The Latest From The Foundation

Imagine if your parents or grandparents had never met.  If you could go back in time, as did Marty McFly in Back to the Future, what would you do to ensure your existence?  In Ruth Rabbah 6:1, we learn that when King David would rise at midnight to praise G-d, he would specifically recall G-d’s great kindness in enabling his grandfather Boaz and grandmother Ruth to meet, against all odds. 

It has been reported that in 1914 Rabbi Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook visited London’s National Gallery and became enamored with Rembrandt’s works of artistic genius.  In Rembrandt, Rav Kook saw “a tsaddik, a truly righteous person,” whose works reminded him “of the legend of the creation of light.”  Kook explained that this was a “light so strong and luminous that it lit up one end of the world to the

I recently had the privilege of helping lead an Encounter trip to Bethlehem, East Jerusalem and Ramallah.  I came away with the strong belief that all communal leaders should participate in one of these trips. Encounter is an organization near and dear to many Wexner alumni and, in fact, many alumni were on my trip.  Started 10 years ago by two WGF Alumni, Rabbi Melissa Weintraub (Class 14)  and Rabbi

WHP Alumni (Montreal 09) Joel Shalit, Andrea Rosenbloom and Monica Mendel-Bensoussan together with other UTT-Herzliah and YM-YWHA execs at the closing transaction, made complete with champagne and strawberries.  For well over a decade, the 106-year-old Montreal YM-YWHA Jewish Community Centers (the “Y”) and United Talmud Torah-Herzliah (“Herzliah”), a mainstream Jewish day school founded over 120 years ago, have considered the possibility of building a new high school immediately adjacent, and

At first glance, many of the women who completed the Wexner Graduate Fellowship (WGF) seem to be at the top of their game.  They are running organizations, teaching at the highest levels and represented in professional Jewish life in powerful ways.  Anyone might guess that these women are “leaning in” to their careers; who would have thought that they would be so eager to share and glean support from one

I entered the Wexner Heritage program as a passionate lay leader, thirsty for knowledge and innovative thinking.  By the end of the program, I was ready to take my leadership experience to the next level and I began to explore the impact I could have as a Jewish professional.   It was no surprise to learn that Jewish professionals spend a lot of time worrying about the fate of the

Jewish overnight camps are powerful incubators of Jewish identity, movements for social change and the next generation of Jewish leadership.  So, why are they built in the middle of nowhere?  As we move into camp season, I’d like to share these questions and more from a piece I wrote last year.  I look forward to the joyous sounds of campers and counselors arriving and to exploring these questions more thoroughly

“For the sake of Zion, I will not remain silent. For the sake of Jerusalem, I will not rest”     ~      Isaiah 62:1 Our project seeks to make a meaningful, humble contribution to ending the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians and to the pursuit of two states living side by side in peace and prosperity.  We, Israelis and Americans, are motivated by a deep love for

Often when we travel to both Israel and the United States, we visit “places” and not “people.”  This results in us failing to develop meaningful personal relationships that would facilitate better understanding between our communities as people.  The misconceptions of what it means to be a Jew in North America, what it means to be a Jew in Israel and how we relate to each other were reflected in the

One of the initiatives developed within our Summit Working Group — we have named ourselves Stronger Together P2P (People to People) —  is the twinning of US and Israeli lay leaders.  We are seeking Wexner alumni interested in participating in the twinning pilot program which will take place over the next 12 months.  The purpose of the twinning is to provide lay leaders with the opportunity to get acquainted with