Newly Elected Ohio Mayor Consults Rabbi on How to Handle Shabbos Emergencies

OHIO (JNS) – Michele Weiss, who is about midway through her third four-year term on the city council of University Heights, Ohio, was elected earlier this month as mayor of the Cleveland-area suburb in what is being widely reported as the first time an Orthodox Jewish woman would be mayor of a U.S. city.

The 50-year-old told JNS that her first conversations after deciding to run for office were with her family—and her rabbi.

“I really feel that everybody is placed on this earth to make a difference,” she told JNS earlier in the week. “I’m doing it for the klal,” Hebrew for “community.”

“I want to make a kiddush Hashem,” to sanctify God’s name, she added.

During the campaign, a “few very loud voices” suggested that she would “ask your rabbi for everything,” Weiss said. “My response was, ‘Well, I’m in council meetings where we’re making laws all the time. I’m not sitting there asking my rabbi for everything.’”

In fact, she told JNS, she has a meeting scheduled with her rabbi to discuss how she should navigate situations, such as a citywide emergency on Shabbat or a holiday. “We will see what those answers are,” she said.

“I asked the police chief and fire chief, ‘What are the situations where you’re going to need to, God forbid, get in touch with me?’” she told JNS.

Weiss described her upbringing in Cleveland as “Conservadox,” that is, Conservative and Orthodox. She became the latter through the youth outreach group NCSY. By 16, she was keeping Shabbat strictly and after high school, she attended seminary in Israel, she said.

She has always worked full-time while raising her children. Weiss, who holds undergraduate and M.B.A. degrees from John Carroll University, a private school in University Heights, is currently the chief financial officer of Hebrew Academy of Cleveland, the “largest Jewish day school in the state of Ohio,” per her city council bio. (The school website and her LinkedIn also identify her as the school’s controller of almost 27 years.)

Weiss is also an adjunct instructor at Cleveland State University and is a founding member of the nonprofit Amatz Initiative, which offers school principals professional development opportunities.

Along the way, Weiss has also helped the Orthodox community “very quietly,” including being an attendant at a mikvah, a ritual bath for women, and instructing brides-to-be, she told JNS. Of her public service for the larger city, “I needed to do it on my own time,” she told JNS.

According to the 2022 Cleveland Jewish Population Study, produced by the Jewish Federation of Cleveland, some 93,200 people in 36,100 Jewish households live in the Cleveland area. A map in the report shows a large cluster of Jews in the area, living in Cleveland Heights and University Heights.

In that region, 38% of Jews are between the ages of 18 and 34, “the highest proportion of young adults of any region,” it states. It adds that there are higher rates of Shabbat observance and synagogue membership in The Heights and in Beachwood, which has a large Orthodox population, than in other parts of the Cleveland area. (Some 21% of Cleveland area Jews live in The Heights and 19% in Beachwood, it states.)

Weiss told JNS that she went to business school after her children had grown. A friend suggested that, after she graduated, she should get involved in city governance. She took notes on council meetings as an observer for the League of Women Voters and was subsequently asked to be on a finance committee. She set her sights on the city council, where there was already one Orthodox Jew.

“We needed more representation,” she told JNS. “University Heights has the largest Orthodox Jewish population in the state of Ohio.”

Among the achievements on the city council about which she is most proud are sponsoring legislation that gives homeowners a 15-year tax abatement when they improve their homes, and one that “emphasized” women and minorities when the city hires contractors. She also said she is proud of a rule that the council must approve any contract above $75,000, so there are not “top-heavy singular approvals.”

According to her LinkedIn profile, Weiss has been the vice mayor of Cleveland Heights for almost 10 years. Per the city council site, she is also chair of the committee of the whole and of the finance committee and a member of the community outreach and the economic development committees.

When Michael Dylan Brennan, the city mayor, announced that he wouldn’t seek a third term, Weiss told JNS that fellow councilors “felt that I was probably the best candidate to run.”

“We have a very diverse council. Most of them are Democrats. All different kinds of ethnicities, orientations,” she said.

Weiss told JNS that the mayor has exhibited a “lot of divisive behavior,” for which the city council censured him twice. She also said his administration displayed “subtle undertones” of Jew-hatred, including when he decried local areas with large Orthodox populations for voting for U.S. President Donald Trump in November.

“He never said ‘Jews,’” she said. “Everybody knew who he was targeting.”

There has also been a “big debacle with Hatzalah,” which “runs everywhere, but apparently it can’t be in University Heights,” she said. The Jewish volunteer emergency medical service now operates in the city, but Brennan is “not happy about it,” she said. (The mayor accused Hatzalah of “jeopardizing public safety.”)

Brennan also upset many in the city’s Jewish community when he sought to block an Orthodox resident from hosting prayer services in his home. An attorney for the man called the city’s efforts “the most egregious of municipal power, for no reason other than to stop a person from hosting friends in his home to pray.”

“There was tension everywhere,” Weiss told JNS. “The first thing I need to do is reunify the city again.”

The self-described “moderate” Republican said her Democratic colleagues named her vice mayor twice.

“Most people are in the middle,” she said. “But this race pitted Democrats against Republicans in a way I’ve never seen.”

She described having doors slammed in her face for the first time while she ran for office. “People are really triggered right now,” she said. “The rhetoric is really scary on both sides.”

She said that she tries to be “as nonpartisan as possible,” although people knew and saw that she wore a pin in support of the hostages in Gaza.

In November, she was elected with 56.6% of the vote, nearly 20 points ahead of the next highest vote earner.

She told JNS that she is focused on local rather than national issues, including school choice, which matters a lot to Orthodox families in the area.

“I’m careful because I represent everyone, but parents should have the right to choose the school they want,” she said. (Half of University Heights children go to public school, she said.)

Weiss said the past five years have brought growth to Cleveland’s Orthodox community, driven by vouchers and the cost of living.

“We have three Orthodox day schools. They are booming. They are building,” she said.

JNS asked Weiss about reports that she might be the first Orthodox Jewish woman to be a mayor of a city. “It was not on my radar at all,” she said. Then reporters started calling, she said.

She offered advice to Orthodox Jewish girls considering public service.

“Your family has to come first,” she told JNS. “You need an understanding family, because you won’t be home many evenings. But you can do it.”

“You can make a difference,” she said.