Our Rabbi
Yitzhak Nates grew up in Scarsdale, New York, in what he describes as a "quite assimilated household. My sisters still can't believe I'm a rabbi," he says. It was a future he didn't imagine for himself until he was 29.
As a young boy, Yitzhak wanted to be a veterinarian or an astronomer. He studied economics at Middlebury College in Vermont and then spent time in New York, where he got involved in the Arab-Israeli peace movement. Yitzhak spent half of his 20s in Israel on a kibbutz, where he studied Hebrew and Arabic and taught English, before enrolling full time in a yeshiva in Jerusalem.
"The first time I thought about the rabbinate was in 1992, when I was doing hurricane relief in Florida in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew. I worked with relief organizations from different religious denominations, and I really enjoyed the volunteers I worked with," he says.
In 1995, at the age of 32, Yitzhak began a five-year program at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Wyncote, PA. Soon after, he met Jen and her daughter, Alex. "We went through school together," Yitzhak says. The couple married and, a week after graduation, had a baby, Eva. The family then moved to Northern California, where Yitzhak led a congregation in Chico for three years, before deciding to come back East.
The Nates family settled back in Narberth and restarted the Havurah, which had first gathered when Yitzhak was in his senior year of the seminary. Rabbi Yitzhak also teaches the Florence Melton Program of adult Jewish education, an open, trans-denominational, intellectually stimulating 30-week course.