Maryland Rabbi Suspended By Reform Council For Ethics Violation
A Reform rabbi who led a congregation in Maryland for over a decade until resigning late last year has been suspended from his movement’s main rabbinical organization for violating its code of ethics, the Frederick (Md.) News-Post reported.
Rabbi Dan Sikowitz was suspended from the Central Conference of American Rabbis in May, the organization confirmed in a statement on Thursday. Sikowitz, a former financial analyst, began leading Congregation Kol Ami as a student rabbi shortly after the temple was founded in 2003, and was ordained as a full rabbi in 2007. He was the 120-family synagogue’s only ever full-time rabbi until last November, when he abruptly resigned after he admitted to violating the CCAR’s Code of Ethics — though the nature of those violations was never fully made public.
Joanna Sieger, president of the synagogue’s board of directors, wrote in an email to congregants after the resignation that Sikowitz’s ethics violations did not involve children and were not against the law, but were serious nonetheless.
Sieger wrote in the January/February congregational newsletter that Sikowitz had admitted to violating the CCAR ethics code and “was planning to continue to do so….There are systems in place, rules Rabbis agree to, and those rules were broken.”
Sikowitz’s suspension from the CCAR essentially means that he cannot be hired or perform rabbinical duties at a Reform temple.
Sikowitz and Sieger declined to comment to the Frederick News-Post on Thursday.
Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO