Penina Eilberg-Schwartz is the Operations Manager of the Rebuilding Alliance, an American nonprofit organization dedicated to rebuilding war-torn communities and making them safe. Penina ensures that information flows smoothly within the organization and with non-governmental partners in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Israel. She works to grow the organization and create a wider and wider network of supporters.
Penina grew up in the Jewish community, concerned with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the first moments of political consciousness. Her mother was the first woman to be ordained as a Conservative rabbi, and her father a radical Jewish academic who eventually left the Jewish community entirely. The disagreements between them about the state of Israel proved to be formative for Penina’s later activism.
At Oberlin College, Penina was recognized for her academic excellence through the Jerome Davis Research Award, the George and Carrie Life Fund Prize in American History, and inauguration into Phi Betta Kappa. She also worked throughout her time as an organizer and social justice activist.
She began work with STAND (Students Taking Action Now: Darfur) at Stanford University, in her home-town, as the Off-campus Outreach Coordinator. She helped to fundraise and network with surrounding religious communities. At Oberlin, she served as Political Advocacy Coordinator, Divestment Campaign Coordinator, and Co-Chair of Oberlin STAND.
Penina then became active in immigrant-rights activism. She moved to the U.S. borderlands where she worked with such organizations as the Industrial Areas Foundation in Tucson, AZ, La Coalición de Derechos Humanos in Tucson, AZ, and En Común de la Fronter in Nogales, Sonors, México. There she worked to register voters organize communities to fight for immigrant rights, collected and disseminated stories of women recipients of micro-loans in Mexico, and staffed an abuse documentation clinic for the undocumented community.
After organizing for Darfur and for immigrant rights in the United States, she began to look back more deeply at her roots in the Israel/Palestine conflict as manifested in the Jewish community, and between her parents. She worked at Abraham’s Vision, an organization committed to transformative education about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. She edited curricula for them and finally traveled to the Balkans with a group of Jewish-Americans, Israelis, Palestinians and Palestinian-Americans studying the Balkans conflicts and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict through a lens of comparative-conflict analysis.
This experience led her to move more fully into organizing for justice in Israel/Palestine, specifically an end to the blockade on Gaza, and a halt and reversal of settlement construction. Penina brings her passion for history and fighting injustice to her work at the Rebuilding Alliance, along with the many skills learned throughout her work in numerous movements and organizations.
