How a rabbi is woven into the community
As David-Seth Kirshner celebrates 18 years at Emanu-El of Closter — among other milestones — he reflects on what it means
This month, three anniversaries will come together for Rabbi David-Seth Kirshner of Closter and his family.
It’s been 25 years since he and Dori Frumin Kirshner got married. It’s been 25 years since he was ordained as a Conservative rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan. And it’s been 18 years since he became the leader of Temple Emanu-El of Closter.
The shul will mark those three anniversaries with its 97th annual party; it calls the evening its Celebration. (See box.)
Rabbi Kirshner talked about his life and his path to this celebration.
He’s the youngest of four sons of a rabbi, and as is not unusual for rabbis’ children — although not his own — he moved around a bit when he was young. He was born in Pottsdam, in upstate New York, lived there for about a year and a half, and after a few more short stays, grew up in suburban Detroit — West Bloomfield, to be specific. It’s only about an hour from Flint, Michigan, where his mother, Barbara Wolin Kirshner, grew up, he said.
His father, Sherman Philip Kirshner, grew up in the rabbinate at a time when the divisions between movements were more porous than they are today. “He was ordained in an Orthodox school, and he was in the Conservadox traditional world,” Rabbi Kirshner said. “I grew up in the ’80s; egalitarianism didn’t really become a thing until later.”
Rabbi Sherman Philip Kirshner was born in Winnipeg, and that made his children eligible to hold dual U.S.-Canadian citizenship. The Kirshners were careful to ensure that their sons got their Canadian passports; all of them except David-Seth were born in the political turmoil of the 1960s, and the parents wanted to make sure that they could avoid the draft, should they have to.
Rabbi Sherman Philip Kirshner died in 2011, and Barbara Wolin Kirshner died in 2022. They were married for 54 years.
“I was born in the 1970s — my brothers all were born in the ’60s — but I was the only one who used that citizenship,” Rabbi Kirshner said. He did so by matriculating at York University in Toronto.
After he graduated from college, Mr. Kirshner, as he was then, enrolled in JTS. He was sure that he wanted to be the principal of a Jewish day school, “and I thought that the title ‘Rabbi’ would be useful in that field,” he said. He’d graduated from college a year early, so when he entered JTS, it was 1994, and he was 20 years old.
Why did he choose to go to JTS, rather than the alternatives to its right or its left? “Because I wasn’t an Orthodox Jew and I wasn’t a Reform Jew,” Rabbi Kirshner said. “I was a Conservative Jew.”
It was a good choice. “I had a great experience there,” he said. “I had a great time. I made lifelong friends there.
“And that’s where I met my wife,” Memphis-born Dori Frumin Kirshner, a third-generation southern Jew who came north to New York to earn her master’s degree in Jewish education.
During his time at JTS, Mr. Kirshner taught, gaining experience in Hebrew schools, day schools, and other Jewish institutions. He taught so much, in fact, that a friend suggested to him that he try something else, just to give himself a break. “If you keep on like that, you’ll burn out before you’re 50,” he was told. And he paid attention to that advice and decided to do something completely different.
So he got a job at Riverside Memorial Chapel, the huge Jewish funeral home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
“I did everything there, from working with the chevra kadisha” — the burial society that many shuls maintain, where volunteers from the community prepare a body and stay with it until the funeral, providing the respect and care and love that everyone deserves, even past death — “to working in the back office and helping with funerals. I became very engrossed in the funeral business, from the Jewish side, and I became a regular speaker at rabbinical school classes and other Jewish institutions about the importance of creating chevrei kadisha in synagogues.
“I was very passionate about it,” he said.
That wasn’t all that was going on in his life, though.
Mr. Kirshner had received a scholarship to JTS, and he frequently was called upon to talk to donors, thank them, and show them the results of their generosity. “I was a poster child of sorts for what a scholarship at JTS could do,” he said.
So, about 18 months before he was going to be ordained, when he thought about his career choices, he found that the options he saw for himself had changed. Now, they were either the funeral business — he had gained a strong understanding of how it did work and developed strong ideas about how it should work — or take up the job offer he’d been given. “I was offered a job working on the capital campaign,” he said. “It was a $250 million campaign. I accepted that job.” That was in 1999. The seminary met its goal in four years, and it flourished.
Rabbi Kirshner was ordained at JTS in 2000, and he worked there until 2007, leaving as its director of institutional advancement.
Why did he leave? “I had moonlighted during that time,” he said. “For four years, I was the overflow rabbi at Temple Emanu-El.” He loved it, and it is accurate to say that congregants there loved him back. “The rabbi there had announced that he was leaving, and people at Emanu-El encouraged me to apply for the position.” Remember, he had never thought of himself as a pulpit rabbi. “But I took a leap of faith — I thought that I could maybe stay there for two or three years, and it would look good on my resume — and I applied for the job.”
And that was that.
“When we came to the shul, our son, Elias, was three weeks old, and our daughter, Evie, was 2 1/2.”
Elias is now finishing his last semester in high school — he’s at the Leffell School, a Jewish day school in Westchester County, and that last semester is spent in Israel. He’s coming home to be with his family at Emanu-El’s celebration for them. And Evie is a junior at Emory University in Atlanta; she will also join the family for the party.
Ms. Kirshner took her passion for Jewish education and Jewish life first to UJA-Federation of New York and then to Matan, an organization that works to provide a Jewish education to special-needs students. She began her work there when the family moved to Closter and stayed for 17 years, 15 of them as its executive director. Last year, “she stepped down for a career pivot,” her husband said. “She’s not sure where she’s going next, but she is taking a little time to enjoy the fruits of her labor.”
So, there’s the family, which has become so deeply woven into the fabric of life at Emanu-El that it’s not just Rabbi Kirshner who’s central to it, modeling what Jewish life in the 21st century can be. “I think that the most important thing I’ve learned at the temple is that this is more than a career and an income,” he said. “We’re part of the community. I have a portal to people’s lives to their happiest moments, and also to their saddest and most challenging.
“I’ve been able to help shape a lot of people’s views about Judaism, about Zionism, about tikkum olam, about what the Jewish response to a moment can be.”
He and his family have opened the doors of their home to the community, he said. “About 30 weeks a year, we host people for dinners on Shabbatot and holidays. Literally thousands of people have broken bread in our home. And Israel has been our north star. We unflinchingly support Israel. That doesn’t mean that we don’t question it, but that does mean that our questioning never calls our love for it into question.
“We have brought an impressive array of speakers about Israel every year, who run the gamut not only politically but culturally. We have had Dahlia Rabin, followed by Danny Gordis. That’s indicative of our synagogue, and our desire to sit and engage in conversation with all parties, from every side of an issue.”
Rabbi Kirshner, like the rest of the Jewish world, was deeply affected by October 7 and Israel’s war with Hamas. Last year, he published “Streams of Shattered Consciousness: A Chronicle of the First 50 Days of the Israel Hamas War”; the book was a collection of daily blog posts about the conflict. October 7 happened on his 50th birthday; he didn’t need that coincidence to feel strongly about it, but the coincidence helped push him to record his observations in a journal.
Rabbi Kirshner goes to Israel frequently; he often leads congregational trips there. He travels widely, again very often as a trip leader. “I just got back from Kenya; I’ve led temple trips to Portugal, Argentina, Germany, Poland, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Ukraine over the last 18 years,” he said.
He’s also taught at Emanu-El and led study groups there. “I’ve led a men’s study group on Thursdays at 6:30 in the morning for 18 years,” he said. “And I teach a women’s study group on Friday mornings. I’ve been doing that for 17 years. I also teach a host of other classes. This year, I’m teaching a great group of eighth-graders about the history of Zionism.
