Yana Agranovsky Berger, who graduated from an ORT high school in Israel, is coming full circle with her recent appointment as Bay Area director for the global Jewish educational organization.
In her new role, the 27-year-old will lead fundraising efforts in Northern California for ORT America and seek to rejuvenate a San Francisco chapter that has lacked a staff member for more than 20 years. In a phone interview, she talked about the desire to re-energize Bay Area chapters — now in Marin, the East Bay, the Peninsula and the South Bay — with younger members and to re-establish a presence for the organization in San Francisco.
“The key word is regeneration,” Agranovsky Berger said.
The lack of younger members is perplexing, she said, because ORT’s activities focus on young people and on high-tech education. In the 1990s, the Bay Area had 13 local ORT chapters and an annual gala, as well as a local office.
Agranovsky Berger attended an ORT high school in Ashkelon after arriving in Israel as a baby with her parents from Belarus. She served in the intelligence unit of the Israel Defense Forces and later worked in marketing in Israel within the high-tech and food and beverage sectors.
She has lived in the Bay Area for three years, working in marketing, public relations and fundraising as well as for the Judaic department at Lisa Kampner Hebrew Academy, a day school in San Francisco.
Agranovsky Berger said her time in Ashkelon “was an excellent experience that prepared me for responsibility in the military and in my future career. The knowledge and sense of community I acquired in ORT gave me the foundation to succeed.”
New York-based ORT America is a branch of World ORT, a group established in 1880 in St. Petersburg, Russia, that supports six educational facilities and four technical colleges in Israel as well as global educational activities. The organization says it has served more than 300,000 students worldwide. — j. staff