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Avis Miller

b. 1945

by JWA Staff
Our work to expand the Encyclopedia is ongoing. We are providing this brief biography for Avis Miller until we are able to commission a full entry.

Rabbi Avis Miller with a koala, on a 2016 trip to Australia. Photo courtesy of Rabbi Miller.

Throughout her career, Rabbi Avis Miller has searched for new ways to educate, engage, and support unaffiliated Jews and those on the margins of the Jewish community. Miller graduated from Wellesley College in 1966 and earned an MA from Georgetown University. After several years as a stay-at-home mother, she became an accountant and worked as an activist for teenage mothers. She began serving as a student rabbi at Adas Israel in Washington, DC in 1984 while studying at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, where she was ordained in 1986. She remained at Adas Israel for her entire career, becoming rabbi emerita in 2008. While there, she led the synagogue in an influential campaign to aid Ethiopian Jews and published On the Wings of Hope, a collection of High Holiday sermons, in 2002. She also served the Rabbinical Assembly, the professional organization of Conservative rabbis, as a regional president, member of the executive council, and leader of the RA’s national outreach and conversion committee. Outreach has defined her career in the rabbinate, both through the learner’s minyans she created at Adas Israel and through her work as founding president of Open Dor, a foundation to engage and serve unaffiliated Jews.

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How to cite this page

Jewish Women's Archive. "Avis Miller." (Viewed on December 12, 2024) <https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/miller-avis>.