“I’m a keeper of people’s stories,” said Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt, co-senior rabbi at Adas Israel Congregation in Washington, D.C.
Holtzblatt has been collecting those stories since her first week at rabbinical school in 2001, becoming one of the most accomplished area rabbis as she’s grown alongside the Adas Israel community over the last 13 years.
Holtzblatt’s future as a rabbi was foreshadowed during her time at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, where she picked Second Temple Judaism as her focus area, the equivalent of a major at the school.
“[It] sounds crazy,” Holtzblatt said with a laugh. “Because who focuses on that? But I was fascinated by that period because there [was] a lot that’s similar to the 20th century. Just in terms of different sects within Judaism developing different ways of reading the text and living their lives.”
Her fascination with Judaism deepened as she went through college, and after spending her junior year at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, she realized that she needed to go back to Israel.
Holtzblatt made it back after graduating, studying Talmud for the first time at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, falling in love with Jewish text and tradition.
“I was living in Jerusalem, and I was living according to the Jewish calendar, primarily. And I remember thinking I wasn’t ready yet to apply to rabbinical school, but I thought to myself, this is how I want to live the rest of my life. This calendar is my calendar. These people were always my people, but the text was alive for me in such a different way,”
Holtzblatt said.
After a couple years of study, Holtzblatt moved back to New York to study at the Jewish Theological Seminary in a five-year rabbinical program. She was immediately tossed into the real world of pastoral work when two planes hit the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001, her first week of school.
Holtzblatt said she went with roommates to the site of the towers and spoke with firefighters.
“It really was this very intense time, also to be in rabbinical school, because here we were studying about ancient traditions that help with life, and then looking out into the world, a world that none of us really could recognize,” Holtzblatt said. “The whole thing really kind of encased my whole experience of rabbinical school.”
Holtzblatt was ordained in 2006 and joined Adas Israel in 2011 as director of lifelong learning, working her way up to associate rabbi in 2015, and then taking over for former Senior Rabbi Gil Steinlauf when he stepped down in 2017.
That role was the beginning of a unique but successful partnership with Rabbi Aaron Alexander, the other half of the senior rabbi team.
“When Gil told us he was leaving, the two of us really enjoyed working together, and we thought, let’s see if we could do this in partnership,” Holtzblatt said. “Ever since the two of us have been co-rabbis, we’re the first Conservative rabbis in the country to be doing this senior partnership, which has been really awesome.”
Holtzblatt and Alexander have reshaped Adas Israel with various programs and revitalized initiatives that fit the needs of a congregation with around 1,900 member families.
According to Adas Israel’s website, Holtzblatt has helped revitalize the Hesed program, which offers a freezer with cooked meals for people in need, organizes visits to the sick or elderly and coordinates phone calls to senior community members over 80.
She also co-founded the Jewish adult education program MakomDC and directs the Jewish Mindfulness Center of Washington.
But Holtzblatt still finds the interpersonal connections to be the most meaningful part of her job.
She said families are going through monumental lifecycle events that she’s been part of the whole way. The child whose baby naming she conducted in 2011 is now old enough for a bat mitzvah.
Holtzblatt said one of the biggest honors she’s received as a rabbi was the chance to lead the funeral of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
“I became, I would say, like a Jewish clerk to her,” Holtzblatt said, having been introduced to Ginsburg through her husband, a former law clerk for the justice.
“The Justice had asked that I do her funeral, and I would say it was the honor of a lifetime. There was no template for what to do, because a Jewish justice had never had a ceremony in the court before,” Holtzblatt said. “I knew how important Hebrew and the Jewish tradition was to the Justice, and so that was how I built what I did at the Supreme Court itself.”
Holtzblatt reflected that a benefit of growing as a rabbi alongside the Adas Israel community is that they push each other to grow.
“I hope that we always have that anchor, that we are so deeply embedded in the tradition, but at the same time that we stay cutting-edge, that we are thinking about where people are spiritually in the world in the 21st century, what they’re seeking, what they’re looking for, how to help them find a home here, how to bring down the barriers,”
Holtzblatt said.
But at the end of the day, the rabbi still finds her passion in being involved in the daily lives of people who need her, even after she leaves the building for the night. Spiritual work always comes back to those individual stories she cherishes.
“I just find the people’s stories to be incredibly holy, and to be a witness and to be a story keeper is one of the things that I love most about this,” Holtzblatt said.
