Rent a Rabbi

For unaffiliated Jews unable or unwilling to join a synagogue, and for whom a justice of the peace or, for that matter, a minister in an Elvis jumpsuit at a Vegas wedding chapel will not do, David Segal has a suggestion: Why don't you just rent a rabbi?

"I've had lots of friends who cannot find a rabbi, or for some reason the rabbi is either too busy or not interested in marrying them. That doesn't really fit right with me. Somebody should marry a Jewish person and not turn Jews off of Judaism. That's what's killing us," says Segal, a Phoenix-based technologist. "I realize that over 82 percent of American Jews are unaffiliated with a temple. I wonder if they're just not finding the right person, the right rabbi for their fit."

Segal's method for matching rabbis with Jews is a bit unorthodox -- though Orthodox rabbis are on his list. He established

a year-and a-half ago, and has since amassed a stable of 54 rabbis nationwide willing to meet your wedding, funeral, b'nai mitzvah, baby-naming and bris needs.

So far, Segal has helped roughly 50 customers and generated nearly 100,000 hits -- meaning, unfortunately for him, that only one out of every 2,000 people who surf the site will hire a rabbi. Segal says he's more or less breaking even on the service (up from a few thousand in the hole last year), but is mainly running it in his spare time "as a mitzvah." And for his efforts, he has been both showered with compliments and chastised as "a bad Jew."

Criticisms of Segal are ill-founded according to Rabbi David Roller, who, along with his wife, Rabbi Shoshana Roller, are listed on the Web site. Unaffiliated Jews have been around since the beginning, he says, and the Internet is only the latest method people have used to find a rabbi for a special occasion. "In the pre-Internet world you went by word-of-mouth if you needed a rabbi for a wedding or a funeral. Or you went to a Jewish bookstore if you were unaffiliated and wanted to remain unaffiliated. You can call a funeral home and ask for a list of rabbis. If you go to a cemetery in New York you have Kaddish rabbis hanging around the front gate," says Roller, a Reform rabbi.

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