Angela Warnick Buchdahl

Angela Warnick Buchdahl (born Angela Lee Warnick in 1972) is the first Asian-American person to be ordained as a rabbi, and the first Asian-American person to be ordained as a hazzan (cantor) anywhere in the world.[2][3] [4] [5] She is also the first woman to become both a rabbi and a cantor; others had become one or the other, but not both.[6][7]

Buchdahl was born in Seoul, South Korea.[8] Her mother was a Korean Buddhist and her father, Frederick David Warnick, was an American Ashkenazi Reform Jew, whose ancestors emigrated from Moinești, Romania, to the United States.[9][1] She was raised Jewish, and was ordained as a cantor in 1999, and ordained as a rabbi in 2001,[10] with both ordinations done by HUC-JIR, an American seminary for Reform Judaism.[11]

She appears in the PBS documentary 18 Voices Sing Kol Nidre. [12] [13]

Through 2013, she was the senior cantor of the Central Synagogue, a large Reform congregation in Manhattan.[11][10] [14] During her tenure as of 2012, Friday night attendance at the synagogue had doubled, post-bar mitzvah retention had tripled and the waiting list for membership had risen to over 300 (membership is capped at 2,000 families).[15] In 2013, she was named as the Senior Rabbi of the Central Synagogue.[16] [17] She is the first woman and the first Asian-American to be their Senior Rabbi.[18] [19]

She has served as faculty for the Wexner Heritage Foundation and for the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) Kallot programs, and on the board of the Jewish Multiracial Network.[11][20]

Personal life and ancestry[edit] She and her husband Jacob Buchdahl live in New York City and have three children, Eli, Rose, and Gabriel.

Her 20th great-grandfather was King Taejo, as she discovered when she was featured in Finding Your Roots, a PBS series hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr.[21] She also discovered then that her Romanian great-grandfather, Srul Soss, came by ship to New York in 1899 and lived a few blocks from the current location of Central Synagogue, where she is now rabbi.[22]

Source: Angela Buchdahl