Rabbi Sheila Shulman
BORN BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, 1936. DIED LONDON, OCTOBER, 2014 AGED 77
AN INSPIRATIONAL pioneer who gave a voice to many outsider Jews and a radical feminist lesbian, Rabbi Sheila Shulman was one of the first two openly gay graduates of London’s Leo Baeck College. The other is Rabbi Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah.
Rabbi Shulman moved to the UK from New York in the 1980s when she began her studies at Leo Baeck, encouraged by three respected Progressive rabbis. The defining moment of her ministry came in 1990 when, with the blessing of Rabbi Lionel Blue, she launched Beit Klal Yisrael.
Preferring to be called simply Sheila, she grew up in Brooklyn, the daughter of a Ukrainian family who arrived in the USA when her mother was very young, Her background, though Yiddish speaking, was not particularly Jewish. Like many immigrant families, a desire to become American clashed with their Jewish ethnicity.
Theirs was a modest home-life and her mother and sisters worked from their early teens since her father died when she was six. She discovered the Holocaust through newsreels and the influence of her grandmother, who, unlike her mother and aunts, kept a kosher home and lit the Shabbat candles.
Shulman recalled her home as a noisy place full of shouting, but loved the book of Bible stories her father brought home for her. Her early education was basic, but the source of knowledge was the library and a summer camp which she attended for several years, experiencing left-wing idealism and music of many genres.
An early, pivotal memory was her horror of war and her delight at the UN vote which brought the State of Israel into being.
She won a full scholarship to study at a small college in the Hudson River Valley, where she encountered excellent teachers, good friends, intellectual debate — and Virginia Woolf, on whom she would later write a dissertation. She later said she was the only student in her class who cried when she graduated. Shulman won a Masters in English and Comparative Literature in the 1960s at New York’s City University, and began working towards a Ph.D.
She came to the UK on a fellowship in 1967, then returned to America for two years to teach, and made aliyah briefly in 1970. She considered the episode a mistake partly because she was expecting to speak Yiddish, which, of course, no-one did. Her Zionism underscored Israel’s right to exist, but not that all Jews had to live there. She liked the cultural developments that the Diaspora had brought to Jewish life.
She encountered many obstacles on her journey to finding herself, and what she once described as “her still, small voice”. She considered feminist writers bourgeois, but her views changed once she joined a writers’ group after attending a conference in Acton with 2,000 women.
Many factors were at play behind her decision to come out as a lesbian in 1972. A free-wheeling student environment led to her concern about gender issues. But intellectual curiosity, support for feminism, her developing love of Judaism always ended in the eternal “Jewish” question: when would she find a husband?
She spent the 1970s and early 1980s as an activist with the Women’s Liberation Movement and in 1980 she joined a Jewish women’s conference in Kings Cross, where she met Elizabeth Sarah.
Now aged 48, she began to look deeper into Judaism, beginning a course of Jewish studies and philosophy. Rabbis Jonathan Magonet, then Principal of Leo Baeck College, Lionel Blue and Albert Friedlander finally convinced her to study for the Rabbinate. Having admitted on the application form that she was gay, she could not believe that she and Elizabeth Sarah would be accepted until she stood on the bima as an ordained rabbi in July, 1989.
After their ordination, Sheila and Elizabeth Sarah started the Half Empty Bookcase Jewish Women’s Conference. Sheila taught basic Judaism at Roehampton University and Jewish converts at Finchley Reform Syngogue where she served for several years as an Associate Rabbi. She catalogued college library books and lectured on Jewish thought at Leo Baeck CollegeCentre for Jewish Education.
The chance of her own congregation came in March, 1990, with the launch of Beit Klal Yisrael, a community open to gay Jews, patrilineal Jews, and those who felt excluded. The community, small and vibrant, claims to have offered a Jewish home to many “outsiders” from mainstream synagogue life.