a rabbi who rides the elevators

Rabbi Joy Levitt’s favorite part of her job as executive director of the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan is riding the elevators. “We have so many people and [the elevators] take forever to come and they’re very crowded,” she said. “Everybody’s coming in for their own unique reason, and yet there we all are on the elevator holding the door for one another, complaining about the weather and feeling a little less alone.” Levitt herself is part of the draw for the center’s thousands of daily visitors.

Levitt’s strong relationship with the Jewish faith began during her childhood on Long Island, where her family was active in the local synagogue. She graduated from Barnard College in 1975 and received a master’s degree from New York University, followed by a rabbinical degree. She was a rabbi at two congregations in Montclair, New Jersey and in Roslyn Heights, Long Island for about 20 years before deciding she wanted to work “outside of a synagogue setting.” Conveniently, the global concept that resulted in the creation of more than 1,100 Jewish Community Centers worldwide was being formed around the same time. ((with one in NY))“There were six people on staff,” Levitt said of the Manhattan center’s humble beginnings. “We rented space at the Guild for the Blind.” The JCC’s current location at West 76th Street and Amsterdam Avenue opened in 2002, and Levitt will soon celebrate her 20th anniversary with the center.

In 2010 and 2011, Levitt was included on Newsweek’s list of the country’s 50 most influential rabbis, which praised her “demandingly inventive programming” and for spending her sabbatical writing “a manifesto on reimagining Jewish education for children.” In her own life, Levitt’s inspirations have been her childhood rabbi, who was a civil rights activist, and former political leader Ruth Messinger. “I was really attracted to the idea of serving a community with a certain set of values that could make positive change in the world,” she said. “That’s what I thought rabbis did. Right now I would say that I’m absorbed by the preciousness of our democracy.”

Few places could have been more receptive to Levitt’s ideas than the Upper West Side. Levitt said the neighborhood has special characteristics that make it feel “like a village,” adding that the JCC tries to foster that sense of closeness. The diversity of the area, Levitt said, is a strength that she looks for ways to celebrate.