Southgate Reform Synagogue
Having studied geography and economics at LSE with a view to a career in teaching or urban planning, Rabbi Eimer went instead to Leo Baeck College on graduation and was ordained in 1971. He spent three years at the Reform Synagogue in Paris before serving the Radlett and Bushey Reform and West London synagogues. He became rabbi at Southgate in 1977 and heads a team including rabbis Marcia Plumb and Deborah Kahn-Harris. Last year he completed an MA in modern European Jewish history at the University of Sussex. He has been married for more than 30 years to Dee, the head of Enfield Parents and Children, a charity supporting vulnerable children and their families. They have two grown-up children.
Tell us about a typical week at the synagogue
A rabbinic week has its “fixtures” — teaching, services, committee meetings and so on. However, there is little that is “typical”.
Tell us what you like most about your role
It is its very “untypicality” which makes rabbinic work so interesting. You seldom know what questions and issues will arise, what encounters you will have. Involvement in the life-cycle events of members means that, as rabbi, I am with people at moments of both joy and sadness. That is a mixture of mitzvah and great privilege — one of the great consolations of the rabbinate. There is the joy of Jewish study — by oneself, with colleagues, and with members encountering Torah, in all senses of the word, as adults, as they find that it isn’t an inaccessible world for them. Team working with colleagues has also been an enjoyable and revitalising experience. I don’t know why I didn’t do more of it years ago!
What do you do in your time off?
Travel, reading, photography, movies, missing my children.
Define your Judaism
A way of living in the midst of the world and a guide for negotiating my way through it. Wanting to bring the mashiach [now!] but recognising that tikkun olam takes a bit longer and is harder work. Rebuilding, though not recreating, the Jewish world destroyed in the Shoah. A more-than-40-year dialogue with Israel.