Rabbi Robert Wolkoff has only been in Greenport since July, but he is already imagining what Congregation Tifereth Israel might become.

The congregation’s new rabbi wants to open the century-old synagogue more widely to Greenport, build on the cultural and civic interests of its members and make it a gathering place for the broader community.

“I’m hoping to sort of place this jewel of a building as kind of a centerpiece here in the community,” he said.

If somebody needs a place for a meeting devoted to a worthy cause, “come on down,” Wolkoff said. Once he gets a Keurig, his favorite coffee maker, set up, that is.

There is a restless curiosity about the 75-year-old Wesleyan grad that becomes apparent within minutes of meeting him. After nearly half a century as a rabbi, conversation with him moves seamlessly from Swedish social democracy to Puccini, from the Holocaust to poverty, immigration and poetry slams.

Wolkoff spent a decade as a rabbi in Gothenburg, Sweden, where he studied the language six hours a day for six months until he could preach in Swedish and write for Swedish newspapers and magazines. He later spent 12 years leading a congregation in Savannah, Georgia, followed by 18 years at his most recent synagogue in New Jersey. Along the way, he accumulated a personal library of tens of thousands of books, most of which are still waiting to be unpacked at his new home in Greenport.

“If I do one bookcase a day, it’ll take me two months,” Wolkoff said with a laugh, sitting in the garden gazebo at Tifereth Israel on Fourth Street.

Wolkoff comes across as exceptionally well read and intellectually engaged, but unpretentious. He is warm and funny and quick to acknowledge the limits of his own expertise. One minute he is offering a detailed explanation of how ecology and ancient weather patterns illuminate passages of the Old Testament; the next he is laughing about Swedish pastries or his limited knowledge of opera.

Wolkoff recently found himself listening to several Tifereth Israel members discussing their favorite Puccini operas.

“I like classical music more than the next guy,” he said, “but I can only name one.”

It was the congregation’s intellectual and cultural life, as well as its involvement in the community, that helped draw Wolkoff to Greenport.

“The people in the congregation are stunningly cultured,” he said. “They are extremely well read, familiar with music, theater, dance,” and deeply involved in social causes throughout the North Fork.

After nearly two decades at his most recent congregation in New Jersey, Wolkoff was ready for a change. Synagogues searching for rabbis fill out questionnaires describing themselves and the programs they are most proud of, Wolkoff said, and Tifereth Israel’s answers caught his attention.

“They’re doing a yellow candle remembrance of the Holocaust,” he recalled. “They have a program set up with the high school, and they’re sending kids to museums. This is great stuff. So I wanted to be a part of that.”

And he wants to build on it. Someone donated a piano to Tifereth Israel, but the synagogue already had one, so the extra piano ended up in the rabbi’s residence. Wolkoff immediately began thinking about what he could do with it. This winter, when things quiet down, he hopes to hold informal piano-and-poetry nights, inviting musicians and poets to perform and opening the gatherings to people beyond the congregation. He might share Israeli poetry or read from the spiritual autobiography he is writing.

It is part of what Wolkoff calls “the life of the mind.” He wants to use the synagogue as both a place of worship and a place for ideas, culture and community.

‘A kind of liberation’

Wolkoff’s career has taken him through strikingly different Jewish communities and cultures. One of the most formative experiences came early, when he was serving a congregation in New Jersey in the 1980s. He sometimes ended up presiding over quadruple bar mitzvahs — four children at once — and gradually concluded that the congregation wanted less a religious leader than what he calls a “religious figurehead.”

“They wanted somebody who would run the services and do appropriate pastoral things,” he said.

What they did not want, he said, was a rabbi delving into controversial subjects or challenging congregants with ideas with which they might not agree.

“What exactly are you trying to do when you give a sermon?” Wolkoff began asking himself. “What am I bringing to the table? If all I’m doing is reinforcing what people already are, what do they need me for?”

So he went somewhere that wanted precisely the opposite: Sweden. Wolkoff spent a decade in Gothenburg — the nation’s second-largest city — where congregants wanted a rabbi willing “to teach from the depth of his heart every single week, and really bring it,” he said.

“That was much more who I am.”

Soon he was conversing, preaching and writing in Swedish.

“I had to pick it up quickly. Unfortunately, nobody older than 12 who learns Swedish ever gets the accent right,” he said with a broad grin. “It’s an utterly unique accent. There are 19 vowel sounds, none of which are the same as American vowel sounds.”

His decade there also gave Wolkoff firsthand experience living under a single-payer health care system and in a social democracy where, he said, the absence of widespread poverty changed the texture of everyday life.

“Living in a place where there’s no poverty, there’s a kind of liberation that comes with that,” he said.

Sweden also gave him his wife, an American he met while both were living abroad. They eventually decided to return to the United States. She has since died, he said.

‘What do I know?’

After Sweden, Wolkoff spent 12 years in Savannah, Georgia, then 18 years in New Jersey. Along the way, his interests kept expanding. His personal library grew to 30,000 volumes. He became deeply engaged with Israel and Holocaust history. In Savannah, he participated in annual Holocaust memorial observances at nearby Fort Stewart, experiences that left him with an enduring admiration for the American military.

