Waterford — On July 1, Temple Emanu-El's new rabbi led his first service in Waterford. It was Marc Ekstrand's formal introduction as the temple's first new rabbi in 35 years — his predecessor, Aaron Rosenberg, planned to be in the audience — and his first service since getting ordained as a rabbi after working for years as an engineer and corporate manager.

Last week, before the sermon, Ekstrand was taking the pressure in stride.

"It's an interesting situation to essentially follow a rabbi who was here with the congregation for 35 years," Ekstrand said. "Change can be difficult. Change is usually difficult."

Ekstrand, 47, said he planned to devote plenty of thought to his first service. He thinks a lot about spirituality anyway, he said.

"I like to think about what I have to say, because I think what we say in our synagogues and our churches and our mosques matters," he said. "We are leaders in our community. We should reflect our best values, as Jews, as Christians, as Muslims.

"That's part of my role here, and I take that seriously."

The newly ordained rabbi faces a challenge as the head of an aging congregation seeking to attract young people and engage them in the Jewish community.

"A challenge I think congregations have had forever is that our children grow up in the synagogue, and at some point they leave the nest, they leave home, and for whatever reason, they're not connecting with what's happening in the synagogue anymore," he said.

"How do we bring a relevant message to those years in between ... when somebody graduates from high school, or graduates from college ... and when they want to get married or have a need to educate their children?"

It's a path Ekstrand said he's familiar with.

"I was kind of the stereotypical kid, who had a bar mitzvah, and because of secular activities — sports and school and things like that — after the bar mitzvah I drifted away," he said.

But Ekstrand, whose mother grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family in Hartford before moving to Pittsburgh and joining a reform congregation, never drifted too far.

"I always felt a strong identity as a Jew," he said. "I just wasn't particularly active."

That changed just before Ekstrand's first son, Michael, was born.

"For me, Michael coming along really kick started my spirituality, and put me on a trajectory of Jewish learning," he said. "I really wanted to know, what does it mean to be a Jewish father? What do I need to do to raise a Jewish child?

"The more I read, and the more I studied, the more I wanted to read and study."

With a group of 30 nearby families, Ekstrand helped start a small congregation near Cincinnati.

"We were looking for something more intimate, where everyone knows each other," he said. The congregation's name was Beth Haverim, which means "house of friends."

"We really were just that," Ekstrand said.

The 30 families provided a good place to start. Ekstrand now faces a job with the Temple Emanu-El congregation, which includes about 200 families.

"That process gave me a good ... knowledge of the realities of small congregation life, and what it takes to make one work," he said. "I think, primarily, it's a strong sense of community."

Around the same time, the community at the company Ekstrand had worked for since college — AK Steel — was in turmoil.

Ekstrand found himself in the middle of a yearlong labor dispute between AK Steel management and thousands of union employees at the company's plant in Middletown, Ohio. At the beginning of the dispute, he found himself locked in the company's offices for a week straight.

"I think that lockout changed a lot of people's lives," he said. "For me, being on the management side, it was...very hard work over a very long period of time. That was 13 months of essentially being away from my family."

After the lockout finally ended in March 2007, Ekstrand left AK Steel. He applied to rabbinical school, briefly pursued a master's degree in education with a plan to become a middle school teacher, got divorced, and applied to rabbinical school again.

In 2011, Ekstrand went to Israel for his first year of rabbinical school with Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion, where he met his wife, Polly Berg.

He was ordained in May, and the couple moved to Mystic with their 2-year-old twins last month.

People often tell Ekstrand they see the move from a career in the steel industry to rabbinical school as a huge leap. But the two jobs aren't so different, Ekstrand said.

"What I enjoyed so much about my job ... was people," he said. "I enjoyed working with people. I enjoyed working towards a common goal, I enjoyed mentoring young engineers. I enjoyed being a manager because it gave me an opportunity to help the people who worked for me."

An interim rabbi, Scott Saulson, has led Temple Emanu-El since Rosenberg retired last June.

Janine Sitko, the president of the synagogue's Sisterhood, an auxiliary group for women, was one of the three members of the search committee that chose Ekstrand.

She said the new rabbi will fit in just fine.

"His age, and the fact that this was his second career, was a big positive," Sitko said. "He had experience leading and managing people."

The search committee met with members of the congregation to collect opinions on who should lead the temple, especially after decades under one person.

"A lot of people were looking for somebody that could bring the greater Jewish community together in general, and also somebody that was good at getting people to become involved in Judaism," she said.

"Our strength is really the relationships that people build with each other," she said. "We were looking for someone who valued people-to-people relationships in the temple."

Ekstrand said he connected with the members of the search committee as soon as they met.

"It was kind of love at first sight," he said. "I had done a little bit of research on the congregation, and all of my best hopes were realized in that interview.

"It seems that in our modern world, we're ultimately connected," he added. "You're connected through Facebook, and Twitter, and there are so many ways we're connected. I think what people crave is actually real face-to-face connections, where they can hear somebody's voice, and where they can see somebody's face and feel a warmth that you don't always feel or can't always feel in the electronic world.

"That's the opportunity that we have here, in a small congregation, is to bring people together in community to have those relationships," he said.

m.shanahan@theday.com