Wayne Dosick, San Diego’s Longest Serving Rabbi, Dead at 77

Article updated to include funeral arrangements.

By Donald H. Harrison

CARLSBAD, California — Rabbi Wayne Dosick, leader of the Elijah Minyan in Carlsbad and San Diego County’s longest-serving rabbi, has died of a massive heart attack at age 77.

His wife, Ellen Kaufman, told San Diego Jewish World that the Rabbi was working at the couple’s dining room table at their home in Carlsbad when he suffered the heart attack about 9 p.m. Friday, March 14.  He was preparing a sermon on the Torah portion Ki Tissa for Saturday morning Shabbat services when he was stricken.

Paramedics tried to revive him and he was transported to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Besides by his wife, he is survived by two sons, Scott and Seth, two granddaughters, and a great grandchild.

The funeral will be at 11 a.m. Tuesday, March 18, at Congregation Beth Israel with burial to follow at Home of Peace Cemetery, Am Israel Mortuary reported.  The officiants will be Rabbi Elie Spitz, the rabbi emeritus of Congregation B’nai Israel of Tustin, California, who was Rabbi Dosick’s friend for many years, and Cantor Kathy Robbins, who was Dosick’s colleague at the Elijah Minyan.

Below is a biographical sketch of Rabbi Dosick that appeared in my book, Schmoozing Along the Interstate 5, Volume 3.

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ENCINITAS, California – Rabbi Wayne Dosick came to San Diego in late 1975 to serve as spiritual leader at Congregation Beth El, then located in the Clairemont neighborhood but soon to move to La Jolla. In 1976, the first year that Dosick officiated High Holy Day services in San Diego County, he instituted a Tashlich (Cast Away) service on the afternoon of the first day of Rosh Hashanah. Today, such services are quite common, but back then, conducting the symbolic ceremony on the shores of the Pacific Ocean was unknown in San Diego County.

When he led Beth El, Dosick took his congregation to La Jolla Shores. Later in his career, as the leader of Congregation Beth Am, he chose Fletcher Cove.  For the last 30 years, as the leader of the Elijah Minyan, he and his congregation symbolically throw their sins onto the ocean waters here at Moonlight Beach State Park.

The rabbi recalled that when he suggested that first Tashlich ceremony back in 1976, his ritual vice president was dubious that anyone would come. However, Dosick said he “promoted it” during his sermons and 200 people arrived.

“The beauty of it was back East where they do Tashlich, or in Chicago where I grew up (and where Lake Michigan is to the east), the sun is setting in the opposite direction from the water, but here the sun sets over the water. So, it is utterly gorgeous!”

“I don’t think anyone thinks that throwing your breadcrumbs into a body of flowing water literally means that you are throwing your sins away,” Dosick continued. “But it is symbolic, and religion is symbolism, ceremony, and ritual. As we did it, more and more shuls around the county heard about it, and it has become a tradition here in San Diego County.”

Dosick noted that Temple Solel, a Reform congregation based in the Cardiff-by-the-Sea neighborhood of Encinitas, also conducts Tashlich ceremonies at Moonlight Beach. “An older lady joined our minyan and asked a friend ‘How will I know which is the Solel group and which is Elijah Minyan?’ And the person said to her, ‘The Solel people will look like fine families of suburban Reform Jews, and Rabbi Dosick’s group will look like a bunch of aging hippies.’”

Typically, Dosick’s Tashlich service involves a short prayer service. “Kathy Robbins is our cantor, and she brings her guitar and we bring a little sound system,” Dosick said. “We have a little pamphlet that we have put together with some prayers – mostly the traditional High Holy Day prayers that people know so well.  I tell them ‘BYOBC–Bring Your Own Bread Crumbs’—and at the end of the service we sound the shofar and we cast the crumbs into the waters.” Usually, the waves don’t return the bread to the shore because “The Jewish birds, with names like ‘Segals’ (seagulls) will eat them!”

