When Rabbi Lauren Werber heard that Congregation Beth Adam was searching for a successor to founding Rabbi Robert Barr, who was planning his retirement, she was unsure about applying for the role.
Werber had fond memories of Beth Adam, and always felt a connection to the community. She interned there in 2001 while a student at the Cincinnati campus of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.
Still, for the last 17 years, Werber loved her job serving as senior rabbi at Temple B’nai Abraham in Elyria, near Cleveland. It’s a position she thought she would retire in.
“I sent in my resume [to Beth Adam’s search committee], and I did the first Zoom interview, mostly to rule out the idea of taking a new position, so that I wouldn’t feel like I missed something,” Werber said.
Instead, the opposite happened.
“I got off the interview and told my husband, ‘That didn’t go the way I expected, let’s hope there’s a second interview, and we’ll go from there,’” she said.
Fast forward, and Werber is now the senior rabbi (the congregation calls the position “chief rabbi executive”) of Beth Adam, having started officially in early August.
Beth Adam is full of “people who love where they are, and yet are open to change, who have been welcoming and embracing,” she said.
Barr, meanwhile, has taken emeritus status, though he is still around in a smaller capacity before retirement in June 2025.
“I think this year is helpful to sort of back away, give people a sense of stability, and then slowly disappear, as Voldemort does at the end of the last Harry Potter,” Barr said. “He breaks apart, you know? It’s such a good image.”
Beth Adam is a unique congregation with roots in Humanistic and Reform Judaism (though not officially affiliated with either) that has its own member-developed liturgy and an emphasis on science, philosophy, and scrutinizing the concept of God.
Its sanctuary, for example, features 12 stained glass windows that depict the big bang, evolution, and science, rather than scenes from the Torah, as many other synagogues have. The ner tamid, or eternal flame, at the front of the sanctuary is in the shape of a strand of DNA.
When Werber interned at Beth Adam as a rabbinical student, the congregation’s atmosphere was a breath of fresh air.
“I had never seen my theology expressed religiously, expressed ritually, until Beth Adam,” she said. “Having readings that spoke to what my husband and I both believed was eye opening…that was a really welcome wake up that there’s more than one way to do Jewish, and more than one way to do progressive Jewish.”
Just as impactful was seeing how the congregation actually functioned. Werber interned right as Beth Adam was completing and moving into a new building.
“Learning about how decisions were being made, how the building was structured, how values were put into place in physical space was all really important,” Werber said.
“Working with Rabbi Barr and having a model of a rabbi who worked in cooperation with his community” left a lasting impact, she said. “He also had really healthy boundaries that I hadn’t seen from a rabbi before.”
Working closely with the congregation is something Werber also plans to do. She isn’t coming in to make big changes unilaterally, she said. Much like other members of the changing class of Cincinnati rabbis, Werber is taking it slow on how the congregation might evolve during her tenure.
“This is a congregation that has always been deliberate and thoughtful in the path it takes, and what it does works,” she said. “So I don’t intend to come in and change what’s working.”
Werber has added more music to services, and is looking forward to tackling the ever-present evolution of liturgy and the structure of Beth Adam’s religious school.
She is also simply excited for the day-to-day life of the congregation, and the variety of things that rabbis get to do at work. It’s an eclectic mix of responsibilities that initially inspired Werber to become a rabbi.
“I couldn’t imagine doing just one job for my whole life – and being a rabbi isn’t just one job,” Werber said.
“You’re invited into the most precious and intimate moments of people’s lives in a way that very few people get to be, at the same time as you have this opportunity to do significant social justice work, to teach and learn, and to connect to a heritage,” she said.
“All these things [combine] to feel like you can’t get bored, right?” Werber said. “And if one thing’s not working for you one day, something else is going to be meaningful for you that day.”
Werber also appreciates the unexpected arc of her journey. Not every rabbi gets to intern at, and eventually come back to help lead, the same congregation after 23 years away.
“I’ve walked into synagogues [that didn’t feel like] home, and I’ve walked into synagogues [that felt like] home,” Werber said. “The little, tiny, wonderful synagogue-that-can in Elyria was home the second I walked into it – and the second I came back to Beth Adam, I knew that this was back home as well.”
Barr reflects on unpredictable 44-year career
Barr is “totally confident” that the congregation he founded and led for 44 years is in good hands with Werber.
“The hard part for me is learning not to worry about it,” he said. “I wake up at two in the morning going through every bar and bat mitzvah kid to think about where they’re at in their training.”
Now, perhaps, Barr can let go of that early morning ritual. He is already enjoying the more relaxed position he’s in after taking emeritus status. That comes with a smaller office, fewer responsibilities, the ability to downsize his suit wardrobe, and a more flexible schedule.
“It’s really very liberating,” Barr said. “I was invited to a family event in a different city, and it’s on a Saturday, and I’m going. I usually said no [to invitations like that] because I had Friday services, or I had Sunday morning religious school, so I missed [a lot].”
Barr taking a step back at Beth Adam, and preparing for retirement next year, also means reflecting on a unique career as a rabbi.
