Angela W. Buchdahl

Angela W. Buchdahl, the first Asian American Rabbi at Central Synagogue, New York City.

“When Cantor Angela Buchdahl walks among the pews, greeting congregants before Friday night services at Manhattan’s venerable Central Synagogue, she encounters a mélange of Jewish faces, including blacks, Asians and Hispanics.

It’s a diversity that reflects the emergence of an American Jewry of unprecedented ethnic breadth, and a diversity that Buchdahl — born to an Ashkenazi, Reform Jewish father and a Korean Buddhist mother — embodies.

In many ways, Buchdahl symbolizes the rapidly changing face of the 21st-century rabbinate. And with the announced retirement of Rabbi Peter Rubinstein as Central’s spiritual leader, she is now a leading candidate to assume the post of senior rabbi of the oldest continually in use synagogue in New York.”

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