The spiritual leader of Beth Sholom B’nai Israel reflects on close to four decades of service to the Manchester Jewish community.

By Cindy Mindell

MANCHESTER – According to the Midrash, a person who reaches age 70 has acquired enough wisdom to deserve the same respect as a Torah scholar. For Rabbi Richard Plavin of Beth Sholom B’nai Israel, who will turn 70 on May 15, the milestone also represents a new opportunity, as he prepares to retire from his 37 years on the Manchester pulpit at the end of June.

A New Jersey native, Plavin was raised in the Conservative movement, participating in Israel Pilgrimage in 1964 and serving in leadership positions in USY. Plavin earned his BA from Columbia University while studying at the Jewish Theological Seminary Teachers College (now the Albert A. List College of Jewish Studies). He earned his master’s degree from the seminary in 1971 and was ordained a rabbi there two years later. In 1975, he earned his doctorate in education from Columbia’s Teachers College.

He came to Temple Beth Sholom in 1979 and, 30 years later, shepherded the synagogue through a merger with Congregation B’nai Israel of Rockville.

While in Manchester, Plavin has been active in the Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford and has served as co-chairman of its National and Overseas Allocations Committee. He has also been a board member of the Solomon Schechter Day School of Greater Hartford, the Commission on Jewish Education and Leadership, among other local agencies. He has also served as president of the Connecticut Valley Region of the Rabbinical Assembly, and serves on the Eastern Connecticut Health Network’s Ethics Committee.

Plavin earned a certificate of completion from the Rabbinic Management Institute at the American Jewish University in 2012. He is the director of the Institute for Basic Judaism, an introduction-to-Judaism program for adults that serves the Greater Hartford Conservative congregations.

He and his wife, Lisa, have three grown daughters and seven grandchildren.

Plavin spoke with the Ledger about his nearly 40-year perspective from the Manchester pulpit and reflected on his long and successful career as the community’s spiritual leader.

Q: Were the original reasons you entered the rabbinate still salient for you?

A: Before you become a rabbi, you don’t really know what it’s going to be like to be a rabbi. I had the advantage of a father-in-law who was a pulpit rabbi in New Jersey, from whom I learned and witnessed a great deal. But until you’re in the frying pan, you don’t really know.

Over the years, I had some amazing triumphs and some tremendous challenges and frustrations. I didn’t have the unpleasant politics that I hear some rabbis complain about because I have a lovely community of nice people who have been supportive and I never had that kind of contentiousness here.

I could have said, “I don’t want to accept it because maybe I’m going to go and find a congregation that instead of 300 families is 600 families,” and then go from 600 to 800 and so on, which many rabbis do. But I was happy here and the people were nice and

I made wonderful friends.

Recently, I was on the phone with a former congregant who still lives in Connecticut but outside our catchment area. She and the rest of her family all became Jewish under my tutelage, early on in my career here. They just signed up to come to my retirement event and she told me that they were saying to each other, “Where would we be in this world if we hadn’t met Rabbi Plavin?” And boy, does that do something for you. The family was nominally Catholic on both sides and they lived near the shul and it was convenient for their kids come to our nursery school so I told them, “This is a Jewish nursery school; I hope you’re happy with your kids learning about how to make Chanukah and drawing a seder plate and so on, because that’s what’s going to be happening here.” They said they could live with that and after a while, they wanted more than to just “live with it;” they wanted to really live with it. After a couple of years of studying, we went to the mikveh – mom, dad and four little kids converted to Judaism. I don’t remember who the third rabbi was but Rabbi Stanley Kessler from Beth El Temple in West Hartford was the second.

Q: How have you seen the Conservative movement change over your tenure?

A: I think the heyday of the Conservative movement was during the Baby Boomer period. When I came to the congregation, so many of the members were my age, a few were a little younger, and most were a little older. Now, it’s kind of still the same because the congregation grew older with me. Part of it is a function of where we are – Manchester, Connecticut. Connecticut, for a whole lot of reasons, has had net loss in employment and it’s hard to convince people to move somewhere where the employment possibilities aren’t so good. I know that West Hartford has suffered it too but we’ve suffered it even more. Therefore, while the bulk of the congregation is getting older, there haven’t been as many young people coming in and, over the years, there has been an increase in a tendency toward non-affiliation. The Pew survey will tell you about the “Nones,” who, by definition, don’t join Conservative synagogues. Therefore, it’s an older demographic and the fact that I enjoy doing adult education is great because I get a lot of older people who have time on their hands to study. That’s been wonderful.

Q: What do you see as your rabbinic legacy?