The “aging hippie” description rings true for Dosick. Why “aging”?  In May 2022 when I interviewed him, Dosick, then 74, was the longest serving, still-active rabbi in San Diego County, having preceded Rabbi Yonah Fradkin, the leader of the Chabad movement in the county, by several months. Early in his tenure here, he met with Rabbi Morton Cohn, the longtime Reform rabbi of Congregation Beth Israel who became the founding rabbi of Temple Emanu-El. Cohn told him he had 10 candidates from Hebrew Union College to serve as his assistant rabbi. As Cohn knew none of them, he asked Dosick for his recommendation. Dosick responded, “Marty Lawon without a doubt.”  Lawson was hired and went on to serve as Cohn’s assistant rabbi, eventually succeeding him as senior rabbi at Temple Emanu-El, and is now retired after a full and productive career.

And why is “hippie” accurate? Some people become increasingly conservative as they age; but the reverse has been true in Dosick’s life. He grew up in a Conservative congregation but decided to enter the Reform seminary of Hebrew Union College because he objected to the Jewish Theological Seminary of the Conservative movement on two grounds.  First, it still separated men and women during prayer services and Dosick opposed mehitzahs (physical barriers). Second the JTS leadership was then on record supporting the war in Vietnam in the mistaken belief that if the U.S. left Vietnam to the Communists, its support for Israel against its enemies also might be shaky.

As a student rabbi, Dosick served small congregations in Seminole, Oklahoma, and in the Tri-Cities area of Tennessee. His parents, Hy and Roberta Dosick, meanwhile, had moved from the southside of Chicago to San Diego, where they developed small strip malls, including one mentioned in the first chapter of this book where Barry Robbins (owner of Milton’s Deli) got his start in the restaurant business with Chicago Brothers pizza. One day, Rabbi Dosick received a telephone call from a man who said, “You don’t know me, and I don’t know you, but I met your parents at a mutual friend’s brunch here in San Diego. They tell me that they have a son who is a rabbi. I’ve got a shul that needs a rabbi. Come talk to us.”

That Conservative shul was Congregation Beth El, where Dosick assumed the pulpit in November 1975. With the help of longtime community activist Barney Feldman, he helped to effect a reconciliation between Beth El and a breakaway congregation. On February 1^st, the recombined congregation “closed on the land in La Jolla and we walked on an 8 1/2- mile march through the streets carrying Torahs and the Israeli and American flags,” Dosick recalled. “I wanted to let La Jolla know that we were coming.”

There was an old home on the property on Gilman Drive where Congregation Beth El now sits. Services were conducted in the old house, and a few trailers were put on the property for ancillary purposes. “When it was nice out, we were in the back yard, and for High Holidays we put up a tent if the weather was going to be good, or we rented space in a local church.”

Old-time La Jollans were less than thrilled about having a Jewish congregation in their midst. When Congregation Beth El applied for an easement to have a left turn from westbound Gilman Drive to permit cars to turn onto its property, the local planning group flatly turned down the request. “As I was leaving, still young and inexperienced, a well-known member of the community strides up to me, puts his finger right in my face, and says, ‘Listen Jew boy, we don’t want you and your Jew-church here in La Jolla. We never wanted you here. We want you to go away. Seemingly, we are stuck with you. Every time you have to go a quarter mile past your property and make a U-turn to come back the other way, you will remember that we didn’t want you.’”

Dosick remained at the helm of the Conservative congregation for a little more than six years. “If I had been older and more experienced, I would have better known how to weave together the people from Clairemont and La Jolla and better integrate all the folks who were coming from South Africa, Mexico, Iran, Canada, and all over the United States. I am very proud of the work I did at Beth El and the tremendous growth we experienced together. But it was time for me to move on.”

Dosick said in the aftermath of his departure was the creation of Congregation Adat Yeshurun, which was Orthodox. “The South Africans didn’t know from Conservative Judaism. They knew Orthodox and Reform, but not Conservative. But they liked me and put up with me.” After Dosick was replaced “they made their own shul. They got their friend Jeff Wohlgelernter to come. He was a magnificent rabbi who worked 20 hours a day—a fabulous guy. They made a very powerful and impressive synagogue.”

New ventures awaited Rabbi Dosick. One of the first was creation of a “Video Synagogue” in which Dosick put a Friday night service on videotape. “That was when video was in its infancy and they couldn’t decide between Beta and VHS yet,” he recalled. “We made a full 45-minute Friday night service with a full congregation, a rabbi and a cantor, beautiful background visuals, and responsive reading that popped up on the screen. We put that video into hospitals and nursing homes wherever Jews were confined. The shul was virtual. If your hospital had a video player, they wheeled a cart into your room and attached the player to your television. You watched it for 45 minutes and they took it to the next room. That is how primitive it was. But it met a real need, and people loved it. It really was a forerunner of all the Jewish video work that came later.”