“You look at these 19-year-olds, and you realize they’re the sword point for morality. You know, at the end of the day, the sound of freedom is an F-15 flying over your head, and American soldiers on the ground.

“Listen, there’s a big ugly world out there,” he continued. “A lot of bad stuff happens, and who are you going to call? Europe, for the most part, is ineffective. Their heart might be in the right place, and as a coordinated effort, they can be helpful. But when things get real serious, you’re going to want to have the American Army.”

He is currently working on three books.

Wolkoff has strong views about Israel and Zionism and is deeply troubled by the growth of antisemitism. He said that when his congregation prays for those who are ill or suffering, he always includes innocent civilians in Gaza. But when it comes to the political questions facing the United States, Wolkoff draws a careful distinction. He intends to focus on values, he said, rather than prescribe policies.

“I know what I know, but I also know what I don’t know,” he said.

The same principle guides his thinking about poverty. Should government raise the minimum wage? Lower it? What policy would produce the best outcome?

“There are Nobel Prize winners that argue about that,” Wolkoff said. “What do I know?”

What he does know, he said, is that everyone deserve dignity. He draws deep inspiration from an ancient Hebrew inscription, the oldest yet discovered, he said, whose message concerns the responsibility to protect the poor and the vulnerable.

“The powerful need to protect the powerless,” Wolkoff said. For him, that extends beyond economic poverty to immigrants, women, LGBTQ people and others.

Wolkoff believes his role is to speak to the moral questions, while leaving the policy solutions to those better equipped to devise them. He illustrated the distinction with a story about religious activists confronting Secretary of State Henry Kissinger during the Vietnam War and demanding an end to the conflict.

“Kissinger said, ‘Well, how exactly do you want me to do that? “And their response,” Wolkoff said, smiling, “was, ‘Mr. Secretary, our job is to tell you that justice shall roll like a mighty stream. Your job is to take care of the plumbing.’

“I certainly don’t know better than anybody else how to solve the immigration problem that we’re facing,” he continued. “What I do know is that immigrants are human beings that have fundamental rights and deserve to be treated with dignity and integrity … I demand that they be treated with dignity.”

A synagogue connected to its community

Wolkoff is still new to the North Fork, but he has already zeroed in on what he calls “forces for good” scattered throughout Tifereth Israel and the wider community. His idea is to connect them. Someone gardening to raise food for CAST might become involved with the arts. Someone involved with the theater might help protect ospreys. Jewish teaching might intersect with environmentalism, music, poetry or local civic life.

For the Jewish festival of Sukkot, for example, Wolkoff envisions a program on what he calls “biblical ecology,” pairing his discussion of the natural world described in ancient Jewish texts with a contemporary voice addressing environmental issues on the North Fork.

Give Wolkoff an opening like that and his inner professor emerges.

Soon he is explaining Bronze Age weather patterns, harvest cycles, grain, olives and a hot desert wind whose arrival could determine whether a farmer celebrated abundance or confronted famine. Understanding the ecology of the land, he argues, allows a modern reader to see dimensions of biblical passages that otherwise remain invisible.

“I’ve got a ton of these stories,” he said.

He also wants other people telling theirs: hence the piano-and-poetry nights, lectures and collaborations with artists and environmentalists, drawing on the concentration of writers, musicians, actors, academics and civic volunteers he has encountered around Greenport.

His ambition is to make the synagogue a place where Jewish tradition embraces the culture and concerns of the community around it. Wolkoff would also like to someday build a labyrinth in the synagogue garden, provided those responsible for the garden embrace the idea. He sees walking a labyrinth as a spiritual exercise in surrender.

“We have to go where God guides us to go. And if you can learn to live with that, rather than ‘Oh, this is what I want and this is what I have to have, and I’ll drive myself crazy if I don’t get it’ — If you just let go and let God, then you know you still want what you want, but you feel that you’re carried a little bit.”

It’s a useful philosophy for a rabbi leading a synagogue that has endured a difficult year.

Focused on the future

Wolkoff arrives at a delicate moment for Tifereth Israel. His predecessor, Rabbi Gadi Capela, was dismissed last year after 13 years as the congregation’s spiritual leader following an extraordinarily close and contentious membership vote. The dispute divided the congregation, led to litigation and eventually resulted in some former Tifereth Israel members forming a new congregation with Capela.

Wolkoff has no intention of becoming enmeshed in that dispute. In fact, he said, he knows relatively little about it.

“I am focused solely on what I have in front of me. I have no intention at all of trying to, so to speak, go after people who felt that they had been spiritually well served by my predecessor. I’m simply going to do what I do here and build what I build here.”

Wolkoff declined to comment on the dispute itself, citing ongoing litigation.

“A, I don’t know anything, and B, I certainly don’t want to make anything worse,” he said. “This is going to have to work out in the way that it works out.”

He has enough to do without litigating the past.

“I am interested in reinvigorating rather than re-adjudicating.”