Our Clergy

Rabbi Leonard Gordon has been our spiritual leader since 2019. He served for sixteen years at the Germantown Jewish Centre, a Conservative synagogue in Philadelphia known for being "a community of communities." He was conferred the status of Rabbi Emeritus when he moved to Chestnut Hill, MA, serving as the senior rabbi at Congregation Mishkan Tefila until the congregation moved to Brookline. With rabbinic ordination and an MA from the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), he has a BA and M Phil from Columbia University, and an MA in Religious Studies from Brown University. In 2018, he earned a Doctor of Ministry degree in Interfaith Studies at the Andover Newton Theological School.

Rabbi Gordon has taught comparative religion and Humanities at Columbia University, Kenyon College, and the Ohio State University; and he has taught rabbinic literature, history, philosophy, and liturgy at the JTS, the Hebrew College Rabbinicial School, the Reconstructionist Rabbinicial College, and the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. He is a popular teacher at Hebrew College's MEAH program. Among his publications, he was an editor of Mahzor Lev Shalem.

Rabbi Gordon serves on the boards of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA), the Internation Jewish Committee for Interfaith Consultations (IJCIC), and the Nation Council of Synagogues (NCS). At the JCPA, he co-chairs the newly created taskforce on Jewish-Muslim relations. He has traveled to Israel with delegations of Christian and Muslim leaders, under the auspices of Interfaith Partners for Peace (an organization he co-chairs), a project of the Jewish Federations of North America's Israel Action Network.

Rabbi Gordon is passionate about building communities of meaning and connecting people to one another, to the synagogue, and to Israel. When he was on the faculty at Kenyon College, he built the small Jewish community there and was the founding director of the Havurah of Greater Columbus.

His partner, Dr. Lori Lefkovitz, holds the Ruderman Chair in Jewish Studies at Northeastern University, where she is a Professor of English and directs the Humanities Center and Jewish Studies Program. They have two adult daughters. Ronya works for the Jewish Museum in New York and will be married to Mickey Roth this January. Samara recently moved to Boston, where she works for Hyperplane, a venture capital firm.    

Rabbi Gordon looks forward to getting to know the B’nai Tikvah family and encourages each of you to please be in touch to make a time to meet at the synagogue, in your home, or at a local coffee shop.