Natasha Mann comes across as your typical rabbi, assuming you are accustomed to women in the pulpit.
Warm, confident, and chatty, it is difficult to imagine that she was born into an interfaith family which did not include Judaism.
She happily concedes that it seems “a bit crazy” to not only want to become Jewish, but to go on and train for the rabbinate. In doing so, she has become one of the Masorti movement’s first female ministers.
Rabbi Mann’s mother is English and from a Church of England family. Her father is Indian, and his mother was raised Muslim and his father as a Sikh.
So what was it that drew the 28-year-old to Judaism and the years of study?
“My part of the family wasn’t religious,” she told the JC. “We were used to having all sorts of religions around us but they weren’t really ours. I fell in love with Judaism as a teenager.”
The spark was her great-grandfather’s funeral, when there was mention of some Jewish ancestry.
“I started doing my own research and I fell in love with Jewish practice.”
Her parents assumed it was “a bit of a phase” but it turned out to be far more than that and she went through the conversion process as a teen.
“I suppose it is a strange teenage rebellion,” she reflected, laughing. “I was always interested in ideas and I liked to read a lot. It was a stranger part of the teenage puzzle but I loved Judaism. It is hard to explain as something rational.”
Being Jewish just “clicked. It felt like it was what I was supposed to be doing.
“Converting is about identity shifting and identity building and I was at an age where I was already doing that naturally. I think in ways it was helpful [to convert as a teen] and not as difficult as doing it 10 years later.”
She joined the New London Synagogue in St John’s Wood and was supported through her conversion by Rabbi Jeremy Gordon.
“I would always turn up to synagogue first because I didn’t have a sense that Jews turn up late. The first time it was still locked. I thought: ‘What do I do about this?’”
She was welcomed with open arms. “People would sit next to me and guide me through the service.” And although “friends and family definitely thought it was weird, I was really supported in what I was doing”.
After completing her undergraduate degree in theology at Heythrop College, University of London, Rabbi Mann spent a year in Jerusalem, studying at the Conservative Yeshiva.
She moved to Los Angeles in her early 20s to attend the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies.
During her time in California, she served several West Coast communities, including a stint as kashrut supervisor at the American Jewish University.
Coming back to West Hampstead this year — “my flat is still covered in boxes” — she joined the ministerial team at the New London, alongside her long-term mentor Rabbi Gordon.
She often has Friday night dinner with her mother (her parents are divorced). “Then on Saturday I will walk to see my grandmother. My mother has learnt all the appropriate places to say amen [in prayers]. Mum loves the Kotel more than anyone else. She has a real sense of history.”
But there had been some growing pains. “A lot of Shabbat and kashrut practice is hard to play out among non-Jewish family. But we have got there.”
Deciding on a strand of Judaism had been easy because “I had that sense of tradition and belief of the divinity of Torah.
“I’ve always been a feminist and pro-LGBT and I couldn’t square being in a space where that wasn’t part of the theory.”
Rabbi Mann additionally spends one Shabbat a month at Mosaic Masorti, formerly known as Hatch End Masorti.
She also specialises in youth provision and programming and is involved with Masorti youth movement Noam.
“It could have been easier to have been born Jewish,” she acknowledged. “But I have benefited from knowing what it is like not to have owned a sense of religious tradition and to then feel like you own it.
“I really have a drive to help people, especially young people, to own their tradition and feel like it is theirs. I think that drive is what pushed me towards the rabbinate.”
