Spiritual Care

 

At Cedar Village, our focus in on care for our residents.  We celebrate the individual and recognize their unique needs, histories and personalities.  We offer services for the whole person, meeting their physical, emotional, social and spiritual needs to ensure that they achieve an optimal quality of life, in keeping with our heritage of Jewish values, while remaining open to all denominations and faiths. 

 

We have full time pastoral care, including both Reform and Orthodox Rabbis. With our open admissions policy, we also connect residents with their own community clergy and worship services.

 

 

Rabbi Gerry Walter is the Director of Pastoral Care for Cedar Village.  Ordained as a Rabbi from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Rabbi Walter has held positions reflecting a great variety of rabbinical experience.   He has served as a Veterans Administration Hospital Chaplain in Salem,Virginia; as the spiritual leader of congregations in Roanoke, Virginia and Cincinnati, Ohio; and as teacher of Jewish Studies at a variety of college campuses, including the teaching of hospital visitation techniques and practical rabbinics at HUC-JIR.  Rabbi Walter has held positions of national and regional leadership in the Central Conference of American Rabbis as well as chairing rabbinical and clergy groups in Virginia and Ohio. 

 

Rabbi Walter’s interests in the rabbinate have included deep involvement in the Soviet Jewry movement (he visited refuseniks and dissidents in the former USSR and chaired the Refugee Resettlement Program of the Cincinnati Jewish Federation), innovative techniques in the learning and teaching of traditional texts, the use of meditation and guided imagery in worship, and involvement in the “Just Congregation” social justice movement (the AMOS project in Cincinnati).  Rabbi Walter has traveled to Israel many times and studies regularly at the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.

Rabbi Walter received the honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity from HUC-JIR and was also a recipient of the Brotherhood Award of the National Conference of Christians and Jews.
Rabbi Walter is married to Carenjean.  The Walters have two married children, Stacy and Adam, and two grandchildren. 

 

 

Rabbi Binyomin Yudin joined Cedar Village in February 2009 where he serves as the Chaplain/Bereavement Counselor for Cedar Village and Cedar Village Hospice. 

 

Rabbi Yudin is from Baltimore, Maryland.  Upon graduating from high school in Silver Spring, MD, he left to Israel where he spent several years studying in various Rabbinical Schools.  After returning to the states to study in Baltimore, he met and married his wife, Sora Liba.  Together they moved back to Israel, where he studied for four more years, receiving rabbinical ordination in Jerusalem at age 26. 

 

After two years as a pulpit Rabbi in St Louis, Rabbi Yudin moved with his family to Cincinnati, where he joined the Cincinnati Community Kollel, and at the same time began to pursue his Masters Degree in Social Work at the University of Cincinnati, which he completed in June of 2011.  He and his wife reside in Golf Manor with their five children.