Meet Rachel Benaim Abudarham
Posted on 08/07/2026 @ 06:30 AM
Rachel Benaim Abudarham speaking at the first Muslim Jewish interfaith conference in the Arab world, which she organized alongside Mimouna Association and the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding. Essaouira, Morocco, August 2018.
By Dr. Bella Tendler Krieger
Director of the Chandra and Michael Rudd Adult Learning
Picture a windswept Atlantic port in Morocco.
In a conference hall in Essaouira, Rachel Benaim Abudarham stood before a crowd that had traveled from 32 countries.
As founding director of the Muslim Jewish Interfaith Coalition, she had spent months managing the visas, security clearances, kosher catering and government approvals required to bring everyone there.
But once they were in the room, she will tell you, the work became the oldest work in the world: helping strangers become a community, one story at a time.
Rachel spinning outside the world famous Madrasa Ben Youssef in Marrakech, Morocco, July 2022.
That rare ability — to bring people across differences into meaningful relationship, learning and conversation — is precisely what Rachel now brings to CAJE.
It is my great joy to introduce Rachel Benaim Abudarham as CAJE’s new Senior Educator and Assistant Director of Adult Learning.
A little about her: Rachel is a Sephardic Jew, born and raised in South Florida. For her, this is not a new landscape — it is home.
She was trained in study halls across the United States, Israel and Sweden, sharpened in Columbia University classrooms and shaped by a 15-year, award-winning career as a journalist chasing Jewish stories around the globe.
A lifelong student, her current doctoral research explores embodied memory in Moroccan and Sephardic Jewish communities — her own community — which is a scholarly way of saying that she cares about how history lives inside us.
Rachel moved back to Florida in 2021 with her husband, Moshe, and her two bonus kids, Talya and David. They live in her hometown of Boca Raton, and she is a master of the South Florida roads!
Rachel at Jardin Majorelle on a summer trip with her husband. Marrakech, Morocco, July 2022.
Rachel is deeply drawn to teaching, learning and guiding.
She has built a yearlong Jewish history course that travels country by country, weaving each community’s story together with her students’ own family histories.
She has led salon-style sessions for Moishe House and guided women’s circles that pair rigorous Torah study with somatic practice.
Some of you may already know her from teaching “Around the World in Six Days” for CAJE Adult Learning's online school last spring.
Rachel has studied Jewish texts in Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and pluralistic settings — at an Orthodox women’s seminary in Jerusalem, Yeshiva University (where she was my own student 14 years ago!), at Hadar, the Paideia Institute in Sweden, and through the Union for Reform Judaism — giving her firsthand experience with the richness and distinct perspectives of nearly every denominational lens.
She brings that pluralism into every room she teaches.
Rachel likes to say that the richest Jewish learning begins when we stop asking one another, “What kind of Jew are you?” or “Where do you go to synagogue?” and start asking, “What moves you?”
It is a fitting philosophy for CAJE and exactly the spirit she will bring to our adult learning programs: What do you long to understand? Where does your family’s Jewish story begin? What, in 3,000 years of Jewish history, is still waiting to surprise you?
She believes (and so do we!) that Jewish learning should feel like a door swinging open, not a test you're afraid to fail. It should be serious and joyful, meeting every learner exactly where they are.
"Consider this my hineini," Rachel says, "my 'here I am.'" We're thrilled she's here.
You'll find Rachel in a classroom, salon, lecture hall or zoom room soon.
To personally welcome Rachel to the CAJE family, please contact her at rachelabudarham@caje-miami.org
