Pamela Gaber, Ph.D., Educator

Pamela Gaber was born in Chicago, Illinois, where she was confirmed in the North Shore Congregation Israel under Rabbi Dr. Edgar Siskin, who had a Ph.D. in anthropology, and was a strong influence on her early in life. She went to the University of Wisconsin to study anthropology as an undergraduate, spending her junior year at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She graduated in 1970 with a Bachelor's Degree in Hebrew and Semitic Studies.

In 1970 she went to Harvard University, where she spent three years in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Literatures. In 1973, she moved to the Department of Fine Arts, where she completed a Master's Degree in 1975, with a thesis on Persian and Central Asian art, and a Ph.D. in 1982 in Ancient Art and Archaeology. She has published a book and numerous articles on the art and archaeology of Cyprus, where she has been excavating since 1972.

After teaching for 7 years at the University of New Hampshire, she married William Dever and moved to Tucson, Arizona where he was a professor at the University of Arizona. She taught Middle Eastern Humanities in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Arizona in Tucson from 1991 until the spring of 1994. The focus of her archaeology and research for the last few years has been the nature of the religions of the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean. Recent discoveries at her site, Idalion on Cyprus, point to similarities with the religion of pre-Biblical Israel.

Dr. Gaber became Director of Education at Temple Emanu-El in Tucson in July of 1996. In 1999 she attended the Para-rabbinic Fellows' Course at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, receiving her Para-rabbinic Certificate in July of that year. In August of 2001 she came to Armonk to assume the role of Educator of our Religious School.