For as long as she can remember, Iliinsky has had a keen interest in capturing the beauty around her through art. In the beginning, she drew dancers in her mother's ballet studio. Later, in high school, she studied art in a more formal setting. She gave it up after working several years as a textile artist because she thought it "impractical and lacking in status, respect, possibility for income."
Life, however, often takes unexpected twists and turns. She received a master's degree in social work, practiced psychotherapy for 15 years and during that time discovered her Jewish self. At age 43, she began studying Hebrew and Judaism, and two years later she became Bat Mitzvah. For another nine years she volunteered as a Jewish educator at her JRF affiliate, Havurah Shalom in Portland, OR. Eventually that road led her to RRC.
Before enrolling in 2000, she decided to rededicate herself to her artwork in service to Jewish spirituality and began producing tallitot and painting ceramic ritual objects. "I thought that I would need to put my art behind me when I began my rigorous course of schoolwork to become a rabbi, but life led me down another path," she says. While studying Hebrew in the Arad Arts Project in Israel, she was given the time and space to combine her twin loves of Judaism and art. She exchanged her ceramic medium for paper, and since then has been creating images in gouache to verses from Torah and liturgy.
Her work is celebrated in Jewish circles. Rabbi Dan Ehrenkrantz, to mark his installation as RRC's president in 2003, requested that artists and musicians from the community offer their works for exhibition. A design submitted by Iliinsky was chosen for the cover of the installation program. More recently, when the Union of Reform Judaism Press and the Women of Reform Judaism decided to jointly publish The Torah: A Women's Commentary, due out in the fall of 2007, they asked Iliinsky to create the artwork for the volume.
Today, several of Iliinsky's paintings adorn the walls of RRC. She says that when she graduates, she intends to donate them to the College in gratitude for the profound learning she experienced here.
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