 David Mitchell is our second Rabbi. Ordained in July 2009, David has been with us since July 2006 when he was appointed as our Community Student Rabbi to support Rabbi Paul and develop our Youth and family provision.
As a member of our Rabbinic Team, David is involved in all aspects of synagogue life, especially leading services, adult education, pastoral work, and officiating at life-cycle events. David continues to coordinate our youth provision and to develop our student and young adult work. David is Headteacher of our Cheder, supports our Youth Clubs, and has introduced a variety of exciting new ventures including a 21st Century Cheder curriculum, training for our teenage leaders, numerous residential weekends, and teenage educational trips to Amsterdam and New York. In this capacity David sees his goal as “ensuring that at RBRS we positively increase every young person’s Jewish identity through an array of fun, challenging and stimulating programmes, services and experiences.”
To contact Rabbi David Mitchell click here.
David grew up in a Modern Orthodox home and attended Orthodox Jewish day schools. Although he often questioned as a teenager, it was only during his student days at Oxford University that he was first exposed to Progressive Judaism and to some inspirational Progressive Rabbis. Not long after David had started to explore the ideology and liturgy of Reform Judaism he knew that he had found his true Jewish home. Coincidentally, he attended his first Reform High Holy Days services at RBRS. A few years later David revisited his childhood dream of becoming a Rabbi. He applied to the Rabbinic training programme at Leo Baeck College where he had previously studied for his MA in Jewish Education. David’s first sermon was delivered at RBRS when he visited us as part of Leo Baeck College’s outreach weekend. He returned the following year to shadow Rabbi Paul and shortly after that successfully applied to work for us as our Community Student Rabbi. As part of his Rabbinic studies David undertook an MA in Hebrew and Jewish Studies where he gained a distinction for his Rabbinic dissertation on sexual violence against men in the Bible.
As an educator David has worked with various Religion Schools and Chadarim for over 15 years and has held several positions including Director of Education & Youth for Finchley Reform Synagogue and Southern Education Fieldworker for the Union of Jewish Students. This has given him a great deal of enthusiasm, plenty of material for sermons, and a serious caffeine addiction!
He is passionate about teenage education, exploring biblical narrative, equality activism, LGBT Interfaith Dialogue and finding ways to make each person feel at home in the Jewish world. David has an MA (Oxon) in Geography and lives in Finchley with his life-partner Ian.
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