Honors
Idit Solomon, founder and CEO of Berkeley-based Hasidah, was selected for a national fellowship with Rabbis Without Borders, an interdenominational group based in New York.
Congregation B’nai Israel in Sacramento was named by the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism as one of 17 winners of the 2017 Irving J. Fain Award, recognizing the work of Reform Jewish congregations in creating a culture of social justice advocacy.
Aaron Katler of S.F.-based UpStart and David Katznelson of Reboot are among the 14 participants selected by Leading Edge, the Alliance for Excellence in Jewish Leadership, for the second cohort of its CEO Onboarding Program, a 12-month leadership development program that works with senior leaders of Jewish organizations.
Happenings
Rabbi Marvin Goodman will be honored Aug. 29 at a community event at Peninsula Sinai Congregation in Foster City and is using the occasion — and the celebration of his 69th birthday — to support the Yazidi people and IsraAid’s efforts to help the Iraqi religious minority group targeted by ISIS. Goodman has set a personal goal of raising $10,000 for the interfaith Beyond Genocide campaign and for IsraAid. Contributions may be made here.
As part of her bat mitzvah project at Congregation Beth Jacob in Redwood City, Shira Futornick raised more than $20,000 in donations for the Arava International Center for Agriculture Training in Israel, which provides agricultural and business programs to students from developing countries. Shira spoke about her fundraising project at the AICAT graduation in June.
Comings & Goings
Jody Passanisi has been hired as director of the middle school at Palo Alto’s Gideon Hausner Jewish Day School. She is moving to Hausner after a dozen years at the Abraham Joshua Heschel Day School in Northridge.
Hausner also announced that Smita Kolhatkar will be its new director of technology and innovation. She spent the past decade in the Palo Alto Unified School District, including five years as the district’s first educational technology teacher on special assignment, and serves on the Teacher Advisory Board of the Computer History Museum.
The S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation has hired Sue Reinhold as managing director of philanthropy. The seventh-generation San Franciscan has a quarter-century of experience as an investor, entrepreneur and business leader, including as a founder and managing partner of North Berkeley Investment Partners, an independent financial advisory firm. She also helped found and was the first board treasurer of The Kitchen.
PJ Schwartz is the new rabbi educator at Congregation Shir Hadash in Los Gatos.
Rabbis Daria and Josh Jacobs-Velde will be honored at an Aug. 6 going-away party after three years at Zmanim, a nature-connected spiritual Jewish community in Sonoma County. They will be leaving in August to become rabbis of a congregation in Maryland.
The Berkeley-based Jewish Studio Project, which calls itself “a new approach to Jewish creativity,” has hired Maya Abramson as its new studio manager. She is a former head song leader at Camp Tawonga.