Rabbi Margaret Wenig, D.D.

For nearly forty years, Margaret Moers Wenig has served the Jewish community as rabbi of Beth Am, The People’s Temple in New York City and as Instructor of Liturgy and Homiletics at Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion.

In 2009 Wenig was profiled in the New York Times and, in 1995, named by New York Jewish Week as one of “45 for Tomorrow: A new generation of young Jewish leaders to take the New York Jewish Community into the 21st Century.” She has indeed often been among the pioneers in endeavors that the mainstream Jewish community subsequently undertook. 

Rabbi Wenig’s 1990 sermon, “God is a Woman and She is Growing Older,” has been published ten times (twice in German translation). Rabbis and ministers from Puerto Rico to Canada have read it aloud to their congregations. Students in some Christian seminaries study it in their courses in Homiletics. She has contributed chapters about liturgy, preaching, mental illness, gender identity, and sexual orientation to anthologies published by Harper Collins, Jewish Lights, Yale, KTAV, NYU, Scholars Press, Riverhead Books (Penguin Putnam), UAHC, Chalice, Abingdon, Routledge, Westminster/John Knox, and others.

As a teacher Wenig’s reach also extends beyond the Jewish community. She has taught at Auburn Seminary and for the US Navy. For twenty-five years she was the sole Jewish member of the Academy of Homiletics and was elected to serve as its President. She volunteered for four years as an adult literacy teacher and for eight years in a first-grade classroom in a Brooklyn public school. 

Wenig is an amateur photographer. With Dr. Robert Joel Rubenstein and Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, Wenig raised two children, Liba and Molly, of whom she is very proud and for whom she is deeply grateful.