In Jewish tradition, 70 signifies fullness (seiva) of years, making it an appropriate age for Rabbi Prof. David Golinkin to retire as president of The Schechter Institutes Inc., the parent organization of four nonprofit academic, educational, and cultural programs advancing pluralistic Judaism in Israel.
Seventy also signifies the number of “faces” or facets through which the Torah can be understood and interpreted. Golinkin – who made aliyah 53 years ago – has no intention of retiring from that pursuit.
“I said to one of my children when I turned 70 in June, ‘I still feel like I’m 24,’ the age when I became a father,” he related with a smile.
Chalk it up to his vegetarian diet or his active intellectual and physical lifestyle, or maybe both. Clearly, this new pensioner is approaching the next stage of life with vigor.
Our interview took place in his book-lined office in the Harvey L. Miller Family Library and Administrative Building on the Schechter Institutes campus in Jerusalem. The original structure, recently renovated, opened in 1962 behind the land that would later house the Israel Museum.
With his fundraising and administrative responsibilities transferred in July to his successor, Rabbi Matt Berkowitz, Golinkin can now devote more time to the project for which he is best known in the worldwide Conservative/Masorti movement: writing responsa – authoritative rulings that answer questions or conundrums in the application of Jewish law to new situations.
And he will continue teaching at the Schechter Rabbinical Seminary and the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies, a graduate school for educators and communal workers, which he co-founded in 1990. SIJS offers 11 areas of specialization ranging from Bible to hospital chaplaincy.
On September 10, the Schechter Institutes honored Golinkin with a reception and the launch of a 38-article tribute volume cleverly titled Shir Ha-ma’alot L’David, the introductory phrase of four psalms written by his ancient namesake.
Honoring a lifetime of achievements
Born and raised in Arlington, Virginia, into a rabbinic family, Golinkin moved to Jerusalem in 1972 at the age of 17.
After completing his undergraduate degree at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he spent four years in New York and two in Israel studying toward rabbinic ordination and master’s and PhD degrees at the Jewish Theological Seminary. He has since written or edited 67 books.
Golinkin noted that during his tenure as president of Schechter Institutes, he oversaw the construction or renovation of Schechter campuses in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Kyiv.
The Jerusalem Post named him one of the 50 most influential Jews in the world in 2014. Nefesh B’Nefesh honored him with the 2022 Sylvan Adams Bonei Zion Prize for his contributions to Israeli society in the field of education.
Golinkin lives in Jerusalem with his wife of 19 years, Dr. Dory Rotnemer. He has three children from a previous marriage, and she has four; between them, they have 21 grandchildren.
In a sense, the alumni of the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies and all 114 rabbis ordained by the Schechter seminary over the past 45 years are also his children. He expresses pride in their accomplishments.
“We have over 2,000 graduates of our MA program, each of whom has a particular sphere of influence in the State of Israel, whether it’s leading a matnas [community center] in Shlomi up north, a school in Hadera, or a school district in the Negev. They influence hundreds of thousands of people every week.”
Goal: Transform the State of Israel
“The purpose of the Schechter Institutes is to transform the State of Israel through pluralistic Jewish education,” Golinkin explained.
“The problem is that most Israelis have not received a Jewish education, whether they are Sabras or among the 1.3 million immigrants from the former Soviet Union.”
Golinkin said that experience has taught him that the main “enemy” of Judaism in the Jewish state is not the religious establishment but rather ignorance bred by the secularism on which the state was founded. And most secular Israelis do not connect to Judaism through synagogues.
“You can’t simply transport the American model of the ‘synagogue center’ to Israel because Israelis aren’t looking for ‘the shul with the school and the pool.’ If we want to bring pluralistic Judaism to Israelis, it’s important to have Masorti synagogues but it’s not enough. The main way to reach Israelis is through other avenues such as the school system, outreach centers, and the MA program,” Golinkin said.
“The solution is to bring pluralistic Jewish education to as many people as possible, on all different age levels and in all the different strata of Israeli society. We have to go to people where they are.”
Meeting people where they are
That’s why the Schechter Institutes also encompass the TALI Center Educating for Jewish Pluralism (there are 72 public TALI elementary schools, plus 1,000 preschools using TALI material in Israel alone); and Midreshet Schechter outreach hubs, which include the Neve Schechter Center for Contemporary Jewish Culture in Tel Aviv, satellite programs in eight other Israeli cities, and four sites in Ukraine.
All together, 125,000 people take part in Schechter Institutes’ programs.
A look at the numbers shows how these initiatives have grown.
In 1990, when Golinkin became Schechter’s first full-time professor, the student population on the Jerusalem campus numbered about 30. Today, it’s 968: 313 in the graduate school; 350 in adult-ed programs; 155 in the rabbinical school; and 150 in certificate programs launched after the Oct. 7 war to meet an urgent demand for training in trauma care, including bibliotherapy and psychodrama.
More than 65,000 Israeli children are enrolled in TALI schools, and 9,000 educators use TALI digital materials monthly. TALI websites had 400,000 unique users last year. The project’s bilingual Friends Across the Sea curriculum expands the project’s influence to include children in other countries learning with Israeli peers.
