The BYFI Alumni Advisory Board (AAB) is comprised of BYFI alumni who volunteer to serve for 2 year rotations. Membership on the AAB or serving on an AAB committee is open to all BYFI alumni.
The AAB serves as a “think tank” for alumni life – advocating for the needs and aspirations of BYFI alumni, developing new ideas, and facilitating current processes. In particular, the AAB advises and provides input on the strategic planning efforts of the BYFI Director of Alumni Engagement.
Wayne Jones ‘93,
President - AAB
Wayne Lee Jones is currently Director of Operations at Oracle Corporation, the world's leading supplier of software for information management, responsible for driving greater efficiency and improved customer service within Oracle's North America Sales and Consulting organization. Prior to his current role, Mr. Jones founded and managed a consulting practice within Oracle that assisted Fortune 200 clients with the technical implementation and business transformation required to make best use of Oracle's technologies for collaboration and content management. Before joining Oracle, Mr. Jones founded and ran PWD Concepts, a consultancy that helped medium-sized businesses identify strategies for using Web-based technologies to improve internal operations and open new channels to partners and customers. Mr. Jones holds the degree of Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School, and completed his undergraduate work at Harvard College in 1997.
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Elijah Dornstreich ‘92,
Chair - Technology & Communications Committee (TCC)
Elijah Dornstreich was President of NationsFirst Financial from 1999 to 2007. He is an owner of Capital Business Partners, which partners with banks and institutions to offer funding solutions to small businesses. Elijah is also VP of Sales at eMortgage Management in Hainesport, NJ. In 2007 Elijah became President of the Alumni Advisory Board. Elijah travelled to Israel in July 2006 as a member of ROI-120 (www.roi120.com), an initiative of Birthright Israel, which sends 120 Jewish leaders between age 20 and 35 from around the globe for a 3-day conference in Jerusalem to discuss and strategize on Jewish philanthropy and continuity. Additionally Elijah has attended the annual conference of the Jewish Funders Network (www.jfunders.org) in Denver in 2006 and again in Jerusalem in 2008. In 2007 Elijah helped produce the short film Have You Ever Heard About Vukovar? (www.vukovarthemovie.com) which has won numerous awards and screened at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival. Elijah grew up working on his parents organic vegetable and herb farm in Bucks County Pennsylvania. Branch Creek Farm markets baby greens, specialty herbs, vegetables, edible flowers, and more to the highest-quality Philadelphia restaurants and hotels.
Elijah served as the BYFI Alumni Advisory Board President from 2007-2009.
e l i ja h @ byfi.org
Donya Khalili '97,
Chair – Development & Governance Committee (DGC)
Donya Khalili graduate of Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania Law School and Center on Bioethics, became a Bronfman Fellow in 1997. She is now a federal law clerk for the Honorable Boyce Martin of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky.
Before law school, she co-founded a nationally-syndicated radio show, Culture Shocks with Barry Lynn, while working for Americans United for Separation of Church and State. She also serves on the board of directors of the American Constitution Society and is amember of the IDEA Coalition, a Philadelphia organization seeking to create a community of young black and Jewish professionals and the One Percent Foundation, a non-profit organization committed to engaging young adults in philanthropy.
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Naamah Paley '02,
Chair – Alumni Programming and Events Committee (APEC)
Naamah graduated with highest honors in Middle Eastern and North African Studies from the University of Michigan in the spring of 2008. She grew up in New York City but was fortunate to spend most of her childhood summers wandering around the Goldstein Youth Village while her father, Rabbi Michael Paley, was a staff member on the BYFI.
As a result of her deep interest in the Middle East, Naamah spent a summer organic farming in rural Turkey, a semester studying Arabic at the American University in Cairo, and, most recently, a year in Israel on a Dorot Fellowship. Naamah is a committed educator and spent her college years volunteering in the Detroit public school system, tutoring Sudanese refugees trapped in Egypt, working at New York City’s first Arabic bilingual public school, and teaching English to Arab youth living in several of Israel’s mixed cities.
Naamah is now living in Brooklyn and working at the New Israel Fund.
