Rabbi Elizabeth Bolton

Rabbi Elizabeth Bolton is a dynamic teacher, singer, and leader who enjoyed a successful first career as a singer in Canada, and then attended the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia, where she received her M.H.L. and rabbinic ordination in 1996.

Rabbi Bolton has sustained involvement in a wide range of communal activities, including interfaith coalition-building and education, singing, performing and conducting choral ensembles, and joining rabbinic cohorts of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality and the American Jewish World Service.

Her Torah commentaries have been featured in newspapers in Canada and the US, on the Reconstructionist movement’s web site, as well as in a chapter in The Women’s Torah Commentary. She is a sought-after featured speaker, performer and master teacher at local, national and, international Jewish programs on topics such Interfaith Dialogue, GLBTQ / Faith issues, and Transforming Synagogue Liturgy.  She has served as Scholar-in-Residence across North America teaching about the history of Jewish liturgical music.

While serving as rabbi of Congregation Beit Tikvah in Baltimore, Maryland, Rabbi Bolton was honored by the mayor as a “Woman of Faith,” was named a Maryland Public Policy Fellow, and founded a local branch of the Interfaith Hospitality Network, creating a coalition of churches and synagogues to house homeless families.

Her beautiful voice can be heard on recordings with Sonia Rutstein of disappear fear, with storyteller Gail Rosen in performances of For Tomorrow … the Poetry and Words of Hilda Stern Cohen, a prayerful and poetic account of a Holocaust survivor’s journeys, on recordings of Shabbat liturgy keyed to the Reconstructionist movement’s prayer books and benchers, and in synagogue, at her inspiring musically-infused services.

She returned to Canada in 2013 to serve as the first congregational rabbi of Or Haneshamah, Ottawa’s Reconstructionist Community.