“It’s an honor…I’ve come to appreciate it more and more as I’ve gotten older,” he said. “People let you into parts of their lives that they don’t let other people in. And I think there’s a great responsibility that goes along with that, to treat people with dignity.”
Barr grew up at a Conservative synagogue in Detroit, and like many Jews, stopped attending after his bar mitzvah. But in high school, he felt drawn back.
“I wanted to really understand Judaism,” Barr said. “I assumed that there’s got to be something intellectually and philosophically strong if we’ve been around a long time, and I wanted to explore that.”
In time, Barr decided he wanted to be a rabbi. Coming from a Conservative Jewish background, he assumed he would attend the Jewish Theological Seminary and be ordained as a Conservative rabbi.
But his childhood rabbi saw it differently.
“He said, ‘That’s a bad idea,’” recalled Barr. “I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Because you’re not Conservative.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘You don’t believe what I’m teaching you’…so that was an awakening for me.”
Barr continued to study with different rabbis in the Detroit area while going to college – which is how he met Rabbi Sherwin Wine, the HUC-JIR ordained rabbi who founded the Humanistic Judaism movement. Wine had started his own congregation, declared himself an atheist, cut mention of God out of services, and retooled Jewish ritual – all interesting ideas to Barr.
Eventually, he decided to attend HUC-JIR in Cincinnati, and was recommended both by his childhood rabbi and Rabbi Wine.
“I was recommended by a Conservative rabbi and an HUC-trained rabbi who started Humanistic Judaism – so I went to HUC with this sort of strange pedigree,” Barr said.
“Back then, Cincinnati was considered the liberal of the three campuses,” he said. “I came here not knowing how I would turn out. I felt that it was important to experience and really explore Reform Judaism.”
While a rabbinical student, Barr worked to support a growing network of Humanistic synagogues across North America, and made enough of a name for himself and his ideas among HUC-JIR faculty that some of them refused to sign his ordination certificate.
Toward the end of his time at HUC-JIR, Barr reconnected with a couple that had moved to Cincinnati from Chicago, and was wanting to start a Humanistic synagogue. They decided to give it a try.
“It was sort of a Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, ‘Let’s do a show in the backyard and put up a tent and see if anyone comes,’ kind of thing,” Barr said, referencing a plot point from the movie “Babes in Arms.”
Still a fifth year rabbinical student in 1980, Barr found a receptive community and did Humanistic high holiday services, officially starting Beth Adam in 1981 right after ordination. Not counting Barr and his wife, the congregation had just six members.
Many Cincinnati Jews thought he was crazy to start a new liberal congregation in a place already bursting with Reform synagogues.
One HUC-JIR professor, the day of Barr’s ordination, tried to tell Barr’s wife, “Terry, don’t let him do it, you’re going to be supporting him the rest of your life,” Barr recalled.
But Barr and Beth Adam proved everyone wrong as the congregation carved its own path while steadily growing. In a time when interfaith marriage was still vilified, Barr officiated interfaith weddings. The congregation, even from the start, developed its own liturgy.
Beth Adam was among the first Jewish institutions to take the internet seriously. Barr started a podcast in 2007, and in 2008 the congregation began an initiative called “Our Jewish Community” that managed a forum, rabbi’s blog, and livestream of services.
“We began to develop relationships with people around the world,” as a result of leaning into the internet, Barr said. “It was an attempt to also maintain a relationship with the kids who grew up here, who weren’t going to return to Cincinnati.”
During his tenure, Barr brought to Beth Adam a deep-seated mission to fight against religious extremism. He points to the politics of right-wing evangelical Christians who are against abortion and, in some cases, the right of a woman to vote.
That’s, in part, why Beth Adam puts philosophy, science, and ethics at the center of the congregation, as opposed to God and traditional Jewish practice.
Religion and politics are “about how we shape our society,” Barr said. “It’s about power. It’s about authority. It’s about decision making. It’s about ethics. That’s what I love, because this is what we’re wrestling with, really – not just in congregations, but in America right now.”
That’s also why Barr is adamant that Beth Adam needs to continue to change under Werber’s new leadership, including by throwing out things he did, if necessary.
After all, how can Beth Adam equip its members and their children to face the evolving threat of extremism in the United States, and many other issues, if the congregation doesn’t adapt to the times?
The reality is that “sitting in our religious school are kids who are going to live to the 22nd century,” Barr said. “How are we teaching them to think? They’re going to deal with problems that we cannot fathom.”
While Beth Adam navigates that evolution, Barr is looking forward to his next adventure after retirement – though he still has no idea what to do (if people have ideas, he invites them to email him at [email protected]). In the meantime, he is working on a book about the history of Beth Adam.
“A couple of friends really encouraged me to write it,” Barr said. “They said we did something here that was really unusual. And when you’re in it, you don’t know it.”
Among the details likely to make it into the book: “We created Hanukkah Christmas cards,” Barr said. “We’re probably the only Jewish congregation in the world that has its own Hanukkah Christmas cards.”
Welcome Laura! I remember you well from when my youngest son was in religious school at Beth Adam. And Rabbi Barr, thank you for bringing and growing this congregation here. Mazel Tov on your retirement!!