(JTA) — Rabbi Andrea Weiss, a former provost of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion who made history as the first woman to ordain rabbis in the Reform movement, has died.
Weiss died on Tuesday, March 3 surrounded by family at her home in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, following a year-long battle with cancer. She was 60.
Weiss’ death strikes another blow for the leadership of the Reform movement, which has also buried two leaders of HUC who died prematurely while Weiss worked there — Rabbi Aaron Panken, then the seminary’s president, in 2018, and Rabbi David Ellenson, its past president, in 2023. The school of sacred music, meanwhile, is named for another luminary of the movement who died prematurely at 59 in 2011.
Born on Sept. 9, 1965, Weiss was raised in San Diego where her family belonged to Temple Emanu-El. In 1987, Weiss received her bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and was ordained as a rabbi at HUC in 1993.
Weiss joined the HUC faculty in 2000.
During her tenure at the school, Weiss led multiple initiatives including a curricular redesign, the launch of the Virtual Pathway for Rabbinical students, and the creation of the Seminary Hebrew Program.
Weiss received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2004, where her research centered on metaphor and biblical poetry, scholarship that informed her later work including her 2006 book, Figurative Language in Biblical Prose Narrative: Metaphor in the Book of Samuel.
In 2008, Weiss won the National Jewish Book Awards Book of the Year as the associate editor of The Torah: A Women’s Commentary, the first comprehensive collection of Torah commentary written entirely by female scholars. Sen. Elissa Slotkin chose the text to be sworn in on last year.
In 2016 and 2020, Weiss led a nonpartisan, interfaith initiative titled “American Values, Religious Voices” that brought together 100 faith leaders to write letters to former President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump as well as Congress during the first 100 days of their administrations. The letters were later published as two books.
Weiss described the initiative at the time as “a national,
nonpartisan campaign created from the conviction that scholars who study and teach our diverse religious traditions have something important to say about our shared American values.”
In 2018, Weiss was appointed as HUC’s provost, becoming the first female rabbi to ordain rabbis in the Reform movement.
Weiss is survived by her husband Alan; her two children, Rebecca and Ilan; her father, Marty; her siblings, Mitch, Laura, and Roger; her sister-in-law Catherine; and her nieces, nephews and cousins.