Meet the Rabbi

Rabbi Lee Levin was born in Queens in 1964 and grew up on Long Island. Most of his adult life, however, has been spent in New England. He attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, from which he graduated in 1986, and subsequently studied economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

It was not until moving to the Boston area in 1993 for a position as an economics professor that Lee Levin began attending synagogue for the first time in his life. Becoming part of a small but intensely friendly, welcoming, and participatory Jewish community in Somerville, Massachusetts, helped inspire Lee to begin a religious journey of Jewish learning and discovery that he expects to continue for the remainder of his days. Perhaps owing to his relatively late introduction to Jewish life or to his initial experience with a small and caring congregation, Lee's attachment to Judaism-including Jewish study, practice, and prayer-has been imbued from the start with a sense of excitement, awe, meaning and fulfillment that still animates his relationship with the Jewish tradition. The desire to devote his life to these pursuits and to act as a facilitator for others who seek to deepen their attachment to Jewish thought, practice, and prayer eventually led Lee to change career paths and enter the rabbinical school of the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he was ordained in May of 2004.

At the shul in Somerville, Massachusetts, where he was first welcomed into Jewish life, Lee Levin met and subsequently married (in November of 1995) Karen Kurlander, a clinical psychologist. Karen and Lee have a son, Jonah (born in February, 1998), and a daughter, Mayan (born in June, 2001). Among those experiences which Rabbi Levin considers the spiritual high points of his life are the first moments he laid eyes upon his son and daughter; the first time he attended services at Congregation B'nai Brith in Somerville; the belated celebration of his bar mitzvah at age 31; and a cross-country motorcycle ride in the summer of 1992.

Rabbi Lee Levin