Meanwhile up in coastal north county, a small synagogue named Temple Sinai “closed their doors,” Dosick recalled. “They gave away the Torahs, the yarmulkes (head coverings) and fired the rabbi. Years later four families decided that they needed a new shul for their kids, and in 1982 they called me and asked, ‘would you start a new synagogue with us?’  That was the beginning of Beth Am.”

The Beth Am pioneers needed an inexpensive place to rent and found a former Goodyear tire store which the landlord was willing to let them have for a favorable rent. “We kept the sign that said Goodyear, so for the first Rosh Hashanah a couple of guys held it up and said that we should have a very Goodyear.” Over the next 11 years under Dosick, the Conservative congregation grew but its explosive growth did not occur until after it moved from Solana Beach to Carmel Valley in the midst of that San Diego neighborhood’s demographic boom. That was after Dosick’s tenure.

However, a practice instituted under Dosick set the tone for the synagogue’s move to Carmel Valley. Beth Am applied for one of the Torah scrolls that had been saved from the Holocaust. The scroll was being preserved by the Westminster Trust in London. When the request was granted, funds were required to bring the Torah to Solana Beach. Dosick approached future Congresswoman Lynn Schenk and her husband, Prof. C. Hugh Friedman about sponsoring. “Lynn didn’t hesitate and the next day the check was on my desk. Then when we dedicated the Torah, we dressed it in stark black with a yellow star. On Yom Kippur Day, Lynn and Hugh brought it under a chuppah held by Fred and Shari Schenk (Lynn’s brother and sister-in-law), and her parents Sidney and Elsa. While they were waiting in the back for the right moment, Sidney told Lynn for the first time in her life that it was his forced job in the Holocaust to cut out the yellow strs. He was a tailor. There he was standing with this Torah scroll with a yellow star, and that reminded him of what he had done in the camps and the freedom he and his family now embraced.”

Dosick made it a practice to have children becoming b’nai mitzvah to read from the Holocaust Torah. He would tell them, “You come to the Torah, not only for yourself but for one of the children of Roudnice (Czechoslovakia) who wanted to stand at this Torah but whose life ended instead in a puff of smoke coming from a crematorium chimney.”

That prompted the Davidson/Baird family to travel to Roudnice to learn more about where that Torah had originated. The synagogue had been destroyed but by the Jewish graveyard a memorial building where bodies were prepared for burial was still standing. The family brought back to Beth Am a rock and a piece of wood from the memorial hall site and also photographed the hall. Years later, the arched entrance of the memorial hall was recreated in Beth Am’s courtyard, and the arch served as an architectural element inside the synagogue.

In 1998, while at Beth Am, Dosick was contacted by the Jewish Chautauqua Society, to learn if he would be interested in teaching a course to be underwritten by the society at the Catholic-run University of San Diego. The one-year contract extended to 17 years. Along with the vision of Msgr. I. Brent Eagen, chancellor of San Diego’s Roman Catholic Diocese, he helped to institute an All-Faith Service held at the beginning of every spring semester

“We had Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, Baptists, Episcopalians (in the first year) and each year we had a theme. The first year it was peace, and everybody chanted, danced, meditated, ohmmed, in his or her tradition. Another year I was invited to preach the homily.” Yet another year “there were Native Americans in ceremonial dress dancing up and down the aisles of the Immaculata.” Dosick also led model Passover seders. Eagen and Dosick became such good friends that before the monsignor died, he asked that there be two scriptural readings at his funeral: one from Hebrew Scriptures by Dosick; the other from Christian Scriptures by USD President Alice Hayes.

The meditations perhaps were harbingers of the ritual practice at the Elijah Minyan which at the time of our interview Dosick had been leading at his home in Carlsbad for 30 years—other than the times it was held in members’ homes in 1996 and 1997 when his home had to be rebuilt after being burned down in the Harmony Grove wildfire that destroyed approximately 100 other homes as well.

