A Rabbi’s Legacy: New Scholarship Will Carry Rabbi Carla Freedman’s Name Forward

When Phyllis Yaffe set out to honor her late sister, Rabbi Carla Freedman '90 z"l, she didn't have to think very hard about what would matter most. "What can I do to honor her memory?" Yaffe recalls asking herself. "Obviously this is the thing that mattered the most to her in her life - it was her calling to be a rabbi." The answer was a new annual scholarship at Hebrew Union College supporting rabbinic students on the New York campus, with a preference for women of Canadian origin: the Rabbi Carla Freedman z"l Memorial Annual Scholarship.

Rabbi Freedman, who died in September 2024, was the first Canadian-born woman ordained as a rabbi, a distinction that resonates deeply for her family. "Trailblazer" is the word her daughters, Deborah Melman-Clement and Rena Rubin-Hines, each used independently when writing her obituary and eulogy. It's the same word Yaffe reached for, unprompted, in her own interview. Long before the pulpit, she was blazing trails: a national storytelling champion in B'nai B'rith Girls as a teenager, a working mother in an era when few of her peers worked, and a founding member of both a Winnipeg women's networking organization and, with her then-husband, the city's Reform congregation.

Rabbinical school wasn't part of the plan until later. Divorced by that time, with teenage daughters, she had built a career in counseling and education when, one day, she simply announced she was enrolling. "She didn't tell us that she was applying or thinking about it or anything," Rubin-Hines remembers. "She just-" Melman-Clement finishes: "So I'm just being a rabbi now. See you there." It was, as Rubin-Hines put it, "certainly unexpected," yet somehow no surprise at all: "It just made so much sense… everything in her life had led to this."

Rabbi Freedman's partner of 38 years, Jeanne Shanin, traces that instinct to a single moment. Years earlier, a visiting rabbi filled in at Rabbi Freedman's Winnipeg congregation - and it was a woman. "Carla did not know that women could be rabbis," Shanin says. "She had no idea… And Carla said to herself, 'Oh, I can do that. That's what I should be doing.'" It was the start of a path that took her to Israel for a year, then to Hebrew Union College's Cincinnati campus, and eventually to pulpits in Plattsburgh and South Salem, NY, and Sun City Center, Florida - long tenures, each one, in communities that came to adore her.

That devotion showed up again and again in stories people told after Rabbi Freedman died. At her funeral in Florida, her grandson, Jesse Rubin, recalled a congregant saying that when Rabbi Freedman arrived, she turned the community "from solemn to joyful," teaching them to sing and find real delight in worship. "It was infectious," Rubin-Hines says. "She really had an effect on her congregations."

Shanin remembers Freedman as a rabbi who taught constantly and read voraciously, leaving her with a collection of more than 1500 books of Judaica, yet never asked to be treated as anything other than herself. "There are many rabbis who have a need to be called rabbi," Shanin says. "She never had that need - she would say, 'Just call me Carla.' She was so grounded in who she was. She didn't need any of that stuff." And the same informal nature often came to bear on her pulpit. Shanin recalled that "she sometimes would forgo a sermon in favor of "Ask the Rabbi" with her congregation." A congregant from her pulpit in South Salem remembered that for Purim one year, the reading of the Megillah was reenacted as a Star Trek parody and she played Spock.

At home, that same humility held. Says Yaffe, "Her answering machine said 'Rabbi Carla Freedman'… but not at home, not with her family. Maybe it was fun for her not to be the rabbi for a while." What the family did take seriously was what becoming a rabbi had cost her. Starting rabbinical school later in life, without financial resources or a spouse to share the burden, was, in Yaffe's words, "a real struggle" - precisely the struggle the new scholarship is meant to ease. "As she became more established in her career, I know she appreciated the struggles others faced to follow their dreams," Rena reflected. "I think she would love to alleviate that for somebody - to know that her legacy is doing that for someone else."

The preference for a Canadian recipient carries its own logic. As Yaffe put it, Canada's Jewish community is small, and "lots of people might not be able to afford to do this, even if they wanted to." A scholarship that opens the door a little wider for the next Canadian woman felt, to her, like the truest way to honor a sister who left Winnipeg to become someone new.

Rabbi Freedman's family is confident about how she would have received the news. "I think she would be thrilled about it," Rubin-Hines says. Shanin agrees: "She'd be very pleased to have a fund that makes it any easier for women to become rabbis. She would really appreciate that." And, fittingly for a woman who preferred no fuss over her name, Shanin adds that Rabbi Freedman likely would have shrugged off having a scholarship named for her at all - "I think she would just be happy that it was there for other people."

In honoring her sister, Phyllis Yaffe brings her own distinguished record of public service to this gift: a former media executive who led Alliance Atlantis Communications, later served as Canada's Consul General in New York, and was named to the Order of Canada in 2015. But when asked what she hopes the scholarship's future recipients will take from it, her answer was simple and personal. "Somebody who had tread that path before, who had all the challenges of finding a way to make it happen," she said. "Her memory is kept alive by this scholarship. We hope that they're as successful in their career as she was in hers… She made a difference in a lot of people's lives. I hope the next graduate does the same."