Rabbi Abby Phelps

Rabbi Abby Phelps joined the Sherith Israel family on July 1, 2018.  She spent her childhood in Stony Brook, New York, until her bat mitzvah, after which her family moved to Bellevue, Washington.  Rabbi Abby studied philosophy and religion at Stanford University, earning her BA and completing the Honors Program in Ethics in Society in 2005.  She then moved to San Francisco, where she spent three years working as a paralegal for Altshuler Berzon LLP, a public interest law firm specializing in labor and employment.  During this time, she also staffed teen retreats for the East Bay Midrashot, and took a leave of absence in the summer of 2007 to direct the URJ’s Bay Area Mitzvah Corps.

 

In 2008, Rabbi Abby followed her passion for Jewish youth work and education to the Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale University, where she spent the 2008–2009 academic year serving as student outreach coordinator.  At Yale, she discovered a love of Jewish texts that led her to study first as a 2010 summer fellow at Yeshivat Hadar in New York, and then in the spring of 2011 at the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem.  Her Jewish learning journey continued with her matriculation at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in 2012.  While at HUC-JIR, Rabbi Abby served as a solo student rabbi at Congregation Beth Jacob in El Centro, California, and as a rabbinic intern at Temple Israel of Hollywood.  She received her MA in Jewish Education from HUC-JIR in 2016, and was ordained a rabbi in 2018.  She is an alumna of the Wexner Graduate Fellowship.

 

Rabbi Abby is thrilled to be sharing her passion for Jewish living and learning with the Sherith Israel community.  Her vision for youth education is to foster students' growth in three main areas: curiosity, kindness, and Jewish identity.  As a lover of Jewish text, Rabbi Abby is excited to engage learners of all ages in traditional modes of text study, as well as to explore Jewish ideas through experiential, arts-based, and project-based learning.