Rabbi Ellen Bernstein (1953-2024), born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, was a Jewish environmental activist, rabbi, and educator. In 1988, she founded Shomrei Adamah (Keepers of the Earth), the first national Jewish environmental organization. Shomrei Adamah grew organically out of an ecologically-centered arts and music seder for Tu Bishvat that she organized in Philadelphia along the banks of the Schuylkill River. Around then, she also sponsored Rabbi Miles Krassen in making the first English translation of the original Tu Bishvat seder haggadah, the Pri Ets Hadar. In 2012, she was ordained at the Academy for Jewish Religion. Besides authoring her own Tu Bishvat haggadah, she wrote Ecology & the Jewish Spirit: Where Nature & the Sacred Meet (2000), The Splendor of Creation: A Biblical Ecology (2005), and The Promise of the Land (2020).
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Contributed on: 12 Feb 2025 by Ellen Bernstein | ❧
In her ordination address in May 2012, Rabbi Ellen Bernstein said, “One of the really precious things about becoming familiar with Jewish texts is that I begin to hear the echos of ancient words in daily conversation, and feel my life growing in depth and dimensionality. As I thought about what I wanted to share today, I kept hearing in my head Maimonides’ 13 Principles of Faith reverberating through the NPR series called, This I Believe. Weaving these two not so different themes together, here’s where I arrived.” . . .
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