Commencement & Ordination 2019/5779

Rabbinic Ordination

Mikhail Misha Clebaner
Jevin Seth Eagle
Hayley Mara Goldstein
Joel Avi Goldstein
Jessica Lowenthal Weber
Allison Lee Poirier
Stephanie Katharine Sanger-Miller
Mona Aviva Strick
Dena Meredith Trugman
Yehoshua Eitan Zehavi
Ilana Fiona Zietman

Cantorial Ordination

Maayan Harel

Master of Jewish Arts in Jewish Studies

Joshua Wm. Berkowitz
Jevin Seth Eagle
Hayley Mara Goldstein
Joel Avi Goldstein
Jessica Lowenthal Weber
Stephanie Katharine Sanger-Miller
Mona Aviva Strick
Dena Meredith Trugman
Yehoshua Eitan Zehavi

Master of Jewish Education

Roberta Bergstein
Jennifer Nicole Boyle
Mikhail Misha Clebaner
Jessica Sarah Goldberg
Maayan Harel
Arielle Nicole Hersh Levy
Allison Lee Poirier
Rebecca Naomi Redner
Wilma Sack-Poyser
Andrea Shapiro
Pamela Shapiro
Ilana Fiona Zietman

Master of Jewish Education/ Master of Artis in Jewish Studies (Dual Degree)

Sarah Elizabeth Hartman
Dale Rosenberg
Stephanie Robin Wolfe

Master of Jewish Education/Certificate in Jewish Day School Education

Netanel Kanovsky
Jonah Zev Potasznik
Barry David Rosekind
Ari Yitzhak Weber

Master of Jewish Liberal Studies

Mouhammed Awadallah
Melissa Lea Davis
Sandra  Leah Skoro-Naffah
Jacqueline Gail Tepper

Certificate in Jewish Educational Leadership

Michal Setti-Parnes
Seth Jason Goldsweig

Mark E. Atkins, MBA
Honorary Degree of Doctor of Humane Letters

Mark Atkins is a committed Hebrew College leader and volunteer. He has more than 30 years of experience in the computer and financial industries building and managing entrepreneurial and Fortune 1000 firms. He is currently a professor at The University of Massachusetts-Boston College of Management, where he teaches Entrepreneurial and Global Strategic Marketing courses to MBA and undergraduate students. Before becoming a professor, Atkins served as chairman, CEO, and president of two private global technology companies, Vality Technology and Invention Machine. He most recently joined Linkapedia, a tech start-up company, as its Chairman and CEO.

Atkins received an MBA from Babson College and a BA from The University of Massachusetts-Boston, where he has established The Mark E. Atkins Scholarship Endowment. He received “The Vilna Visionary Leadership Award” from the Vilna Shul and “The Distinguished Business Leader Award” from the University of Massachusetts College of Management.

A graduate of Hebrew College Prozdor, Atkins is chair of the Hebrew College Real Estate Committee and a former chair of the Hebrew College Board of Trustees. He is also a member of The Board of Overseers of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a former trustee of the University of Massachusetts Foundation. He has served as a member of the boards of the JCCGB, The Vilna Shul, and AJC New England, as a well as a member of the AJC National Board of Governors. In addition, Atkins mentors and advises early-stage entrepreneurs and non-profit organization executives.

Atkins and his domestic partner, Miho Sato, live in Boston and enjoy spending time with his family – his sister Paula and his two nephews, Joey and Billy.

Alice Hildegard Shalvi, PhD
Honorary Degree of Doctor of Humane Letters

Educator, feminist activist, social advocate and professor emerita of English literature, Alice Shalvi was born in Essen, Germany in 1926. In 1934, Shalvi and her family emigrated to England, where she received her education.

At age 20, she was sent to the Zionist Congress in Basel as a representative of British Jewish students. She graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1947 and from the London School of Economics in 1949.

In November 1949, Shalvi emigrated to Israel, where she taught in the Department of English at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem for forty years until 1990, receiving her PhD in 1962. During this period, she held various administrative positions at the university and was approved to establish the Department of English at the fledgling University Institute in Be’er Sheva, now the Ben Gurion University of the Negev. She served as the chair of the department from 1969-1973. From 1975-1990, she served in a voluntary capacity as principal of Pelech, a unique progressive high school for religious girls in Jerusalem. From 1984 to 2000, Dr. Shalvi was the founding chairwoman of the Israel Women’s Network, an organization dedicated to advancing the status of women in Israel, which became Israel’s major advocacy group on women’s issues. From 1997-2001, she served as rector of the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies, a graduate school initially affiliated with the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.

