Posted on Tuesday, October 29, 2019 by Michelle Lynn-Sachs
Photo by S Alb on Unsplash
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Posted on Friday, October 18, 2019 by Becca Thomas
Rabbi Nathan Laufer, President Emeritus of The Wexner Foundation, shared that his father, Max Laufer, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps who rebuilt his life in the United States after World War II, passed away recently at the age of 93. He was buried in Petach Tikvah, Israel, his home for the past 14 years. In addition to Rabbi Laufer, he leaves behind a daughter, eight grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren. Because his passing occurred during Sukkot, the Shiva, which will take place…
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Posted on Thursday, October 17, 2019 by Tracy Juran
We just completed the period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur also known as the Ten Days of Repentance. It’s easy to get lost in the monotony and continuity of the everyday, but during significant periods, I can’t help but contemplate where I’ve been and where I want to go. Even perhaps more accurately, who I am and who I want to be. As Jews we’re taught to ‘show up’ for one another, to commemorate beginnings and ends – a marriage, a divorce, a miles…
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Posted on Monday, October 07, 2019 by Guy Avrutzky
An article about systemic challenges of the social services system in Israel was recently written by Wexner Israel Fellow Guy Avrutzky (Class 31) and Rani Dudai (Director of ELKA in JDC Israel) and published here in the last fall edition of the esteemed Stanford Social Innovation Review. In the article, Guy and Rani use the challenges of resolution 922, (the five-year plan of the Israeli Government to invest NIS 15 billion – $4 billion – in Arab municipalities,) to demonstrate t…
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Posted on Friday, October 04, 2019 by Eyal Levit
Do you consider yourself a passive observer or an active participant in your life's destiny? That seems like a rhetorical question. Who would choose the passive role if they have a will, right? And yet almost every time I ask a question of someone about why things did not turn out the way they were supposed to, (for example, when an assignment or a job wasn’t done or the room wasn’t put in order,) the answer is that someone else is at fault. Someone else did not do their job and that…
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Posted on Tuesday, September 17, 2019 by Elisha Gechter
This past weekend, 125 Fellows at The Center for Public Leadership (CPL) at Harvard University gathered for a fall retreat in Cape Cod. The retreat was designed to provide a structured atmosphere for those in 11 different fellowships, including the Wexner Israel Fellowship, to begin the journey into CPL’s curriculum goals of self-awareness, cross-cultural competency, community and social responsibility, by connecting with their cohorts, peers and the full CPL community. List…
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Posted on Monday, September 16, 2019 by Maital Friedman and Ruthie Warshenbrot
Working together as accountability partners in chavruta study has been an incredibly humbling experience. If humility, per David Jaffe in Changing the World from the Inside Out: A Jewish Approach to Personal and Social Change, is ultimately about “finding the proper relationship between the self and the world around you,” what better way to do so than to more deeply understand someone in the world around you who sees the world differently than you do? As the first clas…
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Posted on Tuesday, September 10, 2019 by Scott Harris
July 2016: It was our very first Wexner Heritage Program meeting in Snowmass, CO, and Rabbi Jay Moses told us, “Many of you may think that you do not deserve to be here or may be suffering from a bit of Impostor Syndrome. Let me assure you: We chose YOU for a reason and you have EXACTLY what it takes to make a difference in the Jewish World.” That may not have been verbatim what was said, but my takeaway was that Wexner was making a true commitment to prepare us for what was next. On…
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Posted on Sunday, September 08, 2019 by Or Mars
Last month at the US Open, Naomi Osaka crushed Coco Gauff decidedly in a 6-3, 6-0 loss. ESPN reports that after the loss, “Coco Gauff walked to her chair on the sideline…and desperately tried not to cry in front of 23,000 fans…(but) the tears started streaming down her face, no matter how hard she had tried to suppress them…Then, seemingly without a moment of hesitation, Naomi Osaka…came over to console her and tell her it was all right to cry.” Later Osak…
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Posted on Thursday, August 15, 2019 by Steve Rosenberg
In late May 2019, my wife Ellen and I traveled to the seaside town of Portoroz on the coast of Slovenia, just south of the old Jewish city of Trieste. There we joined with 46 Tarbut fellows from Budapest and Poland, along with their partners (and a few babies), in a scene that reminded us of our own Wexner Seminar in Snowbird, Utah, many years ago. And that was no coincidence, because the new Tarbut Fellowship program that we were honored to be part of was founded by Rabbi Michael Paley, one of…
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