Rabbi Elizabeth Goldstein has been searching for the right pulpit for quite a while.

“I’ve had a lifelong dream to find the right congregation and to really serve like a multi-generational community,” she said, “and to take the skills from my teaching and to be more engaged in Torah and Torah study and Torah teaching.”

Dreams do come true – Rabbi Goldstein is the new Rabbi at Portland’s Congregation Shir Tikvah, succeeding retiring  Rabbi Ariel Stone, the congregation's first rabbi..

Rabbi Goldstein comes to Portland from Spokane, Wash., where she has been teaching at Gonzaga University for the past 15 years since receiving her doctorate in Ancient Jewish History from the University of California, San Diego. She will continue teaching at Gonzaga for the next two academic years, splitting her time between Spokane and Portland during that stretch.

While she has not previously held a full-time congregational post, Rabbi Goldstein has supported and led services on a periodic basis for congregations in Richland and Pullman, Wash. and in Moscow, Idaho. She’s also been instrumental in supporting Jewish student life at Gonzaga – helping many of her students who are experiencing some of the same transitions she experienced moving to Spokane, which is home to a very small Jewish community, and to Gonzaga, a Jesuit-run institution. Rabbi Goldstein led fundraising efforts to acquire a sefer torah and worked to secure a Jewish sacred space for student use in College Hall, adjacent to the main campus chapel. She recalls talking to students who, even having attended Jesuit-run private high schools, were not prepared for the Catholic culture they found at Gonzaga.

“I basically built like a JSU,” Rabbi Goldstein explained. “We built High Holidays and Jewish programming and a Jewish Culture Club. I really spent a lot of my time not publishing and building a Jewish student life community on the Gonzaga campus.”

Rabbi Goldstein’s journey in the rabbinate began following her undergraduate work at Dartmouth College – after a fellowship at the Pardes Institute for Jewish Studies, she enrolled at the Jewish Theological Seminary. After completing a chaplaincy program at hospitals in San Francisco, she and her partner, later wife, left JTS for Hebrew Union College in New York.

“Those were the years where you couldn’t be openly gay at the Jewish Theological Seminary,” Rabbi Goldstein said. “I thought that if I stayed the Jewish Theological Seminary, I would be a very angry 27-year-old.”

By the time she was ordained, Rabbi Goldstein had already been taking graduate courses in Jewish texts and ancient Israel from New York University, just across the street from HUC’s campus, and decided to continue in academia. She and her wife relocated to San Diego, where she began pursuing her doctorate – punctuated by having two sets of twins. Following graduation, she began as an Assistant Professor at Gonzaga, being promoted to Associate Professor in 2017. She’s also taught for ALEPH Ordination Program, which trains Jewish Renewal rabbis. She’s been on the lookout for the right congregation – growing up in a non-affiliated but Conservative-leaning synagogue and attending an Orthodox day school but feeling attached to the social justice emphasis of the Reform movement, she was looking for a community that prioritized Torah study and traditional ritual forms but had a progressive outlook.

Cometh the hour, cometh the synagogue.

“When I opened up the siddur online for Shir Tikvah, that was like ‘Oh, this is like a traditional davening. (prayer)’ I can get behind this,” Rabbi Goldstein recalled. “Between the robust Torah study and the robust liturgy, and they’re open to adding more Friday evening services, I thought, ‘OK, this is my place;’ and it’s progressive and it’s LGBTQ-friendly.”

Rabbi Goldstein also expressed appreciation for the sharing of space and programming that Shir Tikvah has achieved with the Eastside Jewish Commons – providing community connections outside of services that didn’t exist in Spokane.

“I think that if I was just a person moving to Portland, I’d probably join Shir Tikvah because I love the liturgy, love the Torah study,” she said. “My goals for Shir Tikvah are really to increase the robustness of Torah study and to collaborate with other rabbis and organizations in the area to have more learning opportunities.”

Learn more about Rabbi Goldstein at elizabethwgoldstein.com.