Intterview with Dr. Julie Orman, D.C. June 6, 2006 Women of Kehilla involved in Healing
My earliest visions of my future career were to be a counselor to people in trouble, maybe a social worker. I had volunteered some advice to my grandmother when I was 16, and she was having some serious problems. My aunt was shocked that I dared to advise someone so much older, but my grandmother seemed to appreciate it.
I was involved during high school days in Birmingham, Michigan, just outside of Detroit, with a program for young people in trouble, with drugs and other problems, called Common Ground. I also was involved with theater and with a mime troupe, that educated teens on avoiding drugs and alcohol.
My grandmother's family had come to this country from Russia, and her experience there being part of a persecuted Jewish minority made her want to hide her Jewishness here. She stopped speaking Yiddish, except as her secret language with my grandfather. She was afraid of being seen as different. She joined in celebrating Christmas, altho she also observed Hannukah at home. But Christmas became our big, loving family holiday. Our family did appreciate being Jewish, and even were founding members of a pioneering new Temple led by an agnostic rabbi, that was part of a new movement called Humanistic Judaism, that has tried to modernize Jewish culture, by not insisting on praying in Hebrew.
I had a great childhood and I went to a wonderful, happy Jewish camp each summer, where we sang and had lots of fun, and enjoyed being Jewish together. My parents always helped us feel that we were just like other people, not a struggling minority on the defensive. I never experienced any anti-semitic words or attitudes, until I moved to California and my landlady said some derogatory things about me.
In college I fell in love with someone who is still a good friend and soulmate, but we broke up and did not marry, partly because I could not deal with the rough time we would have as a mixed race couple in a still segregated and prejudiced world. I was studying social sciences in preparation for becoming a social worker, and even was an intern in a women's crisis center, where I tried to counsel women who had been raped. But I found myself becoming more and more frightened as I walked the streets of becoming a rape victim myself, and realized I was not a great candidate for a life of advising women who had such horrible experiences. I was too empathetic for my own good.
So I gladly accepted the invitation of a very close friend to join her in a trip to Israel, to get away from my double disappoinments in love and career choice. That was a wonderful summer, and led to many other trips to Isreel later on. We worked on a kibbutz, we learned Hebrew, we did the tourist visits to many places in the Holy Land. When I came back to the US, I was better prepared for my next career test during a year between college and grad school, when I was the program
coordinator with Hillel on a Michigan State University campus, helping students to celebrate their Jewish heritage and holidays.
I decided to try a career in labor relations and human resource jobs in corporate America, where I could still help people, but not face horrible crises all the time, and make a decent living. With my MA I went to work in the city I had heard so many things about, Boston. I worked in a bank, and then for the Combined Jewish Philanthopies. But I decided I would really prefer starting a business of my own, and not be a cog in a big business machine. I considered many options. My best friend had become a chiropractor.I interviewed several chiropractors. They were all happy and friendly, and encouraged me to join them. So I signed up for a school of chiropractic in Atlanta. I was extremely impressed with how happy and enthusiastic these people weee about their work. I realized that I had come across something extremely important if all these people were so satisfied with their work. I eventually transferred to the best school in the country, in Heyward CA, Life Chiropractic College West/
In the meantime I had been maintaining a long distance relationship with an incredibly loving man whom I had left behind in Boston. We married and had a cross country marriage until he found a job in California, and we started to raise our family of a boy and a girl. I had my first child while in chiropractic school. I have been incredibly blessed by my family and my practice. They have both taught me my new-found spirituality. I also feel very blessed to help so many people over the ten years I have been practicing. My patients nurture my growth and greatly fulfill me.
My husband and I recently started looking for a compatible synagogue where our kids could be Bar and Bat Mitvahed. We have finally settled on just the right one for us, Kehilla Community Synagogue on Grand Ave. in Oakland. We all have found the joy and music and social concern we had been looking for. And we even met people who became patients in my practice. We also find a connection with holistic health awareness and a concern for healing our world [Tikkun Olam] as well as our individual bodies.
