FLAGSTAFF, AZ -- Every week for four years, Nina Perlmutter has been taking a shuttle bus from Prescott to Phoenix and catching a flight to Los Angeles in time to attend rabbinical classes Sunday through Tuesday, returning to Prescott late Tuesday night.
By the end of June, the total will be 144 round trips, with 288 flights for Perlmutter.
"The truth is I didn't come the farthest, but I have the longest commute," said Perlmutter, a Prescott resident for 24 years. "There are folks flying in from Denver and Albuquerque, but they live in cities where the airport is."
After completing her studies at the Academy for Jewish Religion California, located at the Yitzhak Rabin Hillel Center at UCLA, she was ordained as a rabbi May 25 at a Los Angeles synagogue.
Perlmutter is Flagstaff's first ordained female rabbi and only the second female rabbi in northern Arizona. Rabbi Alicia Magal serves the Sedona and Verde Valley communities.
The Academy for Jewish Religion California is a transdenominational seminary. The faculty includes scholars and clergy affiliated with all of Judaism's denominations.
"I am trained to serve anyone who will have me," Perlmutter said. "I really feel I have been nurtured by many strands of Judaism."
Perlmutter gave her first service as an ordained rabbi last month at Heichal Baoranim, Flagstaff's Reform Jewish congregation, which included the holiday of Shavuot, commemorating God giving the Torah (Ten Commandments) to the Israelites.
She will be coming up two weekends a month to Flagstaff for services and at other times for special life passage events.
"When I'm coming, I'm doing services, adult education, Torah studies and working with the b'nai mitzvah students. So, I'll be a busy person."
Perlmutter will also be serving as the first-ever Jewish contact for Jews visiting or living in the Grand Canyon
"My husband (Tom Brodersen) and I have brought Jewish things to the Grand Canyon for the holidays and done retreats there," she said.
For more than two decades, Perlmutter served as chair of the Philosophy and Religious Studies Program at Yavapai College in Prescott, where she is now an emeritus faculty member and teaches as an adjunct professor. That service last month marked a rededication of the synagogue following its recent interior renovation and the dedication of a new Ark, built to accommodate the congregation's four Torah scrolls, including two scrolls recovered from the Holocaust in Europe.
"Every Torah is hand-written, and is a meditative, sacred practice," she said. "They are all on parchment, with the same contents, but different sizes. Judaism is based on the Torah."
Jews around the world are reading the same sections of the Torah each week.
"Jews are literally on the same page in community," she said.
Lanny Morrison, who is president of the board of trustees of Heichal Baoranim, traveled with his wife Lynne to attend Perlmutter's ordination ceremony.
"The scribe who does it will have a different handwriting," Morrison said. "It takes about one year to write a Torah."
The founders of the congregation were four couples, including Merrill and Rhoda Abeshaus, who still live in Flagstaff, Morrison said.
"The congregation is about 35 years old," he said. "For years it met in people's homes."
About 15 years ago, the synagogue was established at its present location, he added.
Permutter is related to Rabbi Yitzak Yaakov Horowitz, who was called "The Holy Jew" and lived in the 1700s as a leader of the Hasidic Movement in Poland.
She is also related to Abraham Perlmutter, an Orthodox rabbi in Europe in the early 1900s.
"When Poland declared they would give Jews rights, he was allowed into the legislature," she said. "I am very honored to be related to those two men."
Perlmutter said it is not new to have female rabbis.
"There have been women rabbis from the early 70s," Perlmutter said. More than 60 percent in rabbinical schools are women, outside of Orthodox Judaism."
Perlmutter said the term Israel means "wrestling with God, wrestling with the Torah," and "There's no one final interpretation of Judaism."
To Jews, to be free has a special meaning.
"In Jewish life, the goal is not just to be free," she explained. "We're happy to be free to choose to commit to the commandments, to commit to our God."
