Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Rabbi Judith Abrams, Founder and Director of MAQOM, Dies at 56

Rabbi Dr. Judith Abrams, the founder and director of the online Talmud learning website, MAQOM, died of a heart attack Wednesday in Houston. She was 56.

Image by Courtesy of MAQOm

Abrams, who made a career of Jewish teaching and learning, was a relative latecomer to Jewish study. Inspired by a semester studying in Soviet-era Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), where she met Jews in synagogue and on the streets, she entered the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion with practically no Jewish education, and quickly excelled in her studies, according to professor Jonathan Sarna, who is a professor of Jewish history at Brandeis University and wrote a tribute to her on the H-Judaic e-mail list. Abrams graduated at the top of her class in 1984 and was ordained as a rabbi the following year.

Her rabbinic thesis, on the image of America in the Russian-language Jewish press, was published in the American Jewish History journal in 1986. In 1993 she earned a doctorate in Jewish studies from Baltimore Hebrew University.

Abrams pioneered online teaching of Talmud to adults through her website MAQOM, and authored over 20 books for asults and children. Her most recent book, “The Other Talmud” (Jewish Lights) was published in 2012.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.