“I try to take a lot of what I’ve learned outside the building, whether it’s at a conference or a program or an activity, and apply that inside. I try to engage in important arteries of our community and bring those arteries’ blood flow to the temple.” Those arteries include (but are not limited to) both the New York and New Jerseys boards of rabbis; he’s been president of both. He’s a member of the New Jersey-Israel Commission, first appointed by Governor Chris Christie, a Republican, and reappointed by Governor Phil Murphy, a Democrat. He’s also a member of the rabbinic cabinet at JTS.
The community that Rabbi Kirshner leads is large, diverse, and storied; for decades it was the home pulpit of Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, the public intellectual whose fiery personality, powerful sermons, and seminal books, including “The Zionist Idea,” drew attention to the shul, then in Englewood, as well as to its leader. But Rabbi Hertzberg retired in 1985, and it wasn’t until Rabbi Kirshner took its pulpit that Emanu-El began to grow again. “In 18 years, we have grown exponentially,” Rabbi Kirshner said. “There were probably about 550 families when we went there; now we have more than 950. Our budget has grown, our staff has grown, and our activity has grown. We really have become a mile marker for the Jewish community on this side of the Hudson.”
How has that happened? “Since the year that I came to the temple, I’ve always said that I want to focus on the portals that people will utilize to engage in this community,” Rabbi Kirshner said. “Whether it’s religious, whether it’s educational, whether it’s programmatic, whether it’s social action, whether it’s entertainment, whether it’s affinity groups.
“No matter what portal people use — we have people who come to the temple weekly to deliver food. We have a program called JOMT — Just One More Thing. It’s to collect food for the local pantry; every month we ask people to bring in a specific food item, tuna or mayonnaise or canned tomatoes. We have some people who are religious about bringing those food items in every week, but they don’t come in to pray.
“For me, that is also an act of religiosity, just as prayer is.”
Why has Emanu-El flourished while so many other Conservative synagogues are not? “I am proud that we are bucking the trend,” Rabbi Kirshner said. “The movement is facing challenges. I think that it’s a little bit of luck and a lot of meeting people where they are.
“Part of me just wishes that the movement would put its ear to the ground a little bit more and listen to what constituents want. What they want, in my estimation, is unwavering support for Judaism and for Israel, and the chance to express ourselves religiously in a way that doesn’t compromise our values or beliefs. I think that right now, some of the microphones in our movement are by the margins, and they’re amplifying ideas that the majority does not hold.
“And that’s a problem.”
Temple Emanu-El’s building is beautiful — it’s surrounded by green, has windows and open spaces and is full of light, and its sanctuary is crowned with a spectacular stained-glass dome imported from a doomed shul building in Brooklyn. Its beauty makes it a favorite venue for weddings and other smachot. But to some extent the beauty is irrelevant, Rabbi Kirshner said. “You get past that quickly. What matters is what happens inside the building, and the values that we hold. We’re not just a pretty sanctuary.”
Looking back at 18 years, and looking forward, “I firmly believe that Temple Emanu-El’s best days are ahead of it,” Rabbi Kirshner said. “In a post October 7 world, where people are craving connection and community, for a place to express their views on Judaism and Zionism openly, the synagogue’s function will be all the more valuable. I think that our synagogue is well poised, both professionally and programmatically, to help people on that journey.”
As for himself personally, “I know that it is impossible to know what will happen. The older I get, the less I take any sunrise for granted. I feel incredibly blessed and very happy to have raised my children in this community, and I am looking forward to the years to come.
“This is the first time that I have agreed to be honored,” he continued. “I’ve been asked before, but the condition is that we have to be honored together. Yes, I am the rabbi, but it involves all of the family.
“And we are doing this to benefit the temple. The most important thing is for the temple to be poised for growth and success.”
Who: Dori and Rabbi David-Seth Kirshner
What: Are honored at Temple Emanu-El of Closter’s annual celebration
When: On Saturday, March 8, at 6:45
Where: At Temple Emanu-El
What else: Mentalist Lior Suchard will perform
For reservations and more information: tecloster.org
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