By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
Rabbi Yael Karrie
Before Yael Karrie became Rabbi Yael Karrie, she was a young woman growing up during the 1990s in the Israeli city of Haifa amid a family environment that was unabashedly secular. True, there was a synagogue right below her mother’s house – a Reform congregation, yet – but Yael paid it little mind.
Then came her obligatory IDF service, where she encountered women who’d come from Orthodox backgrounds and who provided something akin to a minor revelation.
“I got to know this beautiful face of Judaism that I didn’t know before,” Karrie recalled. “This was the first milestone in my journey – the one that opened the gate.”
Her “journey” would eventually lead Karrie to embrace Israel’s Movement for Reform and Progressive Judaism, dovetailing with her own imperatives for social action.
As a rabbi and photographer, she’s spent significant time in two of the nation’s most sensitive areas: four years with the Sha’ar HaNegev Regional Council in the nation’s Gaza Envelope, and later as rabbi of the Matte Asher Regional Council in the Western Galilee – the Jewish Federation of Louisville’s Partnership2Gether region.
Rabbi Karrie will travel here next month, spending Jan. 12-14 speaking to small groups around town and an exhibition of her photographs will be featured at the Trager Family JCC. A list of these public sessions can be found at the bottom of this article.
Asked to define herself, Karrie — who spoke via Zoom from her home in Israel’s Kibbutz Rosh HaNikra — paused for a few seconds before answering. “There’s a word that means different things in English and in Hebrew: ‘creator.’ Not in the way God created the world, but to be creative in how to join people together, how to invent events and ceremonies that will answer people’s needs or solving problems.”
Here Karrie hearkened back to her time as rabbi of Sha’ar HaNegev, where she arrived shortly before the November 2013 Gaza conflict between the IDF and armed Palestinian groups.
“I had to think on my feet about how to serve this community in the best way, to calm them and bring them some sort of comfort,” she recalled. “A lot of times, creativity comes with courage — when you know how to be creative and be able to get out of difficult situations.”
It was, despite myriad challenges before her, a period of marvelous possibility.
“I really wanted to be our community rabbi,” Karrie said, adding that “there were a number of positions open, and the movement suggested I try and see if (one) might work for me. There was a rabbi there who led Shabbat services something like once a month, so I joined her.”
Karrie had discovered her special place.
“I just fell in love with the people in Sha’ar HaNegev,” she said. “They’re so sweet and grounded; it’s very peaceful and beautiful. I feel connected to the huge, wide spaces — wheat fields. I was already tired of living in the city, so I just said, ‘Let’s do it.’”
Karrie found the prevailing social structure especially appealing. In a nation where normative Jewish worship is orthodox, Reform Judaism’s egalitarian ethos proved a natural fit.
Her introduction was itself unconventional. “I didn’t (get to) know the Reform movement from Israel,” she said. “I got to know it because I was leading Birthright tours. I remember standing up (near) the Western Wall and telling them: ‘This is the women’s section; this is the men’s section.’ And they were asking, ‘Where is there a place where men and women can pray together?’
That moment was a tipping point. “From then, I started learning more about the Reform movement and saying, ‘This is Judaism I can fit into without compromising the values I was raised in.”
But there was deeper motivation of a highly personal kind: the death of Karrie’s father, who’d been told he had three months to live but who succumbed after only a week.
“After he passed away, I went through the grieving process for the first time in my life with God,” she said. “I didn’t admit to myself that I believed in God until that moment.”
Karrie had recently earned an undergraduate degree in Jewish thought and comparative religion. She remembers saying to herself, “Okay, I’ve studied this and I love it, and now I believe in God. So, what are the nest steps?”
Her initial plan had been to emulate her father, who’d been a university professor. Yet after her jump of faith, “that didn’t work for me anymore — it wasn’t enough.” Instead, barely a year later, she enrolled in the rabbinic program at Hebrew Union College’s Jerusalem campus.
Later, after spending her four years in the Gaza Envelope, Karrie was at something of a crossroads, trying to figure out where her life was headed — or should be headed.
“I think it’s important, once in a while, to go on a long journey and just look for answers — or to have the answers come to you.” With that goal in mind, she embarked on the Camino de Santiago, a storied Christian pilgrimage the winds along routes in Spain, Portugal and France.
“It’s a very spiritual path,” Karrie said. “And although it’s a Christian pilgrimage, there are people from different religions. People say that there’s a river of love flowing below the Camino.”
Love, literally, came her way when she met her future husband while tromping through Portugal. Once in Matte Asher and seeking to be its official regional rabbi, Karrie had to collect at least 250 signatures (she got 320). She now works with 28 of 32 kibbutzim and villages, two of which are made up predominantly of Bedouin Arabs. There is also an Orthodox rabbi, “but does mostly kashrut, weddings and funerals — which I do as well,” though each has their distinctive approach.
October 7 and its aftermath forced Karrie, like many other Western Galilee residents, to evacuate to safer areas in central Israel.
“I was so concerned about the people I served in the Gaza Envelope,” she said. “Some of them I couldn’t reach on the phone, and I heard that the reason was because they were murdered.” Karrie and her family became itinerant Israelis, living in eight successive apartments before returning to Matte Asher.
Those experiences led to one of her signature initiatives: “Reclaiming Red,” spurred by the practice of substituting a woman’s voice declaring adom — Hebrew for the color red — instead of sirens when a rocket attack was imminent.
“They thought that would be more soothing,” Karrie explained. “I said, ‘Red is my favorite color, and I don’t want this to be the connotation of ‘red.’ So I invited my friends on Facebook to send me happy pictures of red things — and it spread, and spread, and spread. It was like an art project.”
So, too, are her photographs. During her Louisville visit she’ll display her detailed images of pomegranates — some ripe and whole, others torn open as though by acts of war.
Karrie has been travelling to the U.S. more frequently, leveraging her Partnership2Gether connections to bolster causes she holds dear. Last year she attended the Austin, Texas Conference of Communities, where one of the attendees was Amy Fouts, who coordinates P2G activities for the Jewish Federation of Louisville.
“I was touched by her stories about being a Rabbi in the Gaza envelope prior to the war and having to be evacuated from her home in the north during the war – having many current and previous “congregants” who wanted/needed her spiritual guidance, while she was also grieving and a trying to understand this new normal,” Fouts said.
“When I was recently in Israel for the P2G Summit, Yael provided me with comfort after hearing a Nova Festival survivor’s testimonial; she encouraged me to befriend the darkness, supported me to feel my feelings, while simultaneously reminding me there is light to also be seen, when I am ready. I am excited for the Louisville community to meet her and experience her calming way to seamlessly weave Jewish values and teachings into modern day lessons.”
Rabbi Karrie’s public events include:
Tuesday, Jan. 13 at 12:45 p.m. at the Trager Family JCC — “With Kind Eyes,” an amateur photography workshop open to all.
Tuesday, Jan. 13 at 6 p.m. at the Trager Family JCC –”Renewal Sound Bath
Wednesday, Jan. 14 at 9:30 and 10:50 a.m. at The Temple – Guest speaker at Temple Scholars adult education classes. RSVP for one of these sessions by going online at thetemplelouky.org/special-class.