Chaplain from St. Augustine featured in Washington Post

Chaplains hear call to serve God while serving country

By Debra Rubin
Religion News Service,

As a student at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., Aaron Kleinman was the “Jew who did Jewish stuff.” Although he served two years as president of the academy’s Jewish Midshipmen Club, becoming a rabbi had never really entered his mind. If he hadn’t experienced deployments on two carrier ships that didn’t have onboard Jewish chaplains, it might have remained that way.

Kleinman, 38, had grown up in a Conservative Jewish home. When he was stationed in St. Augustine, Fla., he and his wife gradually grew comfortable with an Orthodox lifestyle.

Kleinman, who already had begun studies “to fill in some the gaps in my Jewish knowledge,” left active duty in 2005 for the reserves. But the rabbi shortage was growing more acute. Kleinman saw the number of Navy rabbis drop from 15 in 1995 to seven a decade later.

“Sometime around then, I realized that I needed to become a chaplain,” said the rabbi, a lieutenant stationed aboard the USS Harry S. Truman in his hometown of Norfolk, Va. “As someone who had proven compatibility with the military lifestyle, this was something I should do.”

Thirty-five rabbis are on active military duty, 13 of them in the Navy.

Kleinman was ordained in 2007 through a military chaplaincy program offered by the Yeshiva Pirchei Shoshanim in Lakewood, N.J. “If I felt there were enough Jewish chaplains to go around,” he said, “I don’t know if the interest to be a rabbi would have come to me.”
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