Dr. Shalvi has been an active and leading figure in a variety of social movements, peace and inter-religious dialogues, and feminist activities in both establishment and non-governmental frameworks. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including honorary degrees from a number of institutions of higher education such as Brown University, the Weizmann Institute of Science, Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and Ben Gurion University of the Negev. In 2007, she was awarded the Israel Prize for Lifetime Achievement.

Her memoir, Never a Native, was published in September 2018. Dr. Shalvi remains steadfast in her determination to find time in an over-busy schedule to continue her writing. She enjoys music, her garden and her growing family, which now includes seventeen grandchildren and twenty great-grandchildren.

Mary Evelyn Tucker, PhD
Honorary Degree of Doctor of Humane Letters

Dr. Mary Evelyn Tucker is a pioneer in the field of religion and ecology. She is a senior lecturer and research scholar at Yale University, where she teaches religion and ecology in the joint master’s program between the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and the Divinity School. Along with her husband, Dr. John Grim, she directs the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale.

Dr. Tucker received her PhD in Asian Religions from Columbia University, where she focused on Japanese Confucianism. Since 1997, she has been a Research Associate at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard.

Her concern for the growing environmental crisis, especially in Asia, led her and Grim to organize a series of 10 conferences from 1995-1998 on World Religions and Ecology at the Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions. Together they are series editors for ten volumes from the conferences. Tucker co-edited Buddhism and Ecology, Confucianism and Ecology, and Hinduism and Ecology.

After these conferences Drs. Tucker and Grim founded the Forum on Religion and Ecology, now based at Yale. They wrote Ecology and Religion, and, with Willis Jenkins, co-edited The Routledge Handbook on Religion and Ecology.

Tucker and Grim studied with Thomas Berry and then worked closely with him for 30 years. Tucker edited Berry’s books: The Great Work, Evening Thoughts, The Sacred Universe; and with Grim, The Christian Future and The Fate of Earth and Thomas Berry: Selected Writings on the Earth Community. Tucker and Grim also wrote Thomas Berry: A Biography with Andrew Angyal.

With Brian Thomas Swimme, Tucker created a multimedia project called Journey of the Universe, which included an Emmy Award-winning film, a book entitled Journey Conversations, and a large number of online courses. Tucker served on the International Earth Charter Drafting Committee and was a member of the Earth Charter International Council. She received an Inspiring Yale Teaching Award in April 2015. In June, she and John Grim will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for Religion, Nature, and Culture.

Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, PhD
Honorary Degree of Doctor of Humane Letters

Dr. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg is a Torah scholar, teacher, and author. She was born in London, England, where her parents found refuge after the 1938 Nazi takeover of Austria. In 1949, her family moved to Glasgow, Scotland, where her father, an eminent rabbi, was appointed head of the Rabbinical Court of Scotland. As a child, Avivah studied Bible daily with her father. She continued her Jewish education as a resident of Gateshead Seminary near Newcastle. While still in her teens, she co-authored a book of Bible studies, Sabbath Shiurim, with Rabbi M. Miller. The book won such wide acclaim in Orthodox Jewish circles that she was commissioned to translate a work about the Book of Proverbs by the great 19th century biblical commentator known as the Malbim.

Dr. Zornberg received both her BA and PhD in English Literature from Cambridge University and taught English literature at the Hebrew University before turning to teaching Torah. She moved to Israel in 1969, where she has been lecturing on Torah since 1980. She currently resides in Jerusalem and focuses on reading biblical narratives through the prism of midrash, literature, philosophy and particularly psychoanalysis.

She has lectured at synagogues, universities, and psychoanalytic institutes throughout the Jewish world, from North America through Europe, Africa and Asia to Australia. She holds a Visiting Lectureship at the London School of Jewish Studies in the United Kingdom. She is the author of five critically acclaimed books including Moses: A Human Life; Bewilderments: Reflections on the Book of Numbers; The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious; The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus;  and The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis, for which she won the National Jewish Book Award.

In 1996, Dr. Zornberg appeared on the PBS TV series “Bill Moyers: Genesis – A Living Conversation.” In 2009, she was interviewed about the Exodus story by Krista Tippett for “On Being.” The podcast has been rebroadcast around Passover time in the years since then. In 2005, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Jewish Theological Seminary and delivered the Haskell Lectures at Oberlin College. In 2009, she received The Maurice N. Eisendrath Bearer of Light Award from the Union for Reform Judaism.

