David Roberts grew up in the Bronx in a modern Orthodox family. But it wasn’t until he was a young man involved in the civil rights movement that he truly experienced being Jewish. “I was fighting for people less fortunate than I was and I came to realize that had so many strong Jewish roots,” he says. “I think Jewish texts will tell you it’s your obligation to give.”

Roberts has acted on that obligation in many ways for many years, in his personal and professional life. A recent example is his new position as chair of the board of governors of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Wyncote, Pa.

A member of the RRC board since 1998, Roberts is the first chair to be selected from outside the East Coast.

Roberts’ journey to and within the Reconstructionist Movement has hardly been a straight path. While attending City College of New York in the 1960s, he worked in Harlem with Charles Rangel before he became a congressman, and with inner-city children. “I realized I wanted to be a community organizer to make real change happen,” Roberts says.

After earning a sociology degree from CCNY, he attended the School of Social Work at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, but was asked to leave after one semester. “They said I wasn’t mature enough, and they were right!” Roberts says. He did field work for the American Jewish Committee for a while, then in 1965 he enlisted in the Peace Corps. His tour of service landed him in Uruguay as a community organizer and a basketball coach.

“It was me and another Jewish guy,” Roberts says. “I got somewhat involved with the Jewish community there, and when the Six Day War broke out, I marched with some of the 50,000 Jews of Uruguay. There was real solidarity with Israel.” Roberts enjoyed his experience there but after two years he was ready return to the USA and finish school. He was welcomed back to Case Western Reserve where he earned a master’s degree in social science administration.

JFed experience

Although his heart still was in community work, Roberts took a job with the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston. “At the time things were not so great in the inner cities,” he says. “An instructor suggested working in the Jewish community to get fundraising and administrative experience.”

He stayed at CJP eight years as a campaign associate and director of the Women’s Division (“It was the early ’70s and there was a lot of chauvinism and sexism back then,” he explains).

By then he had met his wife, Susan Fischlowitz. In 1974, the couple decided to quit their jobs and see the country. “Near Portland, Ore., I had the name of a friend of a friend who was very active with the Jewish community there,” Roberts says. “He invited us to Shabbot dinner and halfway through the meal his wife said, ‘What do you do?’ I said, ‘I’m an unemployed Jewish Federation professional.’ She screamed and said, ‘We have an opening for assistant director!’ and I said, ‘I’m not interested.'” But he and Susan fell in love with Portland and he took the job. Roberts worked for the Jewish Federation there for nine years, as assistant director and executive director. He left and worked as a consultant and teacher for three more years.

In 1985, Roberts returned to Boston and to CJP. As human resources director, he worked in leadership development, getting community leaders involved in various Jewish agencies. “This was a big movement in Jewish Federations in the 1980s,” he says. However, after three years, “I realized working for a large bureaucracy was not my thing,” Roberts says. He earned a second masters degree, in education, at Boston College and taught bilingual second grade. “Basically they put a stethoscope on me and saw my heart was beating and they hired me,” he deadpans.

In the meantime, Roberts says, he and Sue had embarked on their “Jewish journey.” They visited Orthodox, Conservative and Reform congregations “but we couldn’t find a place where we felt comfortable,” he says. Friends invited them to their Reconstructionist congregation, Shir Hadash (“New Song”). “As soon as we walked in we saw a woman with an infant in one hand and a prayer book in the other,” Roberts says. ‘Sue and I looked at each other and said, ‘We’re home.'” He adds, “The Reconstructionist service seemed open and available, as opposed to a program in Hebrew repeated in a rote manner. There is a certain degree of creativity in the Reconstructionist service which appealed to us, among so many other things about the movement.”

Joining the Board

Roberts and Sue and their three sons moved to St. Louis, Sue’s hometown, in 1992. Roberts taught middle school in the Maplewood-Richmond Heights district for five years, then established David Roberts & Associates, a management consulting firm that works with nonprofit organizations.

Around that same time Roberts became involved with the Reconstructionist movement on a national level, when he got a call from then-RRC President David Teutsch, inviting him and Sue to meet at the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation conference in Chicago. At that fateful meeting, Teutsch asked Roberts to join the board of the rabbinical college. He officially joined the board in 1998.

“I quickly got very involved,” Roberts says. He chaired the development committee and the endowment campaign, and now leads the ongoing comprehensive leadership campaign which to date has raised $30 million of its $50 million goal.

Roberts’ commitment and diligence to the movement and the college led to his being named RRC’s board chair last June. “It’s an honor but it requires a lot of work and travel,” Roberts says. The executive committee meets every six weeks and the board assembles four times a year in New York City, which gives Roberts several opportunities to visit his mother, age 101, in her Bronx apartment.

There’s no time limit for Roberts’ tenure. “I’ll stay as long as they want me around,” he says. He hopes to accomplish two major goals: First, to bring younger people onto the RRC board; second, to diversify geographically and have board members from across the U.S. and foreign countries. “There are 107 Reconstructionist congregations in the United States, and also in Canada, Curacao and Eastern Europe,” notes Roberts.

At the college, “the professional and academic staff and lay leadership are all truly amazing people,” Roberts says. RRC President Rabbi David Ehrenkrantz, returns the compliment. “When we thought about who we wanted in a leadership position we turned to David because he has shown an extraordinarly high level of both commitment and effectiveness. He was the unanimous choice,” Ehrenkrantz says. “David is often the person who notices or thinks about doing something nice for people who have gone beyond the call of duty or who have experienced a trying time. He’s the one who will send flowers or offer special recognition. He really has endeared himself to the rest of the board and the professional staff, from administrative assistants through the associate president, in the most beautiful way.”

In St. Louis, Roberts and Sue are members of the Shir Hadash Reconstructionist Community, which they helped found. The congregation currently has 12 member units and meets at B’nai El.

“I wish we could rent a storefront in the Central West End,” Roberts says. “I think the Jewish community needs to do that, to reach out to where young Jews are, as opposed to expecting them to walk in the door.” The tiny congregation has been led by student rabbis from RRC who come to St. Louis for the weekend. “We hope in the future we can engage a rabbi to be here full-time,” Roberts says.

Additionally in the future, Roberts says he hopes to spend more time with Sue, who is chairman of the board of the St. Louis Hillel at Washington University. They’d like to visit Poland and Roberts also hopes to get back to Uruguay. He and Sue are free to travel; their sons are Bernie, who’s graduating from the University of Michigan; Aaron, a news reporter in Bangor, Maine; and Max, a freshman at Brandeis University.

Above all, Roberts would like to “engage in more Jewish learning,” he says. “I’d like to study and dig deeper and learn more from Rabbi Ehrenkrantz. And I’d like to give more time to the Reconstructionist movement.”