Dear Clal friends and family,

Rebecca has been a remarkable leader, creating and stewarding RWB over the past ten years. She has grown this program from inception to today, reaching over 240 rabbis in our fellowship programs and countless more in seminars, workshops, and through her writing. Throughout it all, she has helped rabbis become more pluralist and innovative, the core goal of this program. She has more than achieved what we set up to do when we first conceived of RWB. We are genuinely proud of these accomplishments.

Rebecca will be leaving Clal/ RWB at the end of October and though we are sad that Rebecca is leaving, we are excited about her new position at Hadassah as Director of Member and Unit Services (Membership and Engagement) which will enable her to broaden her reach as she inspires more than 300,000 members of Hadassah. In addition, Rebecca will pursue her longstanding passion for, and commitment to, nurturing greater gender equity in the wider Jewish community and its major institutions. We wish her great success in these future endeavors.

“I have learned a tremendous amount in my past ten years at Clal. I look forward to bringing that learning to my new position.” Rebecca said.

Clal’s work with rabbis will continue, and we are already developing and building out the next iteration of RWB, reaffirming its original mission as a place for rabbis across ideological, political, cultural, halachic divides to develop, learn and apply new ideas. We will not hold our previously scheduled February alumni retreat in Austin this year, as we explore future directions for our work with rabbis. We look forward to your participation in this next phase of that work, and welcome your input and ideas.

In the meantime, we hope that the rabbis will continue to make use of the RWB alumni Google group, and continue their conversations.

“RWB rabbis have so much to contribute to the world. I can’t wait to see what they do next. I will miss each and every one of them.” commented Rebecca.

For more than 40 years, Clal has been defined by the creation, cultivation, and dissemination of new ideas, always animated by deep pluralism and a fearless embrace of how new realities shape both people’s experience of Jewishness, and the resulting applicability of Jewish wisdom to those new realities, both within Jewish life and beyond. We look forward to your being an ongoing part of this effort.

Sincerely,

Rabbis Brad Hirschfield & Irwin Kula