A familiar face around Howard County’s Jewish community for decades, Rabbi Joanne Yocheved Heiligman was recently named the new spiritual leader of Columbia’s Bet Chaverim Congregation.
She succeeds Rabbi Kim Blumenthal at Bet Chaverim, a Conservative congregation founded by more than 50 Howard County families in 2013.
“Bet Chaverim Congregation provides a warm, inclusive Jewish experience that enables all members to participate and fulfill their religious and spiritual needs within a dynamic, Conservative-style framework,” reads the synagogue’s mission statement. “Member-driven and committed to participatory Judaism in our services, structure and decision-making, the congregation also plays an active role in the local Jewish community.”
A Columbia resident who grew up in Pittsburgh, Rabbi Heiligman started at Bet Chaverim on Monday ,July 10.
“Rabbi Heiligman is a perfect fit for Bet Chaverim,” said congregational president Mark Schmall. “She embodies a remarkable blend of congregational and community leadership, engagement and scholarship, which our members greatly appreciate. We especially look forward to her leadership at this year’s High Holiday services.”
Rabbi Heiligman will lead Bet Chaverim’s Shabbat and holiday services, as well as provide pastoral counseling and Jewish enrichment and educational experiences.
“I greatly enjoy teaching Jews of all ages how Judaism can help them find a more fulfilling spiritual life,” she said in a statement.
For 17 years, Rabbi Heiligman served in the pulpit at Columbia’s Congregation Shalom Aleichem and for several terms on the board of the Jewish Federation of Howard County. She is a member of the Howard County and Baltimore boards of rabbis, as well as the Rabbinic Partnership for Jewish Peoplehood. She was a visiting chaplain in the federal prison system and at a VA nursing home.
Rabbi Heiligman wrote a chapter for the 2008 book “The Women’s Haftarah Commentary” (Jewish Lights), and has authored articles and spoken about such issues as including special needs children in Jewish communal life and Jewish sexual ethics.
In addition, Rabbi Heiligman is an acclaimed Jewish artist whose biblically themed quilts and multi-media art have been exhibited in the Ratner Museum in Bethesda, the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore and the Hoffberger Gallery at Baltimore Hebrew Congregation.
“I draw on my rabbinic knowledge to enrich my work so that my art expresses several levels of meaning, from the plain meaning to traditional interpretations of Biblical texts, to my own serious or whimsical perspective,” she wrote in an artist’s statement. “I hope that my work will encourage people to see the world in a new light, to fire the imagination about how life, art, spirit and intellect can illumine each other.”
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