About

Faculty

Rabbi Helen Plotkin
Director

Rabbi Helen Plotkin is a graduate of Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. She currently teaches Biblical Hebrew and other subjects at Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. She is co-founder of the Swarthmore College Center for the Study of Classical Jewish Texts, also known as the Beit Midrash, where she taught Biblical Hebrew and Classical Jewish Texts to hundreds of students over 20 years, until her retirement in 2021. She is a particular fan of the open-ended, imaginative arguments that one finds in the Jewish interpretive tradition. Before devoting herself to Jewish texts, she spent years studying ancient Chinese and pioneering the use of the internet in education.

Laura Lee Blechner

Laura Lee has been a member of Congregation Beth Israel for over 20 years and attending Mekom Torah classes since its inception. She was co-chair of the Religious Practice committee for many years and is a regular lay service leader and Torah chanter. She loves sharing her knowledge of and passion for Judaism and teaching at many levels, from Gan/kindergarten family education to B’nai Mitzvah students to adults.

Emerita: Rabbi Shelly Barnathan

Rabbi Shelly Barnathan graduated from Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 2015. She is Associate Rabbi and Educator at Conservative Congregation Beth Am Israel in Penn Valley, PA. In addition to be being a talented guide along the spiritual path of Judaism, she is a seasoned educator who has taught foreign languages to children in grades K-12 at many different Philadelphia-area schools. In synagogue settings, she has taught Melody and Meaning of Prayer, a weekly Shabbat spirituality class for adults, for over a decade, and has been the instructor of a women’s spirituality group since 2005.

Emerita: Rabbi Danielle Parmenter

Rabbi Danielle Parmenter graduated from Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in June 2014. She received her bachelor of arts from Emory University with a major in religious studies and a minor in English. She also holds a master of arts in Judaic studies from Boston University with a concentration in medieval Jewish thought and culture.

About Mekom Torah

Mekom Torah is a pioneering Jewish learning project founded in 2008 by Rabbi Helen Plotkin, in collaboration with Congregation Beth Israel of Media, Congregation Ohev Shalom of Wallingford, and Reconstructing Judaism. It is built around a radically ancient vision of Jewish learning: Participation in learning is not a preparation for Jewish life, it is Jewish life.

The goal of Mekom Torah is to offer high quality Jewish study opportunities for adults and families that transcend the boundaries of the various Jewish movements and that work to strengthen congregational life in our synagogues and Jewish life in our homes. Study groups are open to anyone, whether or not they are members of the collaborating synagogues.

Mekom Torah approaches Judaism as a culture of learning. This perspective allows us to offer alternatives to the typical entry points of prayer, piety, or practice by creating new pathways to Jewish identity for the unaffiliated and new opportunities for inter-denominational contact.

About the name

"Mekom Torah" is pronounced like this: McCOMB toe-RAH!
It means "A Place of Torah." In Hebrew, it's מְקוֹם תּוֹרָה.

The name comes from a passage in the ancient text, Pirkei Avot (The Ethics of the Fathers), Chapter 6 Mishna 9:

Rabbi Yosi ben Kisma said:

One time I was walking on the road when a man ran into me and gave me a shalom and I gave him back a shalom.

He said to me, “Rabbi, from what makom (place) are you?”

I said to him, “I am from a great city of wise people and scribes.”

He said to me, “Rabbi, do you want to live with us in our makom? I’ll give you thousands and thousands of gold coins and precious stones and pearls.”

I said to him, “If you gave me all the gold and silver and precious stones and pearls in the world, I would dwell nowhere except in a mekom Torah – a place of Torah.”

Like Rabbi Yosi, we want to live in a place of Torah. But what makes someplace a mekom Torah? In some traditional Jewish communities, the phrase has come to be associated with a place that has a kosher butcher, a ritual bath, and a daily minyan.

We are using the phrase in a different sense. For us, a mekom Torah is a place where people engage with Jewish learning in a way that is connected to their real lives. Through our work with Mekom Torah, we hope to transform Jewish identities, to make our neighborhoods into destinations with a reputation for thriving Jewish life, to make our area truly a place of Torah.

For Grammar Nerds Only:

Hebrew word for "place" is makom. But when it is combined with another word, to mean "a place of," makom becomes mekom. (Actually, m'kom would match the Hebrew pronunciation even more precisely, but that is too hard to spell on the internet.) We say that the words mekom and Torah are in s'michut - they are leaning against each other. When this happens in Hebrew, the first word in the pair squishes up a little, into what is called "construct form." Here is another example of s'michut : The Hebrew word for "house" is bayit. The construct form for bayit is beit. Thus Beit Yisrael means "The House of Israel."

Website artwork

Our beautiful page header is an original painting by Rabbi Me'irah Iliinsky. See more of her work at Verses Illuminated.