From the age of 13, he wanted to be an actor. Music was always a part of her life. They met while working at a Jewish camp in California.
A decade later David Young is assistant rabbi at Temple Sinai in North Miami Beach and wife Natalie, cantor at Ramat Shalom synagogue in Plantation.
Deciding to become a rabbi “wasn’t a lightening bolt,” David Young said. “It was more of a tide rolling in.” As he became more involved in Jewish education, the Cincinnati native said, he found it to be more rewarding than acting. “I just love entertaining people,” he said.
The congregation on Friday nights and Saturday mornings is a captive audience, David said, and the service has props, choreography and music. “It involves feeling,” he said. “The Torah wasn’t always read. It was recited. We don’t tell our stories, we sing our stories.”
Natalie Young, the daughter of a French Canadian Catholic who converted to Judaism and a father who was a Hungarian Holocaust survivor, grew up in Los Angeles. “I loved going to religious school, even as a kid,” she said. “My mom was the one who brought a lot of tradition and rituals into the home.”
It was a “life changing experience” to become involved in Jewish education, she said. “Being with people seeking the same things I was.”
As seminary students the couple was living in Jerusalem on 9/11. After the terrorist attacks in the United States, “It was a strange kind of cross-culture empathy,” David said. And they were in Israel during the second intifada, when a cafM-i they had planned to go to was bombed.
They led Passover seders and worked with Ethiopian immigrants in Russia. And as members of a clergy team in Fairbanks, Alaska, they served a Jewish congregation that met in a converted house.
The people had a “ravenous appetite for Judaism,” David said.
“They take [Jewish] community very seriously because they need to,” said Natalie.
She served a small Jewish congregation in Shreveport, La. and saw the community come together when the synagogue became a shelter after Hurricane Katrina.
David served in a small synagogue in Steubenville, Ohio and a large congregation in Long Island, New York.
The Youngs came to South Florida three years ago when David was selected as a rabbi by Temple Sinai.
A friend later told Natalie about the vacant cantor job at Ramat Shalom.
“It was beshert when I went into my interview,” she said. “I was at home. I had found my congregation.”
Natalie has added “a lot of energy and creativity to our community,” Rabbi Andrew Jacobs of Ramat Shalom said. “She’s very enthusiastic, very creative when it comes to the arts.”
Rabbi Alan Litwak of Temple Sinai called David “a dynamic rabbi” and a great teacher. “He’s learning from me and I’m learning from him,” Litwak said. “As an actor in a previous life, he has an understanding of people and their feelings. He is in touch with that.”
Litwak said while he hopes Rabbi Young “doesn’t go anywhere soon” but will one day find a congregation of his own. “He’s a rabbi with a great future,” Litwak said.
The couple has a dream of sharing the bima.
“David and I would love, down the line, to serve a congregation together,” Natalie said. “Anything is possible. We’ve kind of learned that along the way.”
“Amen,” the rabbi said.
