About Rabbi Leo

Rabbi Leo Fuchs
Assistant Rabbi

leo@rodefsholom.org

Rabbi Leo joined the Rodef Sholom clergy team in the summer of 2024. He is dedicated to enhancing the synagogue experience, ensuring it is a transformative space where members can pursue spiritual growth and become their truest, most realized selves.

Rabbi Leo is passionate about teaching and leading engaging explorations of Jewish prayer, sacred texts, and spiritual ideas. He works closely with Aviva Lev-David, our Director of Education, and Jacob "Hershey Hershman, our Youth Director, on programming for our younger generations, and he spearheads the Building Bridges initiative, which focuses on effectively responding to antisemitism.

Rabbi Leo served as the Rabbi Educator at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco from July 2023 to summer 2024, and held the role of Director of Youth and Family Education from 2020-2023. He was ordained at Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion in 2023. Prior to entering rabbinical school, Rabbi Leo worked in the Oakland public school system as a special education teacher, assistant principal, and for eleven years as the founding principal of Learning Without Limits Elementary School.

Rabbi Leo holds an M.A. in Education from U.C. Berkeley and a Masters in Non-Profit Management from the Heller School at Brandeis University. As a student at HUC-JIR, he received the Professor Stanley Gevirtz Award for Excellence in Bible, the Lorraine Helman Rubin Memorial Prize for Scholarly Writing, and the Louis and Minnie Raphael Memorial Prize for Outstanding Service to a Small Congregation.

Rabbi Leo lives in San Francisco with his wife Liz, their two children, and their dog, Nugget