Rabbi Deborah Reichmann, as a “rabbi for all life cycle occasions,” takes care to ensure that everyone is included and welcomed, but she didn’t always know that was her calling.
Reichmann, the rabbi and spiritual leader for Interfaith Families Project and member of Congregation Har Shalom in Potomac, started out as a lawyer while parenting two young children.
“It was awful,” Reichmann said. “When you hate your job and you have toddlers, it’s not an easy life.”
Before that career, she had minored in theology at Georgetown University, and her favorite class at Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School, which she attended from first to twelfth grades, was rabbinics, having been fascinated by Jewish history.
Reichmann recalled learning about Rabbi Harold White, the trailblazing Jewish chaplain at Georgetown, as a freshman attending Shabbat dinner. Another participant turned around and asked Reichmann if she knew White. When she said she didn’t, the student whispered, “He does interfaith marriages.”
Doing so was practically unheard of at the time.
“That was actually very shocking, a [Jewish Theological Seminary] rabbi doing that in the ’80s,” Reichmann said. “At school, we were taught that it’s the worst thing you can do. … They were like, ‘Do not date non-Jews; do not marry non-Jews.’ My world was rocked.”
After a decade as a lawyer, Reichmann ran into White at a wedding he was officiating. He remembered her and invited her to his office.
“‘Debbie, come work for me,’” she recalled him saying.
“You don’t need a lawyer,” Reichmann told him.
“‘No, I don’t. But you don’t have to be one either,’” White had said.
“He saw how miserable I was, and then he was very frank,” Reichmann said.
She said White told her about an open entry-level university position that wouldn’t pay as much as her current job, but it was worth considering: “‘You need to for your health; you have to change.’”
“I don’t know how he had that insight with not seeing me for the longest time, but it rang a bell,” Reichmann said. “It made sense.”
Reichmann’s husband agreed: “‘You’re miserable. Do something that makes you less miserable or not miserable at all; it’s not good for the kids.”
“So I took the leap of faith — it’s funny I say that — and went to work at the Georgetown University campus ministry,” she said.
Georgetown’s Campus Ministry is an interfaith space for students, with services for the Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Orthodox Christian and Protestant Christian communities. It has since expanded to include Dharmic religions.
Reichmann described the job as “transformative.” The campus ministry allowed students to not only explore their own religious identities but also others’ identities.
“I took to it like a fish to water,” Reichmann said. “It was definitely the place I needed to be and the type of work I needed to be doing.”
It was there that Reichmann met Jewish students from interfaith families: “They would come to the Jewish faculty and say, ‘I know my grandmother was Jewish or my mom or my dad, but I know nothing about it’ because when the interfaith marriage happened, the Jewish side of the family or the rabbi closed that door and said, ‘You’re cut from the religion.’”
Many Jewish young adults asked her, “Can you teach me about myself?”
“I’m happy to do that, but I sort of felt there was a need for a Jewish rabbi to specifically serve this interfaith community,” Reichmann said.
She took on this role, finding that her rabbinical purpose was to work with interfaith families “without judgment and with no desire to change anyone.” Reichmann completed online rabbinical school with the new Jewish Spiritual Leaders Institute, then left her job at Georgetown to become a rabbi.
“I see it as an underserved and badly served community, being judged by all sorts of people all the time,” Reichmann said. “Interfaith families, even once they’ve gotten married, once they have kids, it’s still really hard for them to sometimes find a place, a community to fit in and find clergy to do all sorts of religious things.”
She said many synagogues and Sunday schools require families to belong to the synagogue and actively practice Judaism at home, which excludes interfaith families. Reichmann also said she has an aunt whose father nearly disowned her after she married a Catholic man.
“All of that kind of pushed me towards this area of wanting to be a positive force for interfaith families, with the underlying thought that by doing that, they were going to keep more connections to Judaism than by saying no and not giving them resources,” she said.
Reichmann serves Jewish, interfaith and multicultural families in planning spiritual events in the Washington, D.C., area.
When meeting with couples before their weddings, Reichmann’s priority is to create a meaningful experience for them. Her secondary goal is to ensure that all of the couple’s guests and family members feel included in the Jewish ceremony.
“To do that, I always translate Hebrew,” she said. “I never assume. Most Jews don’t even know Hebrew; they’re just used to it. I quickly and easily explain the rituals as I’m going through, whether it’s a bar mitzvah or wedding or baby naming.”
She does so for every service she leads, regardless of if the event is all Jewish or interfaith, because she realizes that not everyone attended Jewish day school like she had.
“I get lovely feedback from people who [walk away] know[ing] a little bit more about the prayers and why we do things, to build that Jewish stepping stone for everybody,” Reichmann said.
Her favorite part of her work is the “joy in people’s faces when they get to be with a rabbi or clergy who gets them” and says, “I’m here for you. What can I teach you?”