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Susan Pultman '99,
Chair - Fundraising and Projects Committee (FPC)
Susan Pultman is currently working towards her Masters in Social Work and Masters in Education in Human Sexuality at Widener University. She is interning at the Health Resource Center in a local high school, providing pregnancy and STI testing, and counseling around all areas of adolescent sexuality and sexual health. Susan is also the Director of Marketing and Programming for The Collaborative, a social organization for Jews in their 20's and 30's in the Philadelphia area.
Prior to moving to Philadelphia, Susan was working at the national office of Hadassah in New York, running the U.S. operations for the WUJS Israel program. Before that, she lived in Israel for a year, studying at WUJS and the Conservative Yeshiva and interning at Jerusalem's gay and lesbian community center. She was also the madricha for BYFI 2005. Susan has a B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis in Women and Gender Studies and Anthropology.
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Inna Alecksandrovich '06,
AAB Member - TCC
Inna Alecksandrovich was born in Russia, but her family immigrated to Israel shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union while she was still a baby. After growing up in Israel for eight years she moved to Pennsylvania with her family. Inna graduated from George School, a Quaker boarding and day school and is currently a sophomore in the Huntsman Program in International studies and business at the University of Pennsylvania. She is concentrating in Finance at Wharton, International Studies at the College of Arts and Sciences, and minoring in French and Russian.
Inna is particularly interested in developing economies and financial responsibility and risk management. She is currently conducting research on modern management structure and culture in Russia and is a co-founder and executive officer of the Wharton Russia Student Society and a partner in the Huntsman Investing Fund.
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Deb Dusansky '87,
AAB Member - DGC
Deb Dusansky was in the first summer program of the Bronfman fellowship in 1987. Ever since then she has been involved in Jewish communities across the US and in Israel. She has served as Director of religious schools from Conservative, Jewish Renewal, Community Day schools, independent schools in Colorado, Connecticut, and Georgia. In addition to being a professional Jewish educator for over 20 years, Deb is a family therapist and started the Boulder office of Jewish Family Service. She has served on JCC boards, Jewish family Service board, Kehilath AIsh Kodesh board, and American cancer society. For the last 5 years , Deb has served as the director of an independent and unique outreach organization for interfaith and jewish unaffiliated families. Deb served as a counselor for BYFI in '89 and '90. Deb has a BA from Wesleyan univ and masters in family counseling at Nnaropa university.
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Yoni Englehart '96,
AAB Member - FPC
Yoni Engelhart is currently an MBA student at Harvard Business School. He began his career as an equity analyst for the Center for Financial Research & Analysis (CFRA) where he worked on behalf of fund managers to uncover and research companies using aggressive, unusual or fraudulent accounting practices to overstate their financial health. He left the research desk to serve as CFRA's Director of Business Strategy until leaving the firm in 2008. Yoni graduated with honors from the University of Maryland where he studied Business Management and Philosophy. He is a founding member of the Israel Society of Investment Professionals (www.cfaisrael.org), a CFA Charterholder, and a member of the Boston Security Analyst Society. He lives in Brookline, MA with his wife Talia and daughter Yakira.
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Danny Greene '00,
AAB Member - TCC
Since August 2007, Danny Greene has worked for Al Gore's media company, Current (current.com), running a nationwide college outreach program, producing large-scale consumer marketing events and now integrating sponsors' brands into online and television programming. In the fall of 2007, Danny produced a short documentary that aired on Current about the wedding of his roommate at Stanford who left his Reform Jewish upbringing to become ultra-Orthodox. Prior to Current, Danny spent two years developing and implementing Hillel's five-year Strategic Plan at the Schusterman International Center in Washington, D.C., and was instrumental in launching the Campus Entrepreneurs Initiative (CEI), which envisioned a new form of Jewish student leadership. Danny staffed two Birthright trips and traveled around the world on Semester at Sea, davening Rosh Hashanah services in Japan, staying in a bed and breakfast in a township in South Africa, and singing Guantanamera on the streets of Havana.
