Rabbi Laura Geller
Rabbi Laura Geller, Rabbi Emerita of Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills, is the first woman to be selected through a national search to lead a major metropolitan synagogue as Senior Rabbi. She was twice named one of Newsweek’s 50 Most Influential Rabbis in America and featured in the PBS documentary “Jewish Americans.”
She was ordained by the Hebrew Union College in 1976, the third woman in the Reform Movement to become a rabbi. She was on the editorial board of The Torah: A Women’s Commentary and is the author of The Torah of My Life: Forty Years in the Rabbinate and Still Counting.
She was a Fellow of the Corporation of Brown University from where she graduated in 1971 and is board member of Encore.org, the Jewish Women’s Archive and B3/the Jewish Boomer Platform. She was named by PBS’ Nextavenue.org as a 2017 Influencer in Aging. She is a founder of the first synagogue-based village, ChaiVillageLA, which is part of the national Village Movement, and Chair of the Synagogue Village Network which helps synagogues explore a new paradigm for engaging active older adults.
She is the coeditor, along with her husband Richard Siegel (z’l), of Getting Good at Getting Older.