Community Blog Creativity and Community: Meet Our Gala 2026 Award Recipients

At our 2026 Spring Gala on May 14, Hebrew College will gather to honor individuals and a family whose lives and work reflect the values at the heart of our community: learning across generations, creative expression rooted in Jewish tradition, and leadership guided by courage, and curiosity. The Gelber family will receive the L’dor Vador Award for Intergenerational Learning and Leadership, Joshua Mayer will receive the Betzalel Award for Leadership in Arts and Culture, and Terry Rosenberg will receive the Esther Award for Courageous Women’s Leadership. These recipients represent different pathways into Jewish life in Greater Boston, contributing in enduring ways to the flourishing our shared future. Through service, philanthropy, and creativity, they demonstrate that Jewish life is sustained not only by institutions, but by people who show up with their whole selves. (Pictured l-r: The Gelber family (Seth, Helene, Benjamin), Joshua Meyer, Terry Rosenberg)

For more than two decades, the Gelber family, recipients of the L’Dor Vador Award for Intergenerational Learning and Leadership, has helped shape and strengthen the Jewish community of Greater Boston. Arriving as a young couple without local ties, Helene and Seth found their foothold in Jewish Boston through Helene’s employment at Combined Jewish Philanthropies. From congregational life to volunteer service and board leadership, their involvement grew into a sustained commitment to Jewish life. Enrolling their son Ben at The Rashi School deepened their connection to Jewish culture, tradition and the State of Israel. In high school Ben served as a youth trustee on the board of Jewish Family Service of Metrowest. Last year, he authored and self-published a children’s picture book set during Passover that raises food allergy awareness, turning its sales into a fundraiser for FASI: The Food Allergy Science Initiative. For the Gelbers, Jewish education is both a personal and philanthropic priority. They invest not only financially, but also through leadership, volunteering, and advocacy to strengthen Boston’s Jewish community.

Joshua Meyer is a painter whose artistic practice is deeply intertwined with Jewish tradition and communal life. “Judaism and art have this thing in common where they’re all-encompassing,” says painter Joshua Meyer, recipient of the Betzalel Award honoring leadership in arts and culture. Based in Cambridge, Meyer has spent decades exploring how art-making, like Judaism, rejects fixed answers in favor of process, debate, and transformation. He is a valuable member of the Hebrew College Arts Committee, and his first major exhibition at Hebrew College, Tohu vaVohu, drew on the opening verses of Bereishit, taking the biblical image of primordial chaos resolving into creation as a metaphor for the artistic process across a cycle of forty paintings. Meyer’s work is not always explicitly Jewish in imagery, yet it is structured by themes that emanate from Jewish life, including pluralism, argument, attention to time, and the belief that meaning emerges through encounter and relationship. He is represented by Rice Polak Gallery in Provincetown and Dolby Chadwick Gallery in San Francisco and has exhibited widely, including Yale, NYU, UCLA, the BYU Museum of Art, the Worcester Art Museum and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

Terry Rosenberg, recipient of the Esther Award for Courageous Women’s Leadership, has dedicated her career to learning, growth, and nurturing the values of Torah in individuals and communities. As a consultant and coach, she has guided senior executives, Jewish communal leaders, and rabbis. In Boston, she has been a devoted volunteer and community leader, helping to seed Hebrew College’s Me’ah adult learning program at her synagogue, and serving on the boards of local and national organizations close to her heart. Her focus has long been adult Jewish learning and contemplative practice, fostered through her work with CJP, Synagogue 2000, Hebrew College, and the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. In 2017, Terry became a certified spiritual director through HUC-JIR, blending her professional experience with her personal commitment to spiritual growth. She serves on the board of the Jewish Women’s Archive, the Institute for Jewish Spirituality’s wisdom council, The Jewish Grandparent’s Network advisory council, and Hebrew College’s Strategic Planning Committee.

As we recognize these honorees, we also celebrate the broader Hebrew College community that nurtures and is nourished by such contributions. We look forward to gathering at the Spring Gala on May 14 to honor their work, express our gratitude, and recommit ourselves to the shared project of sustaining a vibrant, thoughtful, and inclusive Jewish future. We hope you can join us.

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