It took a stint in the American heartland for a kibbutznik like Nir Barkin to discover that there’s more than one way of practicing Judaism. It was during his four-year tenure as Jewish Agency envoy in Milwaukee that Barkin (pictured, at a bat mitzvah ceremony in Modi’in), until then a self-proclaimed secular Jew, first set foot into a non-Orthodox synagogue. So blown away was he by the experience that upon returning to Israel in 2004, he enrolled in Jerusalem’s Hebrew Union College to study to become a Reform rabbi.
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