Harvard, 57, is a student at New Brunswick Theological Seminary, affiliated with the Reformed Church in America. Now that Bayar has accepted her, she may be the first Christian seminary student anywhere to intern at a synagogue.

In that role Harvard is spending six to eight hours each week at B’nai Israel. She sits in on Bayar’s Thursday morning Torah class, shadows him during services on Shabbat, and has taken on a few administrative duties. She will also teach both adult education and religious school classes. She will speak to the congregation from the bima, but will not be permitted to teach children without a Jewish teaching partner.

NBTS dean Mark Kriaar, whose responsibilities include student field study, had no qualms about sending Harvard to B’nai Israel. “It offers some marvelous opportunities not only to encourage interfaith relationships and understanding, but for Adrienne to understand the Jewish roots of her own faith.”

But Bayar acknowledged he had qualms aplenty, from concerns that Harvard would engage in proselytizing to the suitability of having a Christian clergy-to-be as a role model for synagogue children.

“I felt there might be an agenda coming from the seminary and from Adrienne,” he said. Most worrisome was whether he could even be an effective mentor. “Our theologies are so different; I would not want to scar Adrienne’s theology,” he said.

He questioned her about “how it would feel to work with people she thought would not go to heaven.” She told him she wasn’t sure she even believed that and, she said, “I’m here to learn about you and gain a better understanding of the Jewish religion — how you worship and your culture, so I can pass it along.”

The rabbi spoke with Kriaar and eventually began to see her proposal as “a challenge and an opportunity.”

But he received no endorsement of the idea from colleagues in the rabbinate and other clergy he had consulted. “They were unanimously against it,” he said. “There is not one colleague who does not think I’m crazy.” Bayar compared their rejection of the idea to shatnes, the halachic prohibition on combining different substances, usually fabrics like linen and wool. “‘There’s just no meeting of the ways,’ they said. Interfaith dialogue is usually interfaith action.”

He decided otherwise. “I refuse to believe that people of good faith cannot get along.”

He presented the idea to the B’nai Israel board and then to the congregation. Some worried about the role model issue. But, he said, “if, after all the time children spend at B’nai Israel in services, and all the time they spend in religious school, and all the time in different activities, if the one person here who resonates with them and whom they remember when they grow up is Adrienne, we’re doing something very wrong.”

Harvard started her internship on Simhat Torah, but it wasn’t her first experience with services at B’nai Israel.

“I’ve been coming here since 1994,” she said. That year, conflict erupted in Brooklyn when planners of a Caribbean culture parade intended to have participants march past synagogues in Crown Heights, the headquarters of Lubavitch Hasidism. “Everyone was up in arms,” she said. As an African-American woman with a deeply held Christian faith but a long interest in other traditions, it was a decisive moment in her life. She recalled thinking at the time, “If people understood other people’s religions, all this would not be going on. I said, ‘I’m going to one of these services.’ And that’s when I started coming here.”

Harvard grew up in Newark. She graduated from Rutgers-Newark in 1976 with a degree in accounting and spent most of her career in the accounting department of the shipping company known when she started there as SeaLand Service, but which later became Puerto-Rican Maritime Shipping Operation. Harvard, who took early retirement in 1996, has a daughter and a granddaughter and continues to worship in Newark, at the St. James AME Church.

She had gone to B’nai Israel for High Holy Day services on and off through the years. She said she has cried on Yom Kippur. “I found the spirit so high here on the Day of Atonement that I asked God for atonement for my own sins.” And she has had several deep conversations with Bayar over the years. “At one point I asked if she was a theology student,” said Bayar. “Her questions were very sophisticated.”

Still, once she started her internship, she had a steep learning curve. There was the prohibition on handling money and not “passing the plate,” as church-goers do, during Shabbat morning services. She was shocked when Bayar sat down and started explaining the service while it was still going on.

“I told her there are times during the service when we are permitted to talk,” he said.

And she has struggled with not being able to take notes on Shabbat. While Conservative Jews are struggling with a service many find lengthy and uninspiring, she is in awe of the liturgy, particularly compared with the more spontaneous prayer she is used to.

She said she has gained a deep respect for what she calls Jewish “steadfastness” to text. She finds b’nei mitzva ceremonies poignant. “It says in the Bible, ‘Teach your children,’ and that’s what you do.”

Harvard has to complete six semesters of field study, and Kriaar expects four from a church setting.

This isn’t the first time one of his students pursued a synagogue internship, Kriaar said, but it is the first time it has worked out.

The internship, he added, is consistent with the goals of the seminary’s newly installed president, Gregg A. Mast, whose vision for the institution includes creating an interfaith center that, said Kriaar, would “bring clergy together for dialogue and also look for common interests in meeting the needs of central New Jersey.”

Bayar and Harvard are keenly aware of their differences. He pointed out that if he had told the rabbinical school admissions committee that he had been called to the rabbinate personally by God, he would not have been admitted. He said that while he often has to discuss faith issues and putting faith into action with rabbinical interns, with Harvard, “her faith is strong and pure, and there’s nothing I can offer her in that area.” Harvard, for her part, isn’t shy about asking questions.

Occasionally, she may say something that raises Bayar’s eyebrows. When she expressed her aspiration for an “interfaith church” open to all denominations and all religions, he questioned her briefly, then said with a smile, “We’ll have to talk about that later.” He appeared to relish the opportunity to educate her.

She appears to absorb his instruction. Just that morning, she heard an interpretation of the plague of darkness — that it lasted for three days, long enough for the Jews to bury their dead while no one could see them. “I had never heard that before,” she said. “I’m going to take that with me.”