“I wanted to create a living laboratory for exploring reemerging Jewish spirituality,” Dosick said. “So, we started the Minyan as that living laboratory.” In 1997, Dosick received a phone call from Rabbi Zalman Schacher-Shalomi, founder of Jewish Renewal. Based in Colorado, Schachter-Shalomi had San Diego connections. His wife, Eve Ilsen, was the daughter of Sheba Penner and stepdaughter of the late Rabbi Samuel Penner of the now defunct Congregation Beth Tefilah. “I had met him when he was visiting his mishpacha (family) and also before that when he was taking his doctorate at Hebrew Union College while I was there.”

“Rab Zalman said, ‘Wayne, it is time for you to be with us. I have arranged for you and Ellen (Kaufman, who is Rabbi Dosick’s wife) to teach at the Kallah,’ which was a biennial meeting on college campuses, or wherever, to learn and to daven (pray). We met these incredible, highly spiritual, wonderful people. At the same time, I met the people from the Academy for Jewish Religion in New York and helped bring that pluralistic rabbinical and cantorial seminary to California. These were people who were interwoven with each other. So, I met some of the most deeply spiritual, God-centered people that I had met in my whole life. I said, ‘Okay, the Minyan is part of this growing movement’ although it is not actually a movement. It is a growing confederation of people who are doing the same thing we are doing. That is how we decided to affiliate with Aleph—The Alliance for Jewish Renewal.”

In becoming a dues-paying member of Ohalah, the rabbinic organization of Jewish Renewal, Dosick probably became the only person in the world who simultaneously is a member of the Reform Movement’s Central Conference of Rabbis; the Conservative Movement’s Rabbinical Assembly; and Jewish Renewal’s Ohalah.

I asked Rabbi Dosick to explain how Jewish Renewal differs from other non-Orthodox movements. He responded that in Jewish history, there has been a pendulum swing between coming to God through faith and coming to God through reason.

“We moved from faith to reason, reason to faith, back and forth, back and forth,” he said. “Over the last 250 years, since the Enlightenment and the Emancipation, we’ve been in a period of high intellectual reason, and matters of the mind have been most important. Since the end of the Shoah (Holocaust) we have been seeing the pendulum starting to swing back to coming to God through faith, that is, making God the center of what we do. We are very good at creating a communal relationship with God. But we are not so good at helping each person create a deep, personal, intimate relationship with God. That is very hard to do in a big institution where you come to worship, and you wear nice clothes, and you sit facing forward and all read from the same page at the same time.”

Often in contemporary synagogues, Dosick said, “You see book reviews, men’s club bowling league, Hebrew school carpools, and raffles for the fundraisers, but where is God in all of this? So, what we saw was a very hungry generation of young people who came into Judaism looking for spirituality but didn’t find it. So, they went off to the ashrams and the meditation centers and the Buddhist retreats of silence. As Rab Zalman always used to say, ‘We are very grateful to the eastern gurus who kept our kids while we were finding our way back.’ So Jewish Renewal involves deep, contemplative meditation, prayer, and great joy and ecstasy. The joyous music started with Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, and he and Zalman were great friends, interacted a great deal, and all the great Jewish music has come from that. If it weren’t for Shlomo, there wouldn’t be (Jewish religious composers) Debbie Friedman, or Craig Taubman, or Craig Parks. Otherwise, we were singing German Reform Jewish sheet music from 1850. Now, all of a sudden, we are going to camps and youth movement conventions, and we came back with great joy.”

Services at Jewish Reform congregations vary according to the rabbi and the membership. “Jewish Renewal services reflect different people. A lot of people think New Age is Buddhism sprinkled with Judaism. I take Judaism and sprinkle it with New Age. I think each service is reflective of the community in which it is.”

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, recent services of the Elijah Minyan have been mainly online. “For the last 2 ½ years our house has looked like a television studio,” Dosick said. “We have two green screens across the room with computers and hanging microphones and lights and cords running through the living room with one cord running back to my office. Otherwise, the services would have been in our living room. After the fire, instead of having a family room, dining room, and living room, we just took all the square footage and built it back into one great room. We can get 50 people in here comfortably and squeeze 80. In the beginning, we went from house to house. Then years ago, when Kathy (Robbins) came, she wanted a piano in one place and not have to schlep it all over. As I was getting older, the prayer books were getting heavier and heavier, so I was happy not to schlep. It has been at my home for the last 10 years or so. We rent out a space in a church or a hotel for the High Holy Days.”

