Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah

Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah (also known as Rabbi Elli Sarah) is a British rabbi and author.

She graduated from the London School of Economics in 1977 and was ordained in 1989. Sarah (who took her middle name as her surname) and Rabbi Sheila Shulman were the first openly lesbian graduates of the Leo Baeck College. Sarah was also one of the first ten female rabbis ordained in Britain. Sarah worked as a full-time congregational rabbi for Buckhurst Hill Reform Synagogue, 1989–94, as Director of Programmes for the Reform Synagogues of Great Britain and Deputy Director of the Sternberg Centre, 1994–97, and as a freelance rabbi, including a part-time congregational appointment for the Leicester Progressive Jewish Congregation, 1998–2000. She was appointed as the rabbi of Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue in 2000. In 2006 she and Jess Wood Sarah had a civil partnership at the Brighton Registry Office, followed by a Jewish marriage service (chuppah) at the Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue. This, according to Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah, was the first public same-sex wedding to take place in a synagogue following the Civil Partnership Act of the United Kingdom, and the first occasion when a rabbi married her same-sex partner in their own synagogue. In 2012 she was included as one of The Power 50 in The Jewish Chronicle.

She has edited five books, written the book Trouble-Making Judaism, and contributed to several journals and anthologies, including writing Chapter 5, "Being a Lesbian Rabbi", in Lesbian Rabbis: The First Generation, by Rebecca Alpert, Sue Levi Elwell and Shirley Idelson (15 August 2001).