By Martha Moody Jacobs, Special To The Dayton Jewish Observer

Last year, a Chasidic woman earned a master’s degree in creative Jewish expression from Antioch University Midwest in Yellow Springs, under the guidance of a Chabad rabbi. That woman is Miriam Karp of Cincinnati, and the rabbi is Dayton’s Shmuel Klatzkin.

Thirty-five years ago, Karp left the University of Michigan on a spiritual search that led her to Chasidic life. She says this came about after she had a dream about her grandfather, who appeared to her in a row, among white-bearded sages.

Karp then studied at a Chabad women’s seminary in Brooklyn, married a Chabad rabbi, and worked for years in Jewish education, ending up with her husband and 10 children in Ohio. When Ohio’s curriculum requirements for teachers changed and she learned she would need a degree to continue teaching at Cincinnati Hebrew Day School, Karp decided to use those required studies to develop her art and writing.

From a friend, Karp heard about the individualized master’s program at Antioch, a program that struck her as demanding and flexible. Antioch requires each student to have an internal mentor, someone who teaches at Antioch, and an academically qualified expert in the student’s chosen field.

For her external mentor, Karp approached Klatzkin.

“He is uniquely positioned in that he has a Ph.D. from Brandeis, rabbinical ordination from HUC (Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, the seminary of the Reform movement), yet is also a Chabad rabbi and deeply versed in Chasidic thought,” Karp says.

The Karp and Klatzkin families met years ago when they lived in Boston, and re-established contact when they found themselves living in Ohio.

Klatzkin has worked with two other Antioch University students, another Chasidic woman, and an ordained minister. “The thing that most interested (Miriam and me),” he says, “was the idea of integration — that the oneness of God must be realized within the world in a way that would unite and integrate the talents and passions of our lives.”

In their studies, Klatzkin and Karp talked about a 20th-century Chasidic artist and his correspondence with the rebbes, then looked at Kabalistic and Chasidic sources regarding tiferet, or beauty.

Klatzkin says tiferet is seen simultaneously, “as beauty, truth and compassion. There was plenty there to study and to talk about.” This, he says, included “the mystical possibilities of art in serving God.”

For the writing component of her studies, Karp spent a week at the Antioch Writers’ Workshop. She also studied painting at the Dayton Art Institute. Her internal mentor at Antioch was Rebecca Kuder, M.F.A. chair for the university’s creative writing concentration. The fruit of Karp’s master’s program is a self-published memoir, Painting Zaidy’s Dream, and a series of acrylic paintings depicting Jewish rituals and scenes.

She hopes Painting Zaidy’s Dream, published in August, will be a bridge — opening the Orthodox world to outsiders and revealing to those already Orthodox the challenges of being a baal teshuvah (master of return), a person who chooses to live an Orthodox Jewish life who wasn’t raised Orthodox.

Karp grew up Jewish in suburban Detroit; her family attended religious services in “a Humanistic liberal place that met in rented schools.” Her memoir recounts her spiritual searching since childhood.

The first chapter describes when she, her husband, and eight of their children arrived at her mother’s Humanistic Jewish funeral. Karp’s group was in modest garb, yarmulkes, and black hats, and she had cut her blouse with a razor in keeping with traditional Jewish custom.

Other relatives and family friends are dressed in suits and sportcoats, with “sleek black sheaths.” Karp writes, “To the born-and-bred Orthodox I was… a free-floating anomaly, not cut of the same cloth as them… In the eyes of the worldly sophisticates, I was a quaint innocent, an idealist trapped in many rules.”

Karp has enjoyed writing all her life, and has been writing articles for Jewish publications for years. A chapter of her memoir about her first performance of the mitzvah of tahara, preparing a Jewish body for burial, “an ordinary, extraordinary thing to do,” was published in Hadassah Magazine in 2012 and won a first-place American Jewish Press Association Award for Writing About Women.

The most difficult task in writing her memoir, she says, was finding a way to be truthful but not disparaging about certain people: for example, the rabbi of her childhood.

“That took some thinking,” she reflects. “Your readers will really trust you if you don’t have to resort to cheap shots.”

Klatzkin calls Karp “constantly inspiring,” citing “the grace with which she finds a path that integrates the very many levels of her self.”

To paint, she had to conquer some leftover insecurities. Her memoir describes how in a college painting class, her professor “saw the photo clamped on my easel, the beginning sketch of Zaidy emerging…‘Oh, a nostalgic family picture. How nice.’”

“That stayed with me,” she says. She also struggled with how being an artist could fit with tikun olam, the repair of the world. She credits Klatzkin with teaching her that art could be a proper pursuit. “Finally I can say I’m an artist, and I write a bit.”

Miriam Karp’s paintings and more about her book are available at www.paintingzaidysdream.com.

To read the complete July 2014 Dayton Jewish Observer, click here.