A leading rabbi made waves this Yom Kippur when he was asked to lead services on a cruise ship.

Rabbi Jonathan Romain, who recently retired from Maidenhead Synagogue and is now convenor of the Reform Beth Din, was invited to be a “cruise rabbi” on a trip to Greece, Italy, Croatia and Montenegro.

He told the JC: "You might think that Jews who go away for the High Holy Days are not particularly religious, but actually they still feel the call of the shofar at this time of year. It just so happens that they are on a boat at the time.”

Rabbi Romain said that the small onboard congregation came from Reform, Conservative and Orthodox synagogues, “but we blended the different traditions together to create Ocean Judaism. What was very heart-warming was how the Jews on board who had never met each other before quickly became a pop-up community...our Jewish antennae recognised each other as fellow kinsmen.”

On a personal note, Rabbi Romain said it had also felt “very strange, both being away from my family and not with my former community at Maidenhead for the first time in 44 years, which has certainly become my extended family”.

Unusually, the floating congregation started the Day of Atonement in one country and ended in another, with Kol Nidre in Croatia and the Yom Kippur service in Montenegro.

Seeing the sea through the windows during the sermon provided “a great visual aid”, said Rabbi Romain, especially “for a line about ‘life flowing by’ on Kol Nidre”.

"On Yom Kippur, I referred to Jonah and how, like us, he boarded a ship and set sail, but, unlike us, he thought God was territorial and limited to the land of Israel, whereas we recognise that God is everywhere and how our Jewishness accompanies us wherever we are, even at sea.”

The 10-day cruise, which set off shortly after Rosh Hashanah from Piraeus in Greece, stopped at various ports in the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas, including Ancona, Dubrovnik,Venice and Split, before returning to Piraeus. 

During the trip, he was also tasked entertaining the other passengers with a talk entitled Confessions of a Rabbi on his experiences of dealing with funerals that have gone wrong, weddings “that have been hijacked” and the roller-coaster of traumas and crises a congregational rabbis can face.

As for his personal highlight, Rabbi Romain said: “What was astonishing was that just when we were about to blow the shofar, the ship's horn sounded - what a coincidence....or maybe the captain knew!"