities. Some of us identify as Jews, some of us identify as Christians, and we expect to eventually welcome half-Jewish people to our leadership from other cultures as well.
OUR COORDINATOR
Robin Margolis is the daughter of an Orthodox Jewish Polish mother and an Episcopalian WASP father. She was brought up as an Episcopalian.
As an adult, Robin affiliated with Judaism. She identified as a matrilineal Jew with a culturally “Christian half,” reflecting her strong emotional ties to her Christian family and their rich Scots-English-Dutch Protestant heritage.
Robin’s Jewish activities included teaching Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism) classes, co-founding and co-leading a Jewish Renewal women’s havurah (prayer and study group), enrolling in a rabbinic program at the Rabbinical Seminary International, writing a blog on half-Jewish issues for www.jewcy.com, and founding the Inclusivist Judaism Coalition.
Robin decided, after many years of living as a Jew, that she was theologically more comfortable with Christianity and returned to the Episcopal Church. She is also interested in the teachings of the Christian Universalist Association. She plans to enter the ministry. She continues to work with and advocate for half-Jewish people within Jewish, Christian and other faith-based and secular cultures.
Robin currently lives in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. To contact her, please email her at:
binarystar [at] aol [dot] com
OUR BOARD
Sarah Buxbaum is a patrilineal Jew. She spent her childhood as a member of the Jewish Humanist congregation in Deerfield, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. As a teenager and young adult, she was a member of the Jewish Secular Society of Cleveland, Ohio. She has also been a member of several Reconstructionist and Reform synagogues. She and her family currently attend a Reform synagogue.
She has a nice husband and an extremely active child.
Ya’akov Litman comes from a family with Jewish blood, but since it was from a paternal side, no acknowledgement from the Jewish community was given. Raised in the Christian faith, he went on to become a priest in the Old Dutch Catholic Church for seventeen years.
Finally, after much soul searching and membership in several Jewish congregations with a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on Jewish identity, Ya’akov left the church and went through the conversion process as well as a Bar Mitzvah in 2010.
He now serves unaffiliated Jews as Shaliach Tzibur (cantor, public prayer leader) in Florida U.S.A. He has been licensed as a rabbi to unaffiliated Jews by the Unitarian Ministries International.
Ya’akov can reached at by email at:
Ravyaakov [at] live [dot] com
or
inclusivistjew [at] gmail [dot] com
or at his Yahoo group:
