Newsletter
Newsletter Support JNS

Masa leadership summit in Israel to offer guidance to young Jewish professionals

It will train 125 early- to mid-career Masa Fellows on how to tackle challenges and embrace opportunities facing their Jewish communities.

Some 2,500 Masa fellows, alumni and professionals from 40 countries gathered at Ra’anana Park Amphitheater in Israel to celebrate the launch of the 2019-20 programming year. Photo by Ran Biran.
Some 2,500 Masa fellows, alumni and professionals from 40 countries gathered at Ra’anana Park Amphitheater in Israel to celebrate the launch of the 2019-20 programming year. Photo by Ran Biran.

Masa’s Wilf Leadership Summit, funded by the Wilf Family Foundations, will bring together 125 Masa Fellows, predominantly from North America to learn how to exercise leadership using their informal authority as people at the early stages of their career.

This groundbreaking training program has the potential to transform how new professionals and volunteers make progress on the challenges in their Jewish communities and organizations using their own resourcefulness.

The summit, an initiative of the Masa Leadership Center, will be held Dec. 15-19 in the hills of Neve Ilan, just outside Jerusalem. The program works to cultivate a new generation of Jewish leadership that challenges the current status quo so as to influence, diversify and enrich the Jewish future.

“Today, Israel and the Jewish world face increasingly complex challenges, and this requires us to do things differently. This is what the Masa Leadership Center is all about,” said Sarah Mali, vice president of Masa’s Leadership Center. “Adaptive Leadership is rooted in an understanding that each of us can exercise leadership, that we are interconnected parts of a wider system, and that we all have a stake in each other’s growth and in the kind of Jewish world we would like to cultivate. We are channeling participants’ unique voices to advance the common Jewish good.”

Participants will have the opportunity to learn from the center’s global faculty arriving from countries including the United States, Peru, Israel and Europe.

The program content and expertise is supported by the Kansas Leadership Center (KLC), a nonprofit leadership institution that has helped change the way citizens work with the collective challenges faced across the state of Kansas including, nonprofit, business and government industries.

“We need to equip the next generation of Jews with the skills, conviction and passion to lead our community into the future,” said Masa’s acting CEO Ofer Gutman. “Masa is providing the opportunities and resources that enable these young professionals to build stronger Jewish leadership.”

Israeli soldiers continue to operate in Southern Lebanon, as the 91st Division eliminates more than 35 terrorists in a week.
The military said that a weapons cache was hit and drone sites were dismantled.
Iranian and U.S. officials held separate talks with interlocutors in Doha over the past two days, a regional source said.
“These acts amount to the war crimes of murder and torture, and abuses of international human rights and humanitarian law,” according to the report.
University of Copenhagen instructor says phrase questions whether Israeli soldiers should face “violent resistance.”
The Israeli prime minister congratulated his Indian counterpart, saying he expects the bond between their nations to continue to strengthen.