About Elliot

Rabbi Elliot Kukla (he/they) is a rabbi, author, artist, and activist.

Elliot has been tending to grief, dying, and becoming (more) ill or disabled since 2007, and has been engaged in justice work since 1996. His practice of radical spiritual care brings together these two streams of expertise with his lived experience of being trans, non-binary, and disabled.

Elliot is currently on the faculty at Svara: a traditionally radical yeshiva, where he is also the founder and director of the Communal Loss and Adaptation Project (CLAP). He was a rabbi at the Bay Area Jewish Healing Center from 2008 to 2021; there, he co-directed Kol Haneshama, the multiple award-winning volunteer spiritual care hospice program.

Elliot’s essays have been featured numerous times in The New York Times, as well as many other anthologies and magazines. His 2020 J. Weekly essay, on placing a spoon on the seder plate, won a Rockower National Jewish Journalism Award. His work is frequently featured in the media, including NPR, Democracy Now!, and National Geographic. Elliot was named one of the 50 most influential Jews of 2019 by The Forward.

In 2006, Elliot was the first openly transgender rabbi to be ordained by a mainstream denomination (the Reform seminary, Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles). In 2007, he trained in chaplaincy at UCSF Medical Center. In that same year, he co-founded www.transtorah.org, the first website to address transgender issues in Judaism. Elliot is on the bioethics advisory board of San Francisco General hospital, and frequently consults with hospitals, universities, and seminaries on justice issues in health care.

Elliot has a degree in Religion and Visual Studies from the University of Toronto. He is a visual artist with Sins Invalid, the political arts and education group that helped create the Disability Justice movement in the early 2000s, and is active with a number of other BIPOC-led Disability Justice groups.

Elliot was raised on the Big Island of Hawai’i and in Toronto, Canada. He currently lives on Ohlone Land (Oakland, California) with his partner, their kid, queer chosen family, a Boston Terriers, a cat named Turkey, and a few hundred house plants.

Elliot is represented by Todd Shuster, at Aevitas Creative Management.