Steve Karol:  

After graduating from Center, I went to the University of Wisconsin in Madison where I earned a degree in sociology and learned a lot about antiwar protesting and other "liberal causes." During the summers, I worked at City Hall in Kansas City. Following my UW graduation in '72, I started rabbinical school at the Reform movement's Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. I went to school in Jerusalem from September of '72 until May of '73. I moved to the HUC-JIR Cincinnati campus in September of '73 and met my future wife, Mary, the next month (yes, she's Jewish). We got engaged in March of '74 and married in August of '75 in Cleveland. She got a job teaching deaf students in Cincinnati and we lived there for two more years until my ordination in 1977. I accepted a position with a large temple in Buffalo and we were there for 4 years. Mary worked in deaf ed at a state school and I was the assistant rabbi for the 1600-family congregation. In 1981, I was asked to be the rabbi of Congregation Sha'aray Shalom in Hingham, Massachusetts--on the South Shore of Boston. Our daughter Samantha was born in 1985. We lived in Hingham for 21 years and really enjoyed the Boston area and forming some lasting friendships and building a small temple into a medium-sized temple, and then decided that I wanted a larger congregation and we wanted to live in an area with more Jews. In July of 2002, I became the rabbi of Temple Isaiah in Stony Brook, New York--...Expand for more