Lawyer and activist tries on new role: rabbi

VIRGINIA BEACH

In the 1960s, the voices teenaged Howard Mandell heard loudest were Martin Luther King Jr., Bobby Kennedy and Jews in the civil rights movement.

"I was at an early age impressed by the role the Jewish people were playing" as freedom riders and social justice activists, said Mandell, a Conservative Jew. "When you're a minority, you're especially attuned to what other members of your minority group are doing."

Mandell became an activist himself as the first staff attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center, and then as a career civil rights lawyer for indigent clients in Montgomery, Ala.

But in the 1990s, he was distracted again by a voice, one detectable only to himself.

"It was the calm, still voice within," an utterance Mandell recognized as coming from God.

He answered the call by chucking his law career and graduating this spring from Jewish Theological Seminary in New York as a rabbi.

Tonight, he'll lead his first High Holy Days service as the new rabbi of Temple Emanuel at the Oceanfront.

"Being a rabbi is doing the same work I was doing before, but doing it again under the aegis and leadership of God," Mandell said. Both vocations help repair the world, a mission Judaism calls tikkun olam, he said.

Mandell, 63, has brown eyes, salt-and-pepper hair and a long, patient face. His voice is hardly louder than the soothing, gentle crash of waves from an ambient sound machine in his office.

The mildness belies his intense convictions.

"In court he wasn't always soft-spoken - he could be impassioned when he needed to be," said Bobby Segall, a Montgomery lawyer and board member of the American Civil Liberties Union of Alabama.

But behind the passion is compassion, friends say.

Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, said he watched Mandell talk with murderers in New York's Sing Sing prison about personal transformation.

"Howard was incredibly good at getting people to express their feelings and feel safe in front of each other," Cohen said. "I don't think anyone had a dry eye."

Growing up in the Jewish community of Providence, R.I., Mandell never thought about being a rabbi.

As an artsy-minded college student, his first career choice was writing fiction. His mother was a law school graduate, but it was his father, an MIT-trained engineer, who implored him to try law school.

"Because of all the anti-Semitism at the time, he wanted me to have something I could fall back on and be my own boss," Mandell said. As a good son, he reluctantly agreed to try law school.

The decision changed his life. Under professors' mentoring at Georgetown University's law school, Mandell got hooked on constitutional law and civil rights work.

His instructors included Philip J. Hirschkop, a lawyer who helped win the U.S. Supreme Court's rejection in 1967 of Virginia's ban on interracial marriage.

After graduating in 1970, Mandell became a clerk for Frank M. Johnson, a federal judge in Montgomery. Johnson is honored today for his landmark desegregation rulings, but in 1970, he was a pariah in Alabama, as Mandell quickly discovered after moving there for his new job.

At a party, he told neighbors he was clerking for a local judge. Which judge? the neighbors asked.

"Judge Johnson," Mandell replied. Conversation froze.

"No one spoke to me, and after 15 minutes, I left."

It was an early taste of how deeply locals might revile his career choice.

After a year's clerkship, Mandell became the first lawyer hired by the SPLC, which represents indigent clients, especially minorities, in civil rights cases.

"He excelled in telling the stories of those who were accused or injured," said SPLC co-founder Morris Dees, who hired Mandell. "He was able to win over juries because he told their stories in a real-life way."

After two years Mandell formed his own civil rights law practice, Alabama's first racially integrated law firm.

"We were going to save the world. We had a cause and so much to be done - it was hard to say no to people being victimized," Mandell said. In 1977 he helped start the state's first federally funded legal services group.

"He was incredibly devoted to his clients and had a deep, deep, abiding sense of justice," Cohen said. "If you had Howard on your side, you were going to prevail, more often than not."

Eventually, Mandell's practice expanded to include general law cases and represented Major League Baseball players including Oscar Gamble, a black slugger from Alabama.

Family also was a focus - he married and had two sons - but not religion. Mandell said he did not attend synagogue regularly.

And yet, the voice eventually began to speak.

"I started asking myself, 'God, is there something else you want me doing with my life?' " Mandell said.

In 1996, he took time off from his practice - a lot of time.

"I thought I'd be back in a week."

Instead, during a years-long sabbatical, he played piano, slowed his life's tempo, increased his synagogue attendance and studied Torah in Israel.

In 2000, the new mayor of Montgomery recruited Mandell to be city attorney.

"I said, 'I sue the city of Montgomery, I don't represent it.' "

The mayor implored him to help reform the city's image.

Mandell held the job for two years, while his inner voice pestered him. Ultimately, a chance - or divinely engineered - encounter with the visiting Jewish Theological Seminary's dean convinced Mandell to switch vocations in 2002.

"I'd probably never thought of rabbinical school, but it's what I needed to hear, wanted to hear. I don't think it's all serendipity."

Now, preparing for Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, Mandell is a bit nervous.

"The anxiety comes from this being my first time,

really the first time where I'm totally responsible as the rabbi," he said.

Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year, starts the 10 days of High Holy Days that conclude with Yom Kippur, also known as the Day of Atonement. Mandell said his sermons will stress traditional themes.

"The High Holidays are a time for self-reflection, introspection and how can I improve my relationship with God and with other human beings," Mandell said. "It's an opportunity to get in touch with that divine part of us."

Steven G. Vegh, (757) 446-2417, steven.vegh@pilotonline.com