From reverend to rabbi: a post Oct 7 journey

For Rev. Ana Levy-Lyons, a Unitarian Universalist minister in Brooklyn, the Hamas attack changed her life in a unique way. It led Levy-Lyons to quit her role as spiritual leader of the First Unitarian Congregational Society after a dozen successful years there. She’s now focusing on studying to become a rabbi.

Levy-Lyons is Jewish, something she discovered only in her 20s, when a cousin let the family secret slip. It was something her parents had worked hard to deny. Her father had changed the family’s last name. Her family lived as so many do, as American atheists.

Leaving Unitarianism is a big step; her adult life has been bound to Unitarianism since she was ordained a minister in 2007. Levy-Lyons met her husband, Jeff Lyons, when she was interning in her first pulpit, and he was on that congregation’s board. They bonded over their shared Jewish heritage, which neither, at the time, was involved with. It was when they married, also in 2007, that she reclaimed her family’s original and unmistakably Jewish last name: Levy.