SUNBURY -- Nina Mandel took the less-traveled road on her way to a career as a rabbi with Congregation Beth El, but she doesn't regret it.

After a successful career in community development and organizing, Mandel said she discovered a strong connection between the work she was doing and the Jewish faith she grew up with in suburban New York City.

"Then I realized that there are very few women who were rabbis," Mandel said. "So that's how the decision was made."

Mandel, who earned her bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania, enrolled in the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, Wyncote, 10 years after she completed her first master's degree in anthropology and film at New York University.

"I already had a whole other career and several life paths under my belt and never felt really satisfied or fulfilled in what I was doing," Mandel said.

A stint at a historic restoration in Tarrytown, N.Y., as a 17th-century milk maid, though fun, didn't satisfy her itch to do more. "There's something really elemental about it," she said. "You get out there on a cold morning and you get warm by leaning your head up against the cow."

But rabbinical school fulfilled her, she said, and in 2002, she came to Sunbury's Congregation Beth El as a student rabbi. She became the synagogue's full-time rabbi in 2003 and since then has seen the congregation grow to include more than 60 families from Columbia, Lycoming, Montour, Northumberland, Snyder and Union counties. Mandel also oversaw the construction of the congregation's new $2 million synagogue on Arch Street.

Perhaps getting back to the elemental quality she relished as a milk maid in Tarrytown, today Mandel heads out to her vegetable garden to reconnect with nature and time. "It's like horticultural therapy," she said.

And though she entered rabbinical school as a model for women, Mandel says today she sees herself more as a role model for boys than girls.

"I have six nieces and nephews, and I'm really sure that my nieces are getting the right message that they can do anything that they want and they're really empowered," she said. "But I think that boys don't always get the message that women can do whatever they want and they can be strong and they can be empowered without there being consequences for it."