Rabbi Amy Eilberg is an American spiritual leader and peace activist. Raised in a Jewish family in Philadelphia, she earned her bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University and a master’s degree from Indiana University. In 1985, she became the first woman ordained as a rabbi by the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS), the rabbinic seminary of Conservative Judaism.
Eilberg’s work focuses on pastoral care, interfaith dialogue, and conflict transformation. She co-founded the Bay Area Jewish Healing Center, an organization providing spiritual support and hospice care rooted in Jewish tradition, and later served as Director of the Peacebuilding Program at the Ignatian Center for Spirituality at Santa Clara University. She is the author of the 2014 book “From Enemy to Friend: Jewish Wisdom and the Pursuit of Peace,” which examines Jewish sacred texts through the lens of nonviolent communication and conflict resolution.
Eilberg is active in the Rabbinical Council of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and the rabbinic human rights organization T’ruah. She advocates for Palestinian human rights and an end to the occupation, arguing that Jewish ethical tradition mandates equal dignity and justice for Palestinians.
Following the escalation of conflict in Gaza, Eilberg reflected on the war’s moral toll in her October 2024 article, “Why I Couldn’t Pray on Yom Kippur“:
……Wherever I looked in the liturgy, I found myself wondering how many Gaza residents or Lebanese or Palestinians in the occupied West Bank the Israel Defense Forces had killed that day while we were all in synagogue.
Many of the lines of the Al Het, where we list our communal sins, applied directly to things the Israeli military has done during this war — things far beyond what was needed to defend ourselves from attack. For the sins we committed by “hardening our hearts,” “resorting to violence,” “through arrogance,” “through condescension,” “through ego” — it could have been describing what has transpired these past months in Gaza and, now, Lebanon.