There was a time that Jewish Family Service was considering closing its field office in North County because the man who was running it reported very little to do. Dosick and Rabbi Leonore Bohm of Temple Solel successfully urged Jill Spitzer, then the executive director of JFS, to reconsider. “The deal was that they would hire someone on a one-year contract and if that person could make the office work, then they would continue him or her, and if not, they would say ‘Sorry, we’ll be back in five years.’ So, they hired Ellen, who has a master’s in social work out of the University of Chicago. At that point she was working for Jewish Family Service in Orange County and I was on the faculty of the University of Southern California School of Social Work. She came down here and one of her first jobs was to sell her programs to us. So, she took [Rabbi] Lenore [Bohm] and me to lunch and it turned out that we were born on exactly the same block in Chicago, although she is seven-eight years younger than I. She worked, built up North County to four separate offices.”

Divorced, he and Ellen started to see each other. He learned that while his future wife was “the finest talk therapist anyone could ask for, she was the world’s master practitioner and teacher of the psycho-spiritual therapy known as ‘Soul Memory Discovery.’ She has trained 400-500 people from all over the world, who come to San Diego for a 12-day course on how to be the facilitator of soul memory discovery and then they take it back to their communities.”

“Because she is deep into the world of the spirit,” Dosick said, “my work and her work dance with each other; they interact with each other.” Its underlying concept is that your soul remembers everything that ever happens to it in this lifetime or any previous lifetime, records it on a continually running tape. So, if you come to a therapist with a particular problem—the ‘presenting problem,’ as it is called—most of the time the talk therapist will try to talk you back to the original source of the trauma. This can be very successful, but what if it was preverbal or prenatal or from another lifetime?  You will never get to it. So, with a very gentle set of questions –using a pendulum to record yes or no – your own soul takes you back to the exact moment whenever the trauma began that is now presenting itself in the same or a similar fashion. With a very gentle clearing process, almost a holy process, it takes away the original source of the problem. Let’s say water is drained from the battery of your car. With no water, there is no power for your battery to work. Likewise, if we drain away the source of the issue, then there is no power for that issue to work and it clears up and goes away. So instead of coming for 10 to 15 therapy sessions, you come for one, usually three hours long, a fairly lengthy session, and the issue dries up and goes away.”

Dosick wrote approximately 400 biweekly columns for the now defunct San Diego Jewish Times. He also authored ten books, some of them with Ellen. The very first, published in 1988, was The Best is Yet to Be: Renewing American Judaism in which Dosick critiqued synagogues and Jewish Federations and offered some suggestions for how they may be made better. Next came two books about how Jewish values might be applied in the secular world. One was The Business Bible: 10 New Commandments for Bringing Spirituality and Ethical Values into the Workplace. The second was Golden Rules: 10 Ethical Values to Teach Your Children.

After that came Living Judaism, which Dosick wrote as his doctoral dissertation at Columbia Pacific University. More than a quarter century later, it still was being used as a primer in conversion classes at Jewish congregations across the country and in introductory courses to Judaism at colleges. Coincidentally, the day before I interviewed Dosick, I was chatting with Rabbi Michael Leo Samuel of Temple Beth Shalom in Chula Vista. He happened to mention that Living Judaism was the best book he had read for explaining Judaism to the uninitiated.

Dosick’s next book was Dancing with God, which was renamed Soul Judaism in the paperback version. It was based on experiences at the Elijah Minyan.

Following the Harmony Grove fire, in which Dosick lost all his possessions, including his extensive Jewish library, he wrote When Life Hurts.

With Ellen as his co-author he wrote Empowering Your Indigo Child, referring to children who seem to come with great spirituality into the world, and almost from their start as freethinkers. He and Ellen also wrote together 20 Minute Kaballah.

Since then he wrote The Real Name of God, which he revealed as Anochi.

His most recent book was Radical Loving: One God, One World, One People which was awarded two international book awards in 2021.

“They say that rabbis give one sermon over and over in their lives with variations,” Dosick told me. “I’ve been fortunate to give two. One is on the prophetic sense of social justice. The second, for the last 25 years, has been to help you create a deep, loving relationship with God.”

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Donald H. Harrison is editor emeritus of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com