Claudia Kreiman
After losing her mother in a terrorist bombing, Claudia Kreiman chose to honor her mother’s legacy and combine her parents’ careers by becoming both a rabbi and a Jewish educator. The daughter of a Conservative rabbi, Kreiman moved with her family from Chile to Argentina at age eighteen. When her mother died in the 1994 bombing of the AMIA center for Jewish life in Buenos Aires, Kreiman struggled with grief while continuing to volunteer at the synagogue where her mother had worked. Eventually she moved to Israel to earn both a master’s degree in Jewish education and rabbinic ordination at the Schechter Institute for Jewish Studies. After her ordination in 2002, she became both the rabbi for NOAM and the Israeli rabbinic fellow for Temple B’nai Jeshurun in New York, introducing Israeli teens to B’nai Jeshurun’s lively, experimental style and modeling new ways for them to think about women’s participation in religion. In 2007 she joined the clergy of Temple Beth Zion in Brookline, Massachusetts, where she became the senior rabbi in 2019.