Lynn Gottlieb

Lynn Gottlieb (born April 12, 1949 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania) is an American rabbi in the Jewish Renewal movement and one of the first ten women to become an ordained rabbi in Jewish history.

Early life and education Gottlieb is the daughter of Abraham and Harriet Gottlieb and grew up in the Reform community of Allentown, Pennsylvania. Her father was a businessman; her mother was a puppeteer and founder of the Little Civic Theater.

As a high school student, Gottlieb went to Israel as an exchange student and studied at the Leo Baeck Education Center in Haifa.

Rabbinic and artistic career Gottlieb became the spiritual leader of Temple Beth Or of the Deaf and Hebrew Association of the Deaf in 1973, at the age of 23, while a student at JTS. In 1975, she founded an experimental synagogue, Mishkan A Shul, in New York City.

In 1974, she founded the now-defunct Jewish feminist theater troupe Bat Kol, which explored feminist Midrash.

In 1981, she co-founded Congregation Nahalat Shalom in Albuquerque, NM, which she led until becoming Rabbi Emerita in 2006.

In the 1990s, Gottlieb played an important role in bringing to light Carlebach's long history of sexual assault and sexual violence, In 1997, she gave a lecture at Jewish Renewal community Congregation Chochmat HaLev in Berkeley, California, where she described Carlebach's molestation of one of her congregants.

From 2007 to 2009 she was co-director of the Middle East Program at the San Francisco office of the American Friends Service Committee.

In 2007 she was selected as one of The Other Top 50 Rabbis by Letty Cottin Pogrebin.

Gottlieb led a Fellowship of Reconciliation delegation to Iran in 2008, thus becoming the first female rabbi to visit Iran and the first American rabbi to travel there "in a formal peacemaking capacity" since the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

A 2013 dissertation from the University of New Mexico's department of anthropology, “Storied Lives in a Living Tradition: Women Rabbis and Jewish Community in 21st Century New Mexico,” by Dr. Miria Kano, discusses Gottlieb and four other female rabbis of New Mexico.

Palestine activism Gottlieb points to a 1966 interview with a Palestinian journalist living in Nazareth as an important turning point in her pro-Palestine activism.

Other affiliations She serves as board chair of the Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity.

Books She authored She Who Dwells Within: A Feminist Vision of a Renewed Judaism (1995). She self-published "Shomeret Shalom: Replanting Seeds of Jewish Revolutionary Nonviolence after October 7th ."