Rabbi Rachel Weiss, Assistant Rabbi
Rabbi Weiss joined CBST as our Assistant Rabbi in August 2010. Rabbi Weiss first joined CBST as a Cooperberg-Rittmaster Rabbinial Intern in from 2006-2008. Prior to returning to CBST as Assistant Rabbi, she served as the Rabbi of Congregation Am Haskalah in Allentown, PA, the Lehigh Valley's Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation.
Rabbi Rachel Weiss believes in sacred communities enacted through ritual, prayer, justice, and the arts. A native of Evanston, IL, she grew up in the Reconstructionist movement, and graduated from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College with a certificate in Congregation Life.
While at RRC, Rabbi Rachel completed the Certificate in Congregational Life, and was Cooperberg-Rittmaster Rabbinical Intern, and served as student rabbi to JRF affiliates Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation, Congregation Ahavath Sholom, and Congregation Kol Ami of Boca Raton. She has worked as a hospital chaplain, and has developed programs for Kolot: The Center for Gender and Judaism. Rabbi Rachel has spent summers as the Education, Faculty, and Arts Director at Camp JRF, and facilitated interfaith teen dialogues for The Interfaith Center of Greater Philadelphia, as a Walking the Walk group leader. She is the recipient of the Aaron and Marjorie Ziegelman Scholarship, and is a Grinnell College Lilly post-graduate fellow.
Rabbi Weiss graduated from Grinnell College in Iowa with a BA in Spanish, with an interdisciplinary concentration in Gender and Women’s studies. Following her undergraduate studies, she put her academic degree into action by serving as the director of the Chicago-area Nuestro Center for Mexican immigrant families. Blending her interest in the arts with Judaism, she enjoys beadwork, crafts, mosaic, Jewish papercutting, English and Hebrew calligraphy, singing, cooking, and the creation of Jewish ritual and ritual objects. A lover of languages, she communicates in Spanish, Modern Hebrew and ASL.
Rabbi Weiss lives with her partner, Julia Tauber, and their daughter Hannah.
