Readers of the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent already met Rabbi Jacob Lipkin this summer when he was named the new assistant rabbi of Temple Beth Sholom.

Lipkin succeeded Rabbi Bryan Wexler in that role at the synagogue, which has more than 900 member families.

But that story was about an institution finding a qualified candidate for an important role.

Now it’s time to meet the man who holds the job.

“I had a very strong Jewish upbringing,” Lipkin said.

The rabbi is a first-generation American on his mother’s side. His mother and her family emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States in 1978.

Soviet Jews effectively spent seven decades underground during communist rule in the 20th century, spanning from the 1920s, the period immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution, to the late 1980s, the era of glasnost (openness) under Mikhail Gorbachev.

Lipkin’s family was no different.

His great-grandfather would go off to another room, close the curtain and daven three times a day. To prevent his young daughter from spilling the secret, he told her that “Papa likes to sing.”

“Everything was completely suppressed,” Lipkin said.

So, after they came to the U.S. as part of the Soviet Jewry movement, the rabbi’s family enjoyed their own period of glasnost. They started gathering for Shabbat dinner every Friday night at the family home in a suburb of San Francisco.

Lipkin, his younger brother, parents, maternal grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins all sat in the dining room and ate and talked.

“It’s the highlight of my week. It’s just pure joy, as a kid, to be with my family. I felt very close to them,” Lipkin said. “My family was sort of rediscovering and building Jewish life together.”

The rabbi became the first member of his mother’s family in four generations to have a bar mitzvah.

Lipkin also attended day school, and it was there that he discovered his own interest in Judaism outside of his family’s dining room. A Judaic studies teacher encouraged his interest in Jewish texts. She even set him up with her Chabad rabbi to study more.

During his schooling, the future rabbi learned that Jews read Torah every week. So he asked his parents why they didn’t.

The family belonged to a synagogue, but they never attended services on Saturday morning. That is, until the young scholar convinced them to go.

It became a family ritual, like Shabbat dinner.

“All 10 of us would be in synagogue every week. We’d do Havdalah together,” he said. “I remember as a kid feeling so happy every week to walk in.”

Lipkin knew when he was 8 or 9 that he wanted to become a rabbi, and that was still his plan when he enrolled in Stanford University to pursue his undergraduate degree.

While in college in 2016, he joined the founding staff at Camp Ramah in Northern California, and he learned that he loved playing the role of Jewish educator to campers.

“That sort of solidified it for me,” he said.

Jewish Theological Seminary staff members did recruitment at Ramah for possible rabbinical students. On one of their visits, Lipkin connected with Rabbi Daniel Nevins, then the dean of JTS’ rabbinical school.

The older rabbi told the future rabbi what it would take.

“Learn Hebrew, keep studying Jewish texts, daven and push yourself to be as observant as you can of the Sabbath and kashrut,” Lipkin recalled. “That was excellent advice.”

Lipkin said JTS was harder than Stanford.

“The tension at JTS is that the sorts of things that were the hallmarks of rabbinical study — deep study, time in the beit midrash — are not the things that contemporary rabbis are focused on. Rabbis spend time on life-cycle events and managing organizations,” he said. “I was balancing professional training as a rabbi and community leader and time as a scholar of Jewish texts.” By the time Lipkin met a group of synagogue leaders from Temple Beth Sholom on their visit to JTS, he was starting to understand what it would take.

“Search committees aren’t asking for your knowledge of Jewish texts. They care more about, ‘How is your communication style? How are you pastorally?’” he explained.

When he engaged with those TBS leaders, Lipkin connected with the shul’s senior rabbi, Micah Peltz.

“He made an impression on me,” Peltz told the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent around the time of the new rabbi’s start date. “He was engaging; he was smart.”

Lipkin made the same impression during the interview process with the Cherry Hill synagogue.

“He asked some questions about what we do, our teen education programs and our role in the community. He asked what his role would be here,” Peltz said. “It was impressive how deeply he was thinking about us.”

The young rabbi also passed the test that all rabbinical candidates must during their in-person visit: He really listened to people and learned their names.

“I think he showed a real deep interest in the fleeting time he had over the weekend to learn people’s names, talk to them and follow up with them,” Peltz said.

The assistant rabbi is referring to his first year at TBS as “a listening tour.”

“A large part of my role is to build those intergenerational connections. I see my role as deepening the interconnectedness,” he said. “I teach a 10th grade confirmation class that’s focused on Israel. I’ll spend time at our Early Childhood Education Center. Next week, I’ll teach a course on tzedakah for our older adult group. I’m really doing something for all ages.”

jsaffren@midatlanticmedia.com