Rabbi Hara Person is the Chief Executive of Central Conference of American Rabbis. Previously, she was the CCAR's Chief Strategy Officer. In that capacity, she oversaw the Communications Department and served as Publisher of CCAR Press, and worked with leadership on overall organizational strategy. Rabbi Person was ordained in 1998 from Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, after graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Amherst College (1986) and receiving an MA in Fine Arts from New York University’s International Center of Photography (1992). She served as Educator at the Brooklyn Heights Synagogue from 1990-1996, and was the Adjunct Rabbi there from 1998-2019. Since 1998, Rabbi Person has been the High Holy Day Rabbi of Congregation B'nai Olam, Fire Island Pines, NY. Before coming to the CCAR, Rabbi Person was the Editor-in-Chief of URJ Books and Music, where she was responsible for the revision of The Torah: A Modern Commentary(2005) and the publication of many significant projects, including the Aleph Isn't Tough adult Hebrew series and Mitkadem: Hebrew for Youth as well as several award-winning children's books. While at URJ, she was also the Managing Editor of The Torah: Women's commentary, named the National Jewish Book Award Book of the Year in 2008. Rabbi Person is also the co-author of Stories of Heaven and Earth: Bible Heroes in Contemporary Children's Literature and as well as co-editor of That You May Live Long: Caring for Your Aging Parents, Caring for Yourself, and Editor of The Mitzvah Healing. Her essays and poems have been published in various anthologies and journals, including Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal, upstreet, Encyclopedia of Jewish American Popular Culture, Women and Judaism, The Continuum Encyclopedia of Children's Literature, and The Women's Haftarah Commentary. Rabbi Person lives in Brooklyn, NY, and is the mother of two young adults. Jessica Greenbaum, is the co-editor, with Rabbi Hara Person, of CCAR Press' Mishkan HaSeder: A Passover Haggadah (2021). A poet, teacher, and social worker, her first book of poems, Inventing Difficulty (2000), won the Gerald Cable Prize; her second book, The Two Yvonnes (2012), was called a "Best Book of Poetry for 2012" by Library Journal, and of her third book, Spilled and Gone (2019), the poet Tony Hoagland said, "When I read it, I feel myself open and relax into the world." Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, Yale Review, Paris Review and elsewhere, and for twelve years she was the poetry editor for the literary journal upstreet. A recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts fellowship and the Agnes di Castagnola award from the Poetry Society of America, she teaches inside and outside academia, including at Barnard and Vassar Colleges, Brooklyn Poets and DOROT'S senior center. Since 2015, she has been creating poetry reading and writing classes around Jewish text. Some classes investigate the organic relationship between basic Jewish values–like close reading, distinction through separation, and tikkun olam–with those same values found in poetry. Others pair themes found in traditional Jewish texts–Torah, Pirkei Avot, The Psalms–with themes reflected in contemporary poems. She has taught for years in Manhattan's Central Synagogue, and more recently in Brooklyn's Congregation Beth Elohim. As a social worker, she has taught poetry reading and writing to some communities who have experienced trauma, including at Footsteps, the nation's only agency for people who have left ultra-Orthodoxy, and for cancer survivors in the Children's Brain Tumor Foundation. Learn more about Jessica here. Tobi Kahn is a painter and sculptor whose work has been shown in over seventy solo museum exhibitions and is in numerous permanent collections, including the Guggenheim Museum; The Phillips Collection; The Jewish Museum; the Minneapolis Institute of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Yale University Art Gallery; 9/11 Memorial Museum; and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. His paintings, sculpture, and installations have been commissioned by hospitals, synagogues and sacred/interfaith spaces and are in corporate and private collections around the world. He has taught painting at the School of Visual Arts for over thirty years. In 2000, he co-founded the Artists' Beit Midrash along with Rabbi Leon Morris at Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center, where he still teaches. He received his BA in photography and printmaking from Hunter College and MFA in paining and sculpture from Pratt Institute. www.tobikahn.com