She is married to Eric Zornberg, a physicist, and has three children and ten grandchildren. She loves classical music and plays the piano.

DR. BENJAMIN J. SHEVACH MEMORIAL AWARD
For distinguished achievement in Jewish educational leadership

Sefaria 

Joshua Foer 

Joshua Foer is the co-founder and chairman of Sefaria. He is also the co-creator of Sukkah City, the 2010 design competition and exhibition that invited the world’s leading architects to re-imagine what a traditional sukkah could look like. Josh is the co-founder and executive chairman of Atlas Obscura, a media and experiences company whose mission is to help people experience a sense of wonder and curiosity about the world. Their web site, atlasobscura.com, has over 5.7 million monthly users. The book he edited based on the web site, Atlas Obscura: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders, was a #1 New York Times best-seller. As a science journalist, Josh’s work has been published in the New Yorker, National Geographic,  the New York Times Magazine, Esquire,  and many other publications. His first book, Moonwalking with Einstein, about how he became the United States Memory Champion, was a #1 bestseller published in 35 languages. His forthcoming book, Other Ways of Being, tells the story of his travels with some of the world’s last hunter-gatherers. Josh was a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow, and was named “one of ten people who could change the world” by The New Statesman. He is a new member of the Jim Joseph Foundation’s Board of Directors.

Josh grew up in Washington, DC and lives in Brookline, MA with his wife and two children.

Brett Lockspeiser

Brett Lockspeiseris the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Sefaria where he oversees the development of Sefaria’s product experience. Brett studied symbolic systems at Stanford University, and then began a career in technology as a product manager at Google where he led the team that created the first version of the Google News Archives. Brett also worked with Google co-founder Larry Page to run a company-wide process for setting and tracking high-level goals. After leaving Google in 2007, Brett worked with startups and non-profits in San Francisco. Together with the Kadist Art Foundation, he led the development of KAPSUL, a web application that helps curators and educators in the arts collaborate and share visual resources.

Outside of his work with Sefaria, Brett was a founding board member of the Adobe Books & Arts Cooperative, a community group which saved a beloved used bookstore and art space in the Mission District by converting it into a worker-owned cooperative. Brett splits his time between San Francisco and the Russian River in West Sonoma County.

SYDNEY HILLSON/ROSE BRONSTEIN AWARD
For distinguished leadership and commitment to the centrality of the Hebrew language in Jewish education and for the advancement of Jewish culture and civilization

Ross Levine

Ross B. Levine, a native of Newton, MA, graduated with honors from Vanderbilt University in 2008 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science.

Deciding to pursue a deepening interest in the languages and history of the Middle East, Ross relocated to Tel Aviv in 2009, where he earned a Master of Arts degree in Middle Eastern history from Tel Aviv University. After completing a certificate in Arabic language studies, Ross worked as an editor and translator at an academic research center.

Upon returning to Boston in 2015, Ross and his family established a private philanthropic fund, the Chleck Family Foundation. As the foundation’s President and Executive Director, Ross researches and implements philanthropic investments dedicated to the advancement of education, healthcare, and medical research – with an emphasis on cultivating human capital. Several of the foundation’s initial projects are also influenced by the experiences of Ross’ grandfather, David Chleck.

These projects include the creation of undergraduate and graduate scholarship programs, cancer research fellowships, and investments in advanced nursing and physical therapy programs. In addition, the foundation has provided support for Hebrew language programs at Hebrew College.

Ross and his wife Dana, an architect and designer, currently reside in Boston’s Seaport District. Together they enjoy traveling, trying new restaurants, and running along Boston Harbor or the Charles River.

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QUESTIONS?

• General Commencement: Contact Helaine Friedlander in the
  Office of the President at 617.559.8600
• Rabbinical School Ordination:
  Contact Laurena Rosenberg at 617.559.8632
• School of Jewish Music Ordination: Contact Marcia Spellman at 617.559.8643

In addition to Commencement and Ordination, Hebrew College’s Kehillah Week includes a week of community events including:

• Wednesday May 29 – JTFGB Grant Presentations
• Thursday, May 30 – Jewish Education/ Jewish Studies Masters Presentation Day
• Thursday, May 30 – Hebrew College Live! Stories in Honor of Our Teachers
• Shabbat, May 31 – June 1: Spend Shabbat at a a neighborhood shul led by Hebrew College alumni
• Sunday, June 2 –  Commencement & Ordination
• Monday, June 3 – “Ani Kinnor  – אני כינור: Prayer Leader Summer Institute” begins
• Wednesday, June 5 – Me’ah Graduation