A: I’ve left a legacy here of love of Zion. I’ve done 14 congregational Israel trips, most of them together with my wife. Any time I look out at my congregation, a good 50 percent of the people sitting in front of me have traveled to Israel with me one or more times. We put Israel very front and center in this congregation. For example, next Thursday night, we’re having a big Yom Ha’atzmaut celebration. We don’t move it to the nearest Sunday, like so many places do. You wouldn’t move Pesach to the nearest Sunday. I have always promoted Yom Ha’atzmaut as a religious holiday, with [the recitation of the prayer] Hallel: the same passion that we say for the miracle of going out of Egypt we say for the miracle of the reestablishment of the modern state of Israel and its survival.

I advertised the 2014 congregational trip as the last one. Knowing that, by the summer of 2016, I would not be the rabbi anymore, I didn’t think it was fair to step on anyone’s toes. It’s become harder to recruit for trips over the years, but not because of disaffection for Israel or the lack of passion for Israel among more and more Jews. Airfare and hotels have gotten out of sight and, where I could do a two-week trip years ago for $2,000, now it’s going to be $5,000 or $6,000. So obviously it’s harder to recruit and it has absolutely nothing to do with whether there are settlements or territories or intifadas, because we did a trip during the Second Intifada.

I helped to create a warm, supportive community where people who chose to become involved could really feel it could be a home for them, a place where things like professional status or money or what kind of car you drive has never made a difference. It is a very diverse community with people of all economic backgrounds, where a lot of people who are Jews by choice are very involved, and varying ethnicities and gender preferences.

I created a chevra kadisha in the community. We didn’t have one; people would just go to a local funeral home and they would arrange for the tahara, but we created both a men’s and a women’s chevra kadisha and we always do the tahara for our members.

Our endowment fund grew significantly over the years of my tenure. When I began, we had less than $100,000 and now we have over $2 million.

Q: You also presided over the merger of two shul. What was that like and how has it worked out?

A: The 2009 merger of Temple Beth Sholom and Congregation B’nai Israel was a wonderful win-win situation for both communities. Membership in Congregation B’nai Israel had dwindled over the years, Rockville being a farther-away community, and it was becoming increasingly difficult for the congregation to support a synagogue and rabbi. The number of children in their religious school dwindled to a point where it made sense for them to look for another synagogue to which to send their kids. We invited them to send their kids – only half a dozen – to our religious school at the member prices and that was a boon to our school just in terms of having more kids in a class. Then we pursued talks with them on the possibility of having a merged congregation and over the course of two years of discussion, we came to the conclusion of merger. What made it somewhat easier was that, at that point, they didn’t have a rabbi anymore. For the previous couple of years, they had been hiring weekend rabbis. So, it wasn’t an issue of which rabbi would be the surviving rabbi of the new congregation. It worked out very felicitously, especially because a church group came forward and made an offer to buy their synagogue building before they even got it on the market.

Q: What’s next for you?

A: I have shelves of books that I’ve always said I want to read when I retire, including classic Jewish texts. I hope to establish some chavrutot (learning groups) in the area. I’ve always had to push and scrimp to get in an appropriate amount of gym time because it’s always come second to other emergencies and I’m hoping that I’ll be able to do my gym time a little more regularly and consistently. For the last several years, I have been running the Institute for Basic Judaism and will continue doing that.

I would like to do other teaching and am exploring other areas. Adult education has always been a highlight of what I do, along with conversion work. We intend to continue living here: we love the community; we have a beautiful house and many good friends.

I will be transitioning to be rabbi emeritus of BSBI. I had an excellent model for how to carry out that role in my predecessor, Rabbi Leon Wind z”l. He was an exceptional mentsch and I look forward to having as good a relationship with my successor as Rabbi Wind had with me.

Q: Your three daughters grew up here. Tell us about your children.

A: When I came to Manchester, I had two little girls and my wife was nine months pregnant. So, when we came, our kids were six, four and newborn. Now, we have seven grandchildren ranging from age six to almost 16.

My oldest daughter, Aviva Lebson, lives with her husband, Cory, in Silver Spring, Md. and they have three girls, Eliana, Talia, and Nava. My middle girl is Ariel Dubrowin, married to Shlomo Dubrowin, and they have one son, Rafi, and they live in Neve Daniel, in Gush Etzion, south of Jerusalem. My youngest daughter is Ilana Bernstein, married to Steven Bernstein. The two of them were recently honored as the Young Leadership couple by the Bess and Paul Sigel Hebrew Academy at their annual dinner. They have three boys, Yishaya, Moshe, and Ezra.

My wife Lisa has always been my partner in all I do here in Manchester. As the daughter of a prominent Conservative rabbi, Rabbi Yeshaia Schnitzer, and growing up in a home where her mom, Hilde Schnitzer, was a model rebbitzin, she has taught me over the years many important lessons. I have to credit her with whatever success I have had in the rabbinate here.

The Plavins will be honored at Beth Sholom B’nai Israel on Friday, June 3 and Shabbat, June 4. Info: myshul.org/(860) 643-9563.

CAP: Rabbi Richard and Lisa Plavin