Rabbi Eric Yanoff (Courtesy of Rabbi Eric Yanoff)
Adath Israel’s Rabbi Eric Yanoff didn’t always know he wanted to be a rabbi. But one summer during college, when Yanoff was working at Camp Ramah in the Poconos, he let his mind wander when overlooking the lake and, in that moment, he knew he wanted to be doing more of “this.”
The “this” he spoke about wasn’t quite clear yet, but Yanoff was on the path to becoming a Jewish professional — he just didn’t know it yet.
At the time, Yanoff was on the pre-med path at Princeton. He spent his free time working at a local synagogue off campus leading youth group activities and found himself “leaning less and less into the activities that would be typical of someone pre-med.”
It wasn’t until several months later when he was talking with his great-aunt, Shulamith Elster, that he saw his path forward.
“My Aunt Shulamith said something to me that was very formative,” Yanoff explained in an interview with Philadelphia Jewish Exponent. “She said, ‘Eric, sometimes we don’t know the path we’re on going forward until we look backward and see the steps that we’ve already taken, and then that path forward becomes more clear.’ And at that point in time, that was really eye-opening to me, and I more deeply engaged in Jewish leadership, Jewish education, Jewish life, and I applied to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.”
Yanoff, a resident of Bala Cynwyd, was born and raised in Dresher, was a member of Temple Sinai and was very involved in United Synagogue Youth. Over the summers he attended Camp Ramah, eventually working on the staff. He ended up graduating with a bachelor’s in comparative literature with a concentration in Judaic studies, and headed to New York to study at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
After ordination, Yanoff and his wife moved to Detroit, where he served Congregation Shaarey Zedek for six years and celebrated the birth of his first child. However, Yanoff said, “we felt this tug back to Philadelphia.”
“I believe in the Philadelphia Jewish community. I grew up here. I want it to thrive. I believe that it has all of the ingredients,” he said. “I believe that this community together could really do amazing things, and that especially at an inflection point where the future is ours for the imagining, it’s really a blessing.”
In 2010, Yanoff joined the clergy at Adath Israel in Merion Station and has since served the congregation for 16 years. What stuck out to him during the interview process was a question he was asked because he was told he looked very young: How do we know you are here for the long haul?
“I said, there are two ways of marking success in the trajectory of a rabbinic career,” Yanoff explained. “One way, clearly, is to move on to larger platforms. I said, and the other way is to find a place that feels like home and to build connections and to grow that place into the deeper and broader platform, and to do the weddings of the teenager — you did their bar and bat mitzvah — and then to do those weddings, their kids’ baby namings and bris, and then to do those kids’ bar/bat mitzvah and their weddings, and to do that intergenerational growth and connection. And that’s what we’ve done here now.”
At his first sermon, Yanoff introduced himself by saying, “I’m Eric Yanoff. I am not the bar mitzvah boy.” Since then, Yanoff explained, not only has he grown up, but “we’re growing up together.”
He added that “even the funerals are more deeply felt because I’ve been with these people. Sadly, I recognize more names [when] saying the Mourner’s Kaddish because I was with those families in those moments, and I’m a part of it with them.”