Beth Shalom preparing for Zamek’s departure, Gardner’s arrival

• By MARK H. HUNTER
• Special to The Advocate
• Published: Apr 26, 2008 - Page: 1E - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Beth Shalom Synagogue will change rabbis this summer, and strangely enough, the Pacific Far East figures into the journeys of both men.

Rabbi Stanton M. Zamek, after nine years of ministry, is leaving in June for a synagogue in Hong Kong.

Thomas A. Gardner, the New Yorker who will replace Zamek in July, once lived in Japan for three years and has two degrees in Asian studies.

With the switch this summer, both of Baton Rouge’s synagogues will have changed rabbis in consecutive years. Congregation B’nai Israel hired Rabbi Corie Yutkin last year to replace Rabbi Barry Weinstein, who retired.

For Zamek and his wife Martha Bergadine, also a rabbi and executive director of the Jewish Federation of Greater Baton Rouge, the decision to leave Baton Rouge came in November.

“We wanted some new challenges and to broaden the Jewish horizons for our children,” daughter Ayelet, 11, and son, Rachamim, 6, Zamek said.

Choosing where came after checking listings with the World Union for Progressive Judaism and noticing the United Jewish Congregation of Hong Kong had an opening.

“Hong Kong is really the crossroads of the world,” he said. “We were up for an adventure and decided to do it.

“People don’t think of Hong Kong as the Jewish heartland — and it isn’t — but in some ways it actually offers more Jewish institutional support than Baton Rouge does,” Zamek said. Besides the 200-family synagogue there is also a Jewish community center, two kosher restaurants, a kosher market and a day school.

The Hong Kong congregation’s members are expatriates from all over the world, Zamek said, including Australians, British, Americans, Canadians, Israelis, Europeans and Latin Americans.

“There are a lot of kids,” Zamek said. “It is really exotic in a way, but it is also, in a sense, … a familiar, reform congregation and very traditional like Beth Shalom is.”

Zamek’s last service will be June 20. The family plans to get settled in Hong Kong in time for the children to enroll in school in August. Rabbi Bergadine will serve as director of the school, he said.

“I have really enjoyed my time here — my congregants are really wonderful and I wish I could take a bunch of them with me,” he said.
 “And I’m going to miss the clergy community too, because I’ve made some very dear friends here.” Zamek is vice president of the Interfaith Federation of Greater Baton Rouge, an interdenominational group of about 60 churches and both synagogues.