I met Victoria Alcoset in their women's group, when I asked if anyone knew someone who wanted to be a receptionist and assistant in my chiropractic office.
Victoria Alcoset joins a Jewish Healing Team
[One of the benefits of the Women's Movement of the last century is the way in which women are now networking and supporting one another in positive enterprises. Here is the story of one such partnership in Healing.]
Part of the story begins in Los Angeles, with the birth and early years of Victoria Alcoset, who suggests her last name may even go back to the Golden Age of Spain, when it was under Muslim rule, but allowed full expression of both Christian and Jewish religion, In this best of Empires, everyone got along marvelously for 3 centuries. Vicky's connection is in her Roman Catholic father's family name, which her family believes may have been originally Al-Coser, an Arabic name, like Al-Hambra and Al-gebra, among our many Muslim inheritances as Europeans, transplanted to the Americas.
Vicky's Jewish mother raised her in her father's faith, since her own parents were not religious Jews. She attended Catholic schools, was confirmed and found the faith of the nuns contagious, so she prayed the hours of the Mass daily after graduating from high school.
Her Bat Mitzvah came much later, after she spent her college years in a strongly feminist part of the University of California in Santa Cruz. Having f ound some parts of her Catholic upbringing not feeding her hunger for deeper spirituality. She told her priest in the Newman Society at UCSC that she was leaving the church, and continuing to search for the spiritual path that helped her more fully to become who she knew she was down deep.
She found a job after graduation at the Gaia Bookstore in Berkeley, which is a city becoming something like Spain in its glorious days, where people of many faiths can thrive and support one another, even under the rule of Right Wing born-again Christians in Washington. She learned about Buddhism, Hinduism, Deep Ecology, Wicca, Theosophy, and other spiritual teachings.
She sensed that she might find a spiritual home in a gathering of Jews who were open to learning from other traditions as well as Jewish traditions. She saw an ad in the East Bay Express in 1992 inviting people to attend High Holy Day services with a Jewish community, called Kehilla.
She was positively impressed by the relaxed, informal group of young families with little children, who freel wandered around during the lengthy services. She also noted the diversity of expression allowed as she saw two people among the 1,500 gathered there, who lifted their arms in ecstatic prayer, as she had seen in charismaticd services as a young woman, but who also used the ancient Hebrew prayers and modern English as well, with concern for social justice and peace and the environment. This began to feel like her long sought spiritual home an d family.
She was happy to find the new Rabbi, Zari Weiss, waa a young woman with some of her same concerns. [Ed. my ears pricked up at this name, because Zari Weiss was on our Sequoia Advisory Council back in those days, representing Kehilla Community Synagogue in Berkeley. She has since moved to the Pacific NorthWest. Founding Rabbi Burt Jacobson and Rabbi David Cooper carry on the traditions of Kehilla, which has moved from a North Berkeley building to a formerly Presbyterian Church's larger building on Grand Avenue in Oakland, in the Piedmont area.]
So it was through Kehilla that she re-entered the worldwide Jewish family, after studying Torah for her adult Bat Mitzvah. She had the strong support of her family, though some of her Roman Catholic relatives talked about her "converting" to Judaism. But Victoria felt she was just finding her true home, not only as a Jew, but in a community with feminist energy and egalitarian leadership,
Victoria reports that she felt her strong pull toward deeper spirituality might lead her to follow in Zari Weiss's footstops and become a rabbi. But she also felt a strong leading toward the healing arts, that nurture one's body and mind, with a growing awareness of the Oneness of our being, not split between Body at a lower level and Mind at a superior level and Spirit floating vaguely around.
She has been studying a 5,000 year old tradition from India -- Ayur Veda, and has a diploma in Holistic Health. She responded readily to Dr. Julie Orman's invitaation at a Kehilla Women's Lunch to come and work with her as her Chiropractric Assistant. She had already put in 15 years of office administrative work, and this would help her be involved fulltime in a health facility in a key role. She started work in February of this year, and is glad to welcome her sister member of Kehilla, Diana Feigler, as a patient in Dr. Orman's practice.
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