Yael Hollenberg

Origins and early life

Yael Hollenberg-Azoulay was born at Thiais, near Paris, on 2 March 1969.

Work and career

She studied Jewish liturgy and Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York from 1992 to 1994, where she also worked as a librarian in one of the great Jewish libraries of the world. She returned to France and served from 1995 to 1999 as a teacher and an officiant for the Mouvement juif libéral de France, one of the few women of her generation to lead services in French synagogues. Since 2002 she has taught at the synagogue Adath Shalom in Paris, where she is in charge of preparing children for their bar mitzvah and bat mitzvah.

Since 2018 she has been mission coordinator for the review Tenou'a, the journal of Jewish thought published in Paris. She has written about ten teaching books on Judaism, among them Mon encyclopédie du judaïsme in 2015 and a Haggada pédagogique pour Pessa'h in 2017, made for families who want to conduct the seder themselves and need the text explained rather than merely printed. From 2009 to 2015 she also presided over the Île-de-France association for intellectually gifted children.