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Jordan Hirsch '05,
AAB - Member - APEC
Jordan Hirsch is a student at Columbia University majoring in history. He is a intern and writer at Tablet Magazine (www.tabletmag.com), a daily online magazine of Jewish news, ideas, and culture. An avid writer, he has also been published in The National Review, the Dallas Morning News, Guernica, and PresenTense Magazine. He is currently enrolled in New York Times columnist Samuel Freedman's Writer's Seminar on the Jewish people and writing his senior thesis on the history of the movement to rescue Soviet Jewry during the Cold War. Additionally, while at Columbia, he served as editor-in-chief of The Current (www.columbiacurrent.org), a quarterly journal of politics, culture, and Jewish affairs which received funding and support from the BYFI Alumni Grant in 2008. Born and raised in Dallas, Texas, Jordan remains proud to represent his native state on BYFI.
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Liz Kilstein '99,
AAB Member - DGC
Liz Kilstein is a first year law student at New York University, where she is a Root Tilden Kern D'Agostino Scholar. She spent the 14 months immediately prior to law school living overseas, including work and study in Poland, Israel, Honduras, and Nicaragua.
From July 2004 – June 2007, Liz worked at the Institute of International Education, the international NGO that administers the Fulbright scholarships. Her responsibilities included legislative outreach. She formerly worked at the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP) and has volunteered with the YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) campaign for affordable housing in Washington, DC, the Victor J. Goldberg Prize for Peace in the Middle East, and Mavoi Satum, a Jerusalem-based organization which advocates for women chained into unwanted marriages.
A 2004 graduate of Barnard College, Liz has also studied English and Hebrew Literature at St. Peter's College, Oxford University, and Old Testament at Union Theological Seminary. She contributes arts & culture pieces to Lilith Magazine.
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Idit Klein '89,
AAB Member - APEC
Idit Klein is the Executive Director of Keshet, an organization that works to ensure that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Jews are included in all parts of the Jewish community. Since 2001, she has built Keshet from a one person, $35k annual budget local organization to a nine person, over $850k organization with national reach. She has led numerous successful organizing efforts at synagogues, schools, and Jewish organizations around the country. Under her leadership, Keshet mobilized over 30 Massachusetts congregations to help defeat the proposed anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment. Klein also served as the Executive Producer of the documentary film, Hineini: Coming Out in a Jewish High School. Prior to Keshet, Klein was an activist in the queer women's community in Israel and played a role in early organizing around the creation of the Jerusalem Open House. She worked for social justice organizations in Jerusalem and in Boston including Shatil, the Israel/Palestine Center for Research & Information, and Community Work Services. She graduated magna cum laude from Yale University and received a Masters in Education from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a focus on social justice and anti-oppression education. Idit was among eight recipients of the 2003-2005 Joshua Venture Fellowship for young Jewish social entrepreneurs. She is a past fellow and current board member of the Jewish Organizing Initiative and was honored by the Jewish Women's Archive with a Women Who Dared award.
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Ilana Lapid '94,
AAB Member - APEC
Ilana Lapid is a filmmaker, writer and arts-educator who is currently the first Artist in Residence at Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale. Ilana was born in New York City, spent her childhood in Jerusalem and Ottawa before moving to Las Cruces, New Mexico. She has a B.A. in Political Science from Yale University, with a focus on International Relations and the Middle East. Her first directing work was in 1997 as a counselor at Seeds of Peace, a camp in Otisfied, Maine for Israeli and Arab youth flown in from the Middle East. There she directed a multi-media theatrical presentation written and performed by the youth, which inspired her belief in the transformational power of stories. In 2001-2002, Ilana spent a year in Romania on a Fulbright Fellowship, leading a mural and photography project with Rroma children living in a garbage dump in Transylvania. This project resulted in an exhibit, "Dreaming in Color; Living in Black & White," shown in museums and cultural centers in Romania and the US. In 2005, Ilana moved to LA to attend USC School of Cinematic Arts, where she directed and produced several award-winning short films and wrote two feature screenplays. Her USC MFA thesis film, “Red Mesa,” a border story shot on 35 mm in southern New Mexico, is now making its festival run. As part of her Artist Residency at Slifka Center, Ilana is teaching a screenwriting seminar and organizing a speaker series of visionary Jewish artists, writers, filmmakers whose work engages global issues. More info about her film can be found at: www.redmesamovie.com.
