with Rabbi Elizabeth Bolton
March 23, 2025
The story of Dr. Judith K. Eisenstein, Mordecai Kaplan’s eldest daughter, is undertold and deserving of attention. She was an educator and an ethonomusicologist, and her accomplishments not only established her as an innovator in her own right, but also as a concrete expression of her father’s views on Jewish communal life and theology. A musician and teacher of nusach herself, Rabbi Elizabeth Bolton has begun the work of understanding Judith’s immense contributions to the field of Jewish musicology.
Elizabeth Bolton is a Montreal-born rabbi and cantor who began her musical career as a singer of classical music, spanning repertoire from early music to the opera stage. Following exciting years of touring and performing in several Montreal-based professional choral ensembles, she was encouraged to explore the opera repertoire. Career highlights included a dramatic production of Carmen with the Vancouver Opera, and a live-broadcast Royal Gala recital for Prince Charles and Princess Diana in 1986, featuring an international roster of vocal stars.
While studying, teaching and performing, Liz was active in a wide variety of social justice issues, including union organizing, abortion rights, queer liberation, and the AIDS crisis. Following a serendipitous opportunity to serve a Reform congregation as cantor in Toronto, she reoriented her path towards Jewish spiritual leadership and applied to only one seminary – the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC) in Philadelphia.
While a rabbinical student Liz taught voice and service-leading skills, served as cantor for a Conservative congregation in suburban Philadelphia, and founded several choral ensembles, including the RRC ApiChorus and Mak’helat Micha’el, a community choir based at Congregation Mishkan Shalom. Following graduation in 1996, she taught hazzanut and voice at RRC, continued to lead the ApiChorus, and served as a staff chaplain at the Philadelphia Geriatric Centre. From 1999-2004 she created and directed the Music and Liturgy Project for the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation while serving as rabbi with Reconstructionist affiliate Congregation Beit Tikvah in Baltimore, MD from 1999-2012.
Her voice can be heard on recordings linked to the Reconstructionist songbook Shirim Uvrahot: Nashir Unevareh, as well as the CD series keyed to the Kol Haneshamah: Shabbat Vehagim prayer book. Her singing is featured on recordings with Sonia Rutstein of disappear fear, and with storyteller Gail Rosen in the DVD of For Tomorrow … the Poetry and Words of Hilda Stern Cohen, a prayerful and poetic account of a Holocaust survivor’s journeys. She has provided learning and communal singing experiences by creating “instant choirs” at conventions, retreats, and shabbatonim, and through teaching the history, evolution and practice of the music of the Jewish people as scholar-in-residence at synagogues across North America.
Liz is an alumna of study and service programs with the Institute for Jewish Spirituality and American Jewish World Service. She was named one of the Forward’s most Inspirational Rabbis of 2016 and twice invited to be a “book” for the CBC and the Ottawa Public Library’s Human Library events. She is a regularly invited guest with CBC radio and television in Ottawa, commenting on issues affecting the Jewish community. Her Hebrew Bible and liturgy commentaries have been featured in newspapers, anthologies and web sites in Canada and the US, including a chapter in The Women’s Torah Commentary. She posts at Words of the Spirit at www.orh.ca.
After 24 years in the United States, she returned to Canada in 2013 to serve Or Haneshamah: Ottawa’s Reconstructionist Community, becoming Ottawa’s first woman and first queer congregational rabbi. She also serves on the professional Multi-Faith Chaplaincy team at the Queensway-Carleton Hospital. Liz co-leads Rainbow Haven, a community group created in 2015 that sponsors and settles queer refugees to Canada.
Thank you to our sponsors!
Pamela Lerman and Rabbi Bob Gluck, Dr. Karen Hofmann, Ellen Jahoda and Rabbi Jonathan Kligler, Shelley Sadowsky, and from Ann Eisenstein, Miriam Eisenstein and Carol Stern, and Jane and Harvey Susswein in loving memory of Paula Eisenstein Baker.