Ellen Weinberg Dreyfus

Ellen Weinberg Dreyfus is an American rabbi. She is a founder and former president of the Women's Rabbinic Network, which was founded in 1976 by fifteen female rabbinical students.^[1][2] She was ordained in 1979 at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York, and is to her knowledge the first woman to be ordained as a rabbi while pregnant.^[3][4] In 1983 she moved back to Illinois, becoming the first female rabbi in that state.^[3] In 2001 she became the first female president of the Chicago Board of Rabbis.^[3][4][5] In 2004 the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion awarded her an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree.^[4] In 2009 she was installed as the second female president of Reform Judaism's Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) in Jerusalem, making her the first female leader of a major rabbinic organization to begin her tenure in Israel.^[6] In 2009 she was also inducted onto the Board of Governors of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.^[4] In 2010 she was selected as one of the top 50 rabbis in America by Newsweek and the Sisterhood blog of the Jewish Forward.^[2] In 2011 she received the Rabbi Mordecai Simon Memorial Award.^[7] She is married and has three children.^[4]

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