July 18, 2011 – Ottawa Jewish Bulletin – Page 13
Rabbi Sender Gordon is Ottawa’s newest mohel By Ilana Belfer When Rabbi Sender Gordon was ordained, he didn’t want to stop learning. “I didn’t just want to be a regular rabbi,” he said. After 10 years abroad, Rabbi Gordon, 23, has returned to his hometown as Ottawa’s newest mohel. While becoming a rabbi was a goal since high school, the decision to be a brit milah (circumcision) practitioner came more gradually. He left Ottawa at 13 to attend the Mesivta of Chicago, a Lubavitch high school for boys. After high school, he pursued his rabbinical studies, which included two years at Yeshivat Chabad Chulon in Israel, one year studying in Detroit, Michigan, and one year teaching at a yeshiva in Moscow, Russia. In January 2010, after two additional years of rabbinical studies, he was ordained by Rabbi Yitzchak Yehuda Yeruslavsky of Israel and also received his BA in Talmudic Law from the Central Lubavitch Yeshiva at Chabad Lubavitch headquarters (a.k.a. 770) in Brooklyn, New York. Two months later, he married his wife Sarah, also from Ottawa, and the couple moved to Israel so he could further his studies and become a certified mohel. A brit, he said, “plays a very important role in Jewish life. It’s something I wanted to be part of.” Rabbi Gordon studied with Rabbi Yakov Schechter of B’nai Brak, a well-known mohel. Schechter taught him
everything from the medical side to the practical side, as well as the ritual aspects of performing a brit. He said the learning process mostly involved watching how things are done while Rabbi Schecter performed five or six circumcisions per day. Slowly, Rabbi Gordon was allowed to do parts of the procedure, and, eventually, the whole thing. Rabbi Gordon returned home to Ottawa in March to become a program director at the Ottawa Torah Centre in Barrhaven. Two months ago, after having performed around 70 brits, he gained a true understanding of the custom that a father’s first brit should be his own son’s. “No one will trust you until you do your own son,” he said, which is what he did for his first child, Yitzy. “I felt I couldn’t do it … but I was able to focus … and block out the emotions,” he said, describing the feeling as “wow,” particularly because Rabbi Gordon’s own father, Steven, was standing by his side as the sandek (the person who holds the baby). “Many people came up to us afterward and told us how emotional it was to see,” Rabbi Gordon said. “In Ottawa, it’s not necessarily an everyday event that you would have the three [generations] working together.” The beginning of Rabbi Gordon’s career as an Ottawa mohel comes at a time of circumcision-related controversy in California. A proposal to ban circumcision of male
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Rabbi Sender Gordon holds his son Yitzy at the baby’s brit milah.
children in the city of San Francisco will be voted on in a referendum in November. “When you are looking at it from a medical point of view … different people will tell you different things,” Rabbi Gordon said. “We’re doing it strictly because that’s what God commanded us to do. That’s what our greatgrandfathers did and that’s the way we’re going to do it as well.” The word “brit,” which has been translated as circumcision, actually means “covenant.” In this case, the one God took between Abraham and his descendants. Rabbi Gordon explained the importance of that covenant: “No matter what happens … this is something that’s always there to remind us there’s a God above us and we have to be connected with him.” Rabbi Sender Gordon can be reached by e-mail at mymohel1@gmail.com or 613- 276-7195.
NAC string quintet visits Jewish preschool in Westboro By Cynthia Nyman Engel for Jewish Youth Library When Morah (teacher) Rachel began teaching her young charges about orchestras, she never imagined she’d wind up with a string quintet from the National Arts Centre Orchestra performing in her classroom. “It was beyond anything I ever expected,” she beams. “The kids loved it. I loved it. I’d have them come back in a heartbeat.” Rachel Segal is a teacher at the Westboro
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Jewish Montessori Preschool. Her pupils, aged from two-and-a-half to six years old, were into the subject in a big way, so she decided to see if there was any additional information available. There certainly was. Surfing the web, Segal discovered Musicians in the Schools, an NAC program that educates and entertains students from kindergarten to Grade 12 about the various aspects of (Continued on page 22)
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