Tina Grimberg
Tina Grimberg has focused her rabbinic career on empowering women and fighting domestic violence. Grimberg immigrated to the United States with her family from the Ukraine at age sixteen. In Indianapolis she began to immerse herself in the Jewish culture that was finally available to her while advocating for refuseniks still trapped in the USSR. She worked as a family therapist focusing on domestic violence issues before entering Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in 1996. After her ordination in 2001, she worked for a year at an assistant rabbi at Brooklyn’s Congregation Beth Elohim, where she had previously interned during rabbinical school. In 2002 she became the rabbi for Congregation Darchei Noam in Toronto. In 2006 she began a campaign against violence toward women in the Jewish community in partnership with the Jewish Family & Child Service of Toronto and Jewish Women International of Canada. She serves on the Toronto Board of Rabbis and the Canadian Council for Reform Judaism. She is also an associate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association and of the Central Conference of American Rabbis. Alongside her rabbinic work and activism, Grimberg has published numerous short stories as well as an autobiography, Out of Line: Growing Up Soviet, in 2007. She has also published articles in The Canadian Jewish News and written short stories for a number of anthologies.