Rabbi Jacke L. Schroeder, LCSW-C, received rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Spiritual Leaders Institute in 2022. She was ordained as a Maggidah, a teacher of Torah through story and sacred interpretation, by Reb Yitzhak Buxbaum, z”l, in 2013. Her Jewish path has been shaped by many years of study and involvement in Reconstructionist, Jewish Renewal, and traditional Jewish communities.
Rabbi Jacke is a licensed clinical and administrative social worker, psychotherapist, pastoral counselor, and gerontologist. For more than three decades, she has worked with adults, older adults, couples, families, and communities facing grief, trauma, illness, life transitions, and questions of meaning and spiritual purpose.
She is also a longtime elder-abuse advocate and was the director of the first elder- abuse shelter program in the Baltimore metropolitan area. Her work has included statewide advocacy, professional education, and the development of coordinated responses to abuse in later life. She also serves as the elder-abuse educator for the Roper Victim Assistance Academy of Maryland, where she helps prepare victim-service professionals to recognize and respond to abuse in later life.
Rabbi Jacke brings classical Jewish sources into sustained conversation with the moral, emotional, and spiritual realities of contemporary life. Her teaching and pastoral work are especially concerned with grief, aging, teshuvah, human dignity, spiritual growth, and the ways Jewish wisdom can help people live meaningfully through change and loss. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and leads weekday Ma’ariv services twice each month for Sim Shalom.