Neve Schechter, opened in 2012 in Tel Aviv’s Neve Tzedek neighborhood, houses a Jewish art gallery, and offers Jewish music concerts, weekly adult-education classes, and programs for b’nai mitzvah, of which there were 117 last year. Some 50,000 people attended programs there last year.
“Tel Aviv is the most secular city in Israel. If we’d simply opened a synagogue in Tel Aviv, we would not have reached that population,” Golinkin pointed out.
“After the war started, we opened a beit midrash for Russian and Ukrainian immigrant artists at Neve Schechter. There are now three such groups. These are people who never studied anything about Judaism before,” he added.
For 34 years, Midreshet Schechter has been operating a school and a synagogue in each of the four Ukrainian cities. A summer camp, modeled on the impactful Camp Ramah network in North America, now has 220 children and staff.
“It’s a full-service network running all year long in partnership with Masorti Olami,” said Golinkin,” who also is the lay chairman of Midreshet Schechter. Participation is growing, despite many Ukrainian Jews fleeing the war-torn country.
“Before the war began in Ukraine, we had 200 people at our communal Passover Seders in these four locations. In 2024, we had 540 people, and in 2025 we had 690 people,” said Golinkin. Last year, Midreshet Schechter published a unique Ukrainian-Hebrew siddur for children.
Assessing the impact of all these initiatives, Golinkin said, “There are still millions of people we need to reach, but we’ve succeeded way beyond my dreams.”
The next stage
In addition to writing responsa, teaching master’s and rabbinical students, and running Schechter Institutes’ programs, including the Midrash Project, which Golinkin launched in 2007 to publish critical editions of midrashim (“We’ve published six volumes, and 10 more are in the pipeline”), Golinkin looks forward to having more time to indulge his passion for meaningful theater.
“I’m an actor. I appear in one play every year in Jerusalem, usually at the Khan Theater,” he said.
His involvement began in commemoration of his father, Ukrainian-born Rabbi Noah Golinkin, who died in February 2003. The elder Golinkin and two other rabbinical students at the Jewish Theological Seminary started a grassroots protest organization on behalf of endangered European Jews in 1942.
“They organized prayer services and rallies at synagogues and churches across the United States,” said Golinkin. He wrote a book about this effort, The Student Struggle Against the Holocaust, with Holocaust scholar Rafael Medoff.
Medoff also has written about the better-known Bergson Group led by Hillel Kook (aka Peter Bergson), which, like Noah Golinkin’s group, vehemently rejected the “just be quiet and trust President Roosevelt” approach of Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, then-president of the World Jewish Congress.
“There’s a play about the Bergson Group called The Accomplices. When it was first staged in Jerusalem in 2009, I got the role of Stephen S. Wise – the one my father was opposed to.” Golinkin has since reprised this role and will again in December.
“I’ll also be in Copenhagen next spring, a Tony Award-winning play about a secret meeting between nuclear physicists Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr that took place in 1941 after the Nazis had occupied Denmark. We don’t know exactly what was discussed at that meeting, but the play imagines it as a fascinating discussion of moral issues around creating a bomb and helping the Nazis.”
Examining moral issues through the lens of practical Halacha is, after all, at the heart of David Golinkin’s contribution to pluralistic Judaism throughout his working career.
‘Modern science in a systematic fashion’
Rabbi Prof. David Golinkin has researched and written approximately 1,000 responsa, of which more than 200 have been published in Hebrew and/or English, in 16 volumes. He writes an average of 35 per year and leads a responsa workshop for Schechter Institute rabbinical students.
“I started publishing responsa in 1985 and didn’t know it would become such a central focus of my life,” he said.
“These responsa deal with everyday topics such as prayer, Shabbat, holidays, kashrut, conversion, and mourning, as well as ethical or esoteric topics such as infanticide, sex-change operations, space travel, parents with Alzheimer’s, and telling the truth to terminal patients.”
Each responsum requires a deep dive into the pertinent legal and factual issues from ancient and modern sources, looking for previous responsa on similar issues from Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform rabbis, and often consultations with experts as well.
“I utilize modern science in a systematic fashion,” he said. “If I write on a medical issue, I don’t only rely on the Talmudic or halachic texts but first try to learn all the medical facts. For example, when I published a responsum on body piercing, I first read all I could at Hadassah’s medical library about medical dangers involved in piercing ears and other parts of the body.”
This can be time-consuming. However, “sometimes you’re asked a difficult moral question, and the rabbi or layperson needs an answer very quickly,” he added, recalling conundrums posed by soldiers on the battlefield or by mourners sitting shiva.
He is collecting articles relating to Jewish law and artificial intelligence, anticipating questions on the widespread use of AI.
“I find the phenomenon scary,” he admitted. “We frequently invent technology before we figure out what to do with it. Cloning humans is a similar topic, which I’ve written about. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it. We have to be very, very careful; otherwise, we can destroy our planet.”