Elana Kanter

Rabbi Elana Kanter first absorbed her passion for Judaism from her parents, Rabbi Shamai Kanter, a congregational rabbi and scholar, and Jeannette Kanter, a social worker and advocate for the hearing impaired. Her formal Jewish education began at the Solomon Schechter School of Boston during the school’s early years. She describes her learning there as a “privilege.” She notes that thirty years later, five classmates from her kindergarten class are still in touch with one another because the power of the educational experience, of Torah study, “made us into a small community: a community of learners whose bonds were too strong for time and geographic distance to break.” While an under· graduate at Barnard College in New York City, Rabbi Kanter attended the morning minyan at the neighboring Jewish Theological Seminary where debates were taking place on the ordination of women rabbis. When the Seminary’s rabbinical school opened its doors to women in 1984, she joined the first group of women to study for the Conservative rabbinate. She spent a summer during rabbinical school as an intern chaplain at New York’s renowned Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. There she learned from her mentor and teacher, Rabbi Pesach Krauss, the “Aleph” and the “Tav” of her vision of Jewish education: “as human beings, we are created in the image of God. A teacher should try in a normal-life situation to do what the chaplain does in crisis: to help people understand what it means to be in the image of God.”

After her ordination in 1989, Rabbi Kanter taught at the Abraham Joshua Heschel Day School in New York City. She subsequently served as Judaic Studies Coordinator of the Epstein School in Atlanta, Georgia, and, later, as the Assistant Director of the Alperin Schechter Day School in Providence, Rhode Island. Rabbi Kanter and her family moved to Birmingham, Alabama, in 1993. There she taught for four years at the N.E. Miles Jewish Day School. In the spring of 1996 Rabbi Kanter helped to create and became the director of the Birmingham community’s Institute for Jewish Community Leadership, an intensive course of Jewish study for lay leaders and professionals. She also serves as the Associate Rabbi for Education at Temple Beth-El, the Conservative synagogue in Birmingham.