Synagogues

Interview with Rabbi Menashe Bovit

     Tradition and cowboy boots  

Temple Emanu-El’s new rabbi seeks stability

LEADER: Rabbi Menashe Bovit hopes to last awhile at Reno’s 
Temple Emanu-El.

Susan Skorupa
RENO GAZETTE-JOURNAL
9/22/2003 02:28 pm 

Menashe Bovit bursts into his office. He wears reptile-skin cowboy boots, 
Levis, a white shirt, a cowboy-cut sport jacket, sunglasses and a blue 
yarmulke on his salt-and-pepper hair.

Despite his outer appearance — and a past that includes protests, working 
odd jobs and sleeping in the woods — Bovit says he’s a traditionalist. And 
Reno’s Temple Emanu-El, where he’s the new rabbi, loves tradition. He 
loves Israel, and so does the congregation. Temple members are hungry for 
Torah learning and community, and Bovit teaches that tradition.

“My hope is that I’ll be here for a long time,” said Bovit, 47. “I felt 
this was a good place to settle in.”

A few weeks into his life in Reno, Bovit’s office is about half done. The 
tall bookcases behind his desk are filled, but many shelves on the 
opposite wall are empty. A few books, most with Hebrew titles, are stacked 
on his desk. Leaning in a corner, a black guitar case displays stickers: 
One has an American flag and the legend, “These colors don’t run, never 
will”; another reads “Jewish Life Center.” A mountain bike is propped next 
to an empty aquarium.

After seeing two rabbis come and go since 1997, Bovit’s congregation 
members also hope for a longer stay.

“He’s a very bright man, and he brings a wealth of ideas and energy to the 
synagogue,” said Janet Shapiro, the temple’s executive director. “I look 
forward to working with him.”

Bovit, the son of a Holocaust survivor, grew up in Chicago in a 
traditional Jewish home.

“From a young age, I knew why I had no paternal grandparents,” he said. “I 
grew up proud to be Jewish, but not religiously observant.”

As a teenager, Bovit was involved in the anti-war movement, “at 13 or 14, 
running around the Chicago Civic Center with the police and their tear 
gas,” he said.

After high school, Bovit worked a series of jobs: cab driver, short-order 
cook, motel janitor, bus boy, loading-dock worker, phone salesman and 
camera salesman. At 20, he apprenticed to a commercial artist. 

“Our company designed the box for the John Travolta Saturday Night Fever 
doll,” he said. “That put me over the edge,” he said with a laugh.
So in 1979, Bovit headed west, ending up in Santa Cruz, Calif.
“This was with a dog and a guitar, the whole hippie thing,” Bovit said. “I 
slept in the woods.”

He returned to Chicago to more odd jobs, but soon moved west again.
“At about age 23, I ran out of money and gas in Tucson,” Bovit said.

At the University of Arizona, Bovit finally turned to Judaism. The war in 
Lebanon was heating up in 1982, and there were protests on campus, some of 
them anti-Semitic.

“I wanted to get involved,” Bovit said, “but I did not know anything. I 
started to learn the history and the issues.”
Also at the university, Bovit met Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, a singer and 
storyteller, who became his mentor.

“I had never met a person who loved people more or who knew how to balance 
issues from the heart,” Bovit said. 

Bovit decided to attend yeshiva, a traditional school of Jewish learning. 
Over the next seven years, he attended schools in New York, Los Angeles 
and Jerusalem. He embraced Jewish dietary laws, holiday observances and 
prayers.

“I knew I wanted to be a rabbi,” he said. “It was the answer for my father 
surviving the Holocaust. My job was to be a teacher. My father survived so 
I could bring people back to Judaism and be a guide for those who wanted 
to become Jews.”

While all this was happening, Bovit got married. His son was born while 
the family was in Israel, but the marriage ended in divorce. Bovit 
returned to the United States to Florida, to be near his son, Raphoel, 15, 
who now lives with him. He also began his ordination. Bovit hooked up with 
his mentor Carlebach and was ordained in 1992.

Over the past decade, Bovit spent three years as a rabbi in Connecticut, 
then moved to Long Island, N.Y., then to Indiana. After serving as a 
community rabbi in Florida, he moved to Fort Collins, Colo.

“I was in Fort Collins for two years,” he said. “I was brought there by a 
congregation and was only at that congregation half a year. We had some 
big philosophical differences on issues such as Judaism and the rabbi’s 
role in the congregation.”

After leaving that position, Bovit founded a Jewish Life Center in Fort 
Collins that drew people from as far away as Nebraska and Wyoming, he 
said.

“It was a success from a spiritual standpoint, but not from a financial 
standpoint,” he said.

When the center failed after a year and a half, Bovit decided to find 
another congregation.

He heard about the opening at Temple Emanu-El. The congregation had been 
without a rabbi for some months and had seen two rabbis come and go over 
about five years.

“I did interviews with the committee chairs, with the committees,” Bovit 
said. “I got invited out here, spent time here, went home.”
In the meantime, Bovit was talking to other congregations and doing his 
own evaluations. But from the beginning, Reno and Emanu-El felt good, he 
said.

“We visited in May,” he said. “My son liked Reno and I liked Reno. What 
the congregation has going is what I was looking for.”
The search committee, the board and the congregation all approved him for 
the job.

“They’re trying to establish a culture of stability,” Bovit said of the 
congregation. “I think they feel they’ve found a rabbi who wants to do 
what they want to do.”

Harriet Tomes, the principal of the temple’s Hebrew school, wants Bovit to 
unite the congregation as a community.

“I like him,” she said. “He’s great with children and has a lot of great 
ideas. I’m really excited for the future with him.”

Since the late 1990s, Emanu-El has been the target of several hate crimes, 
including an attempted fire-bombing.

“There are three groups of people we have to deal with, I believe,” Bovit 
said. “Those who are anti-semitic, those who love and embrace the Jews and 
those who are undecided.

“We embrace our friends. We reach out and find common ground and 
friendship with those who are undecided,” he said. “Maybe in the 
interaction of those two groups, we turn the other group around.”

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