This is the first in a series of posts from GCC spotlighting our congregations. For more information, email Lee Chilcote at lee@gcc-ohio.org. For more info about Beth El the Heights, visit their website.

Rabbi Unger, tell me a little bit about your background. 

I graduated from JTS, which is Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. I moved here to Cleveland six and a half years ago. My wife and I are both in our second marriage, and when we were introduced, she’d been living here for 30 years and I’d been in Columbus for quite a while. There was a member of my congregation in Columbus who had moved to Columbus from Cleveland Heights, and he said to me, ‘Hey, I was a member of this congregation, and they’ve been without a rabbi for two and a half years.’ This guy made the connection for me at Beth El The Heights. We decided it was a good thing, and I’ve been here six and a half years now. 

I’m also a certified personal trainer, and I own a personal training business for home senior fitness. We only work with older adults. I have one young client who’s in her late 50s. Everybody else is in their 60s, 70s, 80s. I have a couple clients in their 90s. About half my clients I visit, and then the other half we train online. 

What would you like other people to know about your congregation? 

We’re a small congregation, but people are really close. The congregation is making some good strides. In the last six and a half years, we’ve welcomed a lot of new members who’ve made a huge, huge difference, and we’ve gotten some younger people involved and interested. Just in the last year, we made a partnership with Nariya, which is this service that takes place once a month. It’s a Friday night welcoming the Sabbath service, and one of our members is the guy who’s in charge of it.. But it’s not one of our services. And that’s just because we’re traditional egalitarian, which means we’re very traditional, but men and women participate equally in all our services, which is not over the long course of Jewish history considered to be traditional, but otherwise we’re very traditional. 

What are some ways Beth El The Heights is involved in the community? 

We just concluded a winter clothing drive. We’ve also done food drives and every year we do a diaper drive. If you come by our building, you’ll see that we have a sign out in front of our building that gets updated each week with the number of gun violence deaths, just keeping track throughout the year. So we’ve been involved in some organizations and some activities having to do with sensible gun legislation. And then we have individual members who are involved in all kinds of things. 

Why do you choose to be involved in GCC? 

I think people in our congregation care a lot about social justice and social action, they talk about it a lot, and I think that people write checks. At least, I’d like to hope they write some checks to organizations that help to further Jewish values. But I just don’t think that we’ve gotten involved enough as a congregation, working together to work for social justice. I feel like now is the time for us to do things, and also because of everything that’s going on in the world right now. 

Are there any upcoming events at Beth El The Heights that you’d want to highlight? 

The big thing that we have going on is that we’re in the process of writing a Torah scroll, which is a big deal at any congregation but for a congregation our size, it’s a really big deal. We raised the money, not only for the Torah scroll but also for the person who’s writing it, because there’s a special person who’s trained to write it. We actually happen to have a member of our congregation who was trained to do it, and she’s a rabbi. There have been very, very few Torah scrolls written by women. So we’re super excited about this. We’re actually going to have that on the first Sunday in January. It’s an ongoing thing that’s given some energy to our congregation.