AUBURN — After 11 years as the community’s only rabbi — and a statewide voice for tolerance and understanding — Hillel Katzir is leaving.

The 64-year-old Los Angeles native plans to depart Saturday for Evansville, Ind., where he hopes to write and teach without the responsibility of leading a congregation.

“It’s pretty intense,” Katzir said of his time leading Auburn’s Temple Shalom Synagogue Center. “And I feel good having done it. It’s something that I wanted to do.”

Since 2003, Katzir served as the spiritual leader for the synagogue’s 100 or so families. He officiated at bar mitzvahs, weddings and funerals. He sang as a cantor and taught as a rabbi.

And the teaching spread.

During his tenure with Temple Shalom, Katzir became an occasional speaker at churches throughout the region, taught at the University of Southern Maine’s Lewiston-Auburn College and helped create both a Lewiston-Auburn chapter of the multifaith group, Wellspring, and the statewide Hate Crimes Response Team of the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine.

“I’m a teacher,” Katzir said. “That’s who I am. That’s what I am. That’s the essence of being a rabbi.”

Katzir has had several careers. He lived for nine years in Israel, serving for a time in the Israel Defense Forces. He returned to the United States and graduated from law school in 1986. He spent some time as a radio host before deciding to become a rabbi.

When he arrived in Auburn in March 2003, he was a cantor and was finishing work at the Rabbinical Seminary International of New York City. He was ordained in June 2004 and officially installed as Temple Shalom’s rabbi five months later.

At Temple Shalom, he worked with the congregation as it ended its conservative affiliation and tried to reach out to Jews throughout the area, welcoming interfaith couples and gay couples.

“There are many ways of being Jewish,” said Lesli Weiner, president of Temple Shalom’s board of directors. “We don’t demand that you’re one way or another.”

Katzir seemed to take that idea into the surrounding community. He felt added responsibility as a rabbi in an area with relatively few Jewish people, he said.

He became a kind of spokesperson for his faith. He appeared in public during holiday observances and taught people about Judaism. In some cases, he talked about Jewish holidays. More often, he talked about common beliefs.

“I’m not here to try and convert you,” he would tell Catholics and Protestants. “I don’t need for everybody to be Jewish. In fact, if you would be the best Christians that you could possibly be, it would be a wonderful world. If we could all just be the best — fill in the blank, whatever we are — because the best of the teachings of all religions is based on the golden rule.”

Katzir helped create the Hate Crimes Response Team with money from a federal grant.

“He really jump-started the program,” said Liz Helitzer, executive director of the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine. “He stayed informed so that he was quick to know when teachable moments occurred, when there were acts of bias or discrimination in the state of Maine.”

She praised his work last year in response to a group of teens at Greely High School in Cumberland being photographed making a Nazi salute. Katzir and other Jewish leaders met with school officials.

“It wasn’t about blame,” Katzir said. Rather, he learned that the teens didn’t understand the implications of their actions to Jews. He went to work helping school leaders expose students to more ethnicities, cultures and religions.

Once again, he was the teacher.

“On good days, I do feel that I’ve contributed to understanding in Maine,” he said.

On Wednesday, Temple Shalom threw a goodbye party for Katzir. They had dinner and made speeches.

“He will be missed,” Weiner said.

The synagogue has hired a new rabbi, Sruli Dresdner of New Jersey, to begin leading the congregation in July.

By then, Katzir will be in Indiana, which he picked for “personal reasons.”

He plans to work on a follow-up to his first book, a 2013 nonfiction work titled “The Evolving Covenant: Jewish History and Why It Matters.”

And he plans to see more of his family. He has daughters in Texas, Southern California and Japan. In Texas, he has two grandchildren. Katzir has already worked out how long each flight would take and how many times he’d have to switch planes en route.

“The one thing that I have not liked living in Maine is that it is very far from my children and grandchildren,” he said.

dhartill@sunjournal.com

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