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Ben Magarik '01,
AAB Member - FPC
Ben Magarik grew up in Brooklyn, and is a proud graduate of New York public schools. He attended Wesleyan University, where he studied political theory, economics, and history in the College of Social Studies. He is currently a Special Assistant to the CEO and President at OPOWER, an Energy Efficiency and Smart Grid Software company in Arlington, Virginia. He was previously the Associate Director of Development at Digital Divide Data and a Fellow at the Samuel Bronfman Foundation.
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David Ponet '92,
AAB Member - FPC
David currently works at UNICEF where he focuses on the organization's engagement with parliaments around the globe. He previously held public policy positions both in the public and private sectors and directed policy for a NYC mayoral campaign. He earned a BA in political science (or more accurately political philosophy) from Yale and a PhD in political science (with a dissertation on democratic theory) from Columbia.
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Tova Serkin '97,
AAB Member - TCC
Tova is the Chief Business Officer at JGooders.com. Before joining JGooders, Tova served as the Executive Director of KolDor, a global network of Jewish leaders and activists dedicated to strengthening Jewish Peoplehood as an organizing principle in the Jewish world. Previously, Tova worked as development professional for a variety of other not-for-profit organizations in Israel and the United States including the Jewish Agency for Israel, Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Life on Campus and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation. Tova is also an alumnus of OTZMA and ROI and a frequent speaker on fundraising, young leadership, and Jewish Peoplehood. Tova holds a B.A. (with honors) in Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard University (2002). Originally from New York, Tova moved to Israel in 2004 and today lives in Herzliya.
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Judah Skoff '96,
AAB Member - FPC
Judah Skoff is a graduate of Brown University and Boston University School of Law. He is currently an associate at McCarter & English, LLP. Judah has been active in the Jewish community as both a professional and volunteer. He was Bronfman Fellow/Program Officer at The Samuel Bronfman Foundation from 2003-2004. He served on the board of directors and chair of the program committee of BIMA: The Berkshire Institute for Music and Art, and as a member of the Young Jewish Diplomatic Corps of the World Jewish Congress. He is currently a member of ACCESS, the American Jewish Committee's young leadership program. During law school, he served as president of the Jewish Law Students Association, and was a member of the Young Lawyer's Division of the Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Boston. He spent seven summers on staff at Camp Ramah in Canada. He and his wife Becky are active members of the Jewish community in Hoboken, NJ. Judah is thrilled to be a member of the Alumni Advisory Board, and the opportunity it gives him to connect with, and help develop, the Bronfman Youth Fellowship's alumni community.
In his spare time, Judah is a playwright. Most recently, one of his plays was performed at the Last Frontier Theatre Conference in Valdez, Alaska. He is also on the board of director's of the Playwright's Theatre of New Jersey.
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Igor Timofeyev '91,
AAB Member - DGC
Igor V. Timofeyev is an associate with the Washington, D.C., office of Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker, where he specializes in appellate and international litigation. He previously served as Director of Immigration Policy and Special Advisor for Refugee and Asylum Affairs at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. In that capacity, he advised the Secretary of Homeland Security on immigration, visa, refugee, and asylum policy, and coordinated the department’s policy on immigration reform and enforcement. Prior to his government work and private practice, Igor served as an Associate Legal Officer to the president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and clerked for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. He is a graduate of Yale Law School, Oxford University, and Williams College.
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Rachael Wagner '99,
AAB Member - DGC
Rachael Wagner is an Associate at Lion Capital, a private equity firm focused on retail and consumer products investments. Rachael previously worked in Blackstone’s Private Equity Group. She attended Harvard University, where she studied Economics and Social Anthropology. Rachael also received an MSc in Comparative Social Policy and an MBA from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.
In addition to her work with BYFI, Rachael sits on the Board of Directors of the Workshop in Business Opportunities and previously served on the Board of Advisors of the Women's Venture Fund; both organizations help train and fund entrepreneurs in the New York metro area.
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