Thursday, October 1, 2026
Emily Plassmann-Yaniv, a former Glenwood Landing resident, wasn’t Jewish when she became pregnant with her first child in 2020, but she knew she wanted Judaism to be part of the family she was beginning.
Raised Christian, Plasmann-Yaniv had developed an appreciation for Jewish traditions, and wanted to convert before giving birth so her children could grow up with the traditions that were important to their father, Eytan Yaniv. Unmarried and navigating the conversion process during the coronavirus pandemic, she turned to Cantor Gustavo Gitlin, whom she had met years earlier at an event at Sea Cliff Beach with Congregation Tifereth Israel, in Glen Cove. Gitlin explained her situation to Rabbi Irwin Huberman, who agreed to guide her through the conversion.
Over the next several months, Huberman met one on one with Plassmann-Yaniv, working with her on prayers, readings and her connection to Judaism. She recalled that he never judged the circumstances that brought her to him, and made sure that conversion remained something she wanted for herself.
“He made it very comfortable,” Plassmann-Yaniv said. “He was supportive that I chose to do this while I’m pregnant.”
By December 2020, she had converted. When she struggled to find a court date to marry Yaniv before their daughter was born, Huberman stepped in again, helping arrange the wedding at the synagogue on New Year’s Day with only about 12 hours’ notice.
It was one of many ways in which Huberman sought to make Judaism welcoming and accessible during his nearly two decades at Congregation Tifereth Israel, where those who knew him said he built relationships by meeting people wherever they were in their lives and their faith.
Huberman, the longtime rabbi of the Glen Cove congregation, died Aug. 1 in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, from complications of emergency heart surgery. He was 73.
Gitlin knew Huberman for 19 years, and they developed a friendship and partnership at the synagogue. Someone once described Huberman as its brain and Gitlin as its heart, a characterization they turned into a running joke.
“I said, what does that mean? I don’t have a brain?” Gitlin recalled. “And he said, yeah, I don’t have a heart?”
What united them, Gitlin said, was a desire to strengthen Jewish life through kindness. “The challenge was to build the synagogue with kindness,” Gitlin said. “He taught kindness. He taught by example.”
Huberman believed in le-karev, a Hebrew concept Gitlin described as bringing people closer. Having grown up in an Orthodox household with many rules about what could and could not be done, Gitlin said, Huberman came to believe that emphasizing restrictions wasn’t the way to bring people closer to Judaism.
Instead, he tried to say yes.
“We are in the business of continuity,” Gitlin recalled Huberman often saying.
That approach helped reshape Congregation Tifereth Israel. Phyllis Spector, its ritual vice president, said the synagogue grew from roughly 150 members when Huberman arrived to more than 350, while its Hebrew school grew to the point that it began running out of classroom space.
As younger Jewish families settled in Glen Head and Sea Cliff, the congregation looked for new ways to reach them, including holding Shabbat on the beach. Music became part of services, interfaith families were welcomed and customs from different Jewish traditions were incorporated into congregational life.
“No matter where you are on your Jewish journey, there’s a place here,” Spector said.
Rachel Ilberg, 19, of Glen Head, came to CTI as a child after feeling overwhelmed by the emphasis on learning Hebrew at another synagogue. At CTI she found a community that placed greater emphasis on Jewish culture and community than fluency in Hebrew.
When Ilberg traveled to Israel for a vacation at 12-years-old, a month before her bat mitzvah at CTI, Huberman helped her celebrate at Robinson’s Arch, near the Western Wall. Reading Torah in Jerusalem without speaking Hebrew fluently was intimidating, she recalled.
“He truly stood behind me the whole time and helped lead things along,” Ilberg said. When nerves made her want to rush, she recalled Huberman reminding her, “Be in the moment. Don’t feel any pressure.”
Long before Huberman became a rabbi, he spent his life telling other people’s stories.
Born on June 30, 1953, in Montreal, to Leon and Charlotte Huberman, he graduated from Carleton University, in Canada, in 1974 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism, and worked as a photographer for the Ottawa Citizen. He later moved to Fort McMurray, Alberta, where he founded the Fort McMurray Express, one of the area’s first newspapers, while becoming involved in the local Jewish community.
His daughter, Jessica Doyle-Huberman, remembers being brought along on assignments while her father ran the newspaper. She attended blood drives, met politicians and watched him research human-interest stories.
“The important questions that he was trying to uncover, and the human stories that he was trying to get, I got to see that firsthand,” Doyle-Huberman said.
After moving to Edmonton in 1993, Huberman worked in government and became increasingly involved with Congregation Beth Shalom, in Edmonton, teaching bar and bat mitzvah students and helping with Shabbat and High Holiday services. In 2005, encouraged by his wife, Patte, he began studying at the Academy for Jewish Religion in New York.
Huberman came to CTI as a student rabbi in 2006, and was ordained in 2010.
His previous lives remained part of the rabbi he became. Spector remembered his love of reading and music, particularly the guitar. He sometimes led services with a 1967 Gibson Hummingbird given to him by his father, and his musical tastes extended well beyond religious music.
For Doyle-Huberman, understanding her father’s public life took time. She said that an interview she once heard with Sean Lennon, in which he described what it was like growing up as John Lennon’s son, helped her understand her own childhood with a father whose work often took him away from home.
“I didn’t get to spend a lot of time with him, but I got to watch him change the world,” she said.
As an adult, Doyle-Huberman came to see his work as an effort to make the world his children and grandchildren inherited better than the one he had found.
Huberman’s final weeks unfolded far from the congregation he had led for nearly 20 years. He became ill while visiting the Virgin Islands last month and was airlifted to Puerto Rico for emergency heart surgery. Although the surgery went well, Doyle-Huberman said, complications followed, and he died roughly two and a half weeks later.
Ten minutes after her father’s death, Doyle-Huberman said, it rained in Puerto Rico for the first time in three months. He was a man she described as “larger than life,” so, she said, the moment felt fitting.
At a shiva after Huberman’s death, Gitlin heard another rabbi offer a different way of thinking about loss: Don’t think of Huberman as someone who “passed away,” but as someone who “passed our way.”
The words resonated with Gitlin because of something Huberman himself had said when people asked what Judaism said about the afterlife. There were many possible answers, Gitlin recalled, but Huberman believed that part of the answer could be found in how a person was remembered by family and by the people whose lives he or she touched.
For Gitlin, that means that the work Huberman began at Congregation Tifereth Israel didn’t end Aug. 1. “It’s up to us to continue with his work,” Gitlin said. “Continue with his legacy.”
