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Sharon Kleinbaum
(1961 - living) U.S.A.

Sharon Kleinbaum

Rabbi

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Raised in a whole family of social activists, Rabbi Kleinbaum's own social action career began in her first year at Barnard College, leading protests against the school's investments in South Africa and against the proliferation of nuclear weapons. It has continued nonstop ever since. As a human rights advocate - for blacks, women, gays and lesbians, immigrants, Palestinians - she has been jailed, arrested, vilified, and lauded, all with equal aplomb.

Rabbi Kleinbaum has testified in Federal Court and before the U.S. Congress in hearings on the subject of same-sex marriage. She attended the President's White House meeting of national religious leaders in 1999.

Rabbi Kleinbaum has been a speaker or a panelist at numerous feminist and gay rights conferences. She has frequently been engaged to speak about same-sex marriage, Judaism & homosexuality, gay synagogues, and Judaism and social justice.

Rabbi Kleinbaum has been the Senior Rabbi of New York City's Congregation Beth Simchat Torah (CBST - House of Joy in the Torah), in Manhattan, the world's largest LGBT synagogue, since 1992.

Rabbi Kleinbaum's education and experience cut across all varieties of contemporary Judaism: Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, and secular activist. She received her ordination from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 1990.

A 1977 graduate of Frisch Yeshiva High School of Northern New Jersey, she graduated cum Laude from Barnard College in Political Science in 1981. Rabbi Kleinbaum has also studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and at the Oxford University Centre for Post-Graduate Hebrew and Yiddish.

Sharon KleinbaumAlthough she is a rabbi of the Reconstructionist movement, the temple serves all denominations and all sexualities, holding its Yom Kippur service at the Jacob Javits center so as to be even more inclusive.

The focus of the temple is to create a welcoming Judaism for LGBT people while maintaining fundamental beliefs and traditions. Kleinbaum has been named one of America's top 50 Jewish leaders and also one of the 45 top young Jewish leaders in New York for her work in the synagogue and with AIDS patients and their families. Kleinbaum lives in Brooklyn with her partner Rabbi Margaret Moers Wenig and two daughters, Liba and Molly.

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