Featured Presenters

Maurice N. Eisendrath Bearer of Light Award

Tri-Faith Initiative

The Tri-Faith Initiative is a unique and ambitious project in the field of interfaith relations in design, scale, and scope. It brings together into permanent residency a synagogue, church, mosque, and interfaith center on one 38-acre campus in the middle of America’s heartland.

By its very model it challenges people of faith and goodwill to be conscious and proactive about the assets of faith in civil life in a religiously pluralistic society. The Tri-Faith Initiative aims to create a more inclusive culture in which religious pluralism is socially normative.

Alexander M. Schindler Award for Service to World Jewry

Julie Fisher & Ambassador Dan Shapiro

Over the past eight years, Julie Fisher has taken a personal interest in the conversation about the safety, care, and education of the children of African asylum seekers in South Tel Aviv and has worked with NGOs and other partners to improve conditions in schools and childcare facilities through fundraisers and hands-on repair projects. In 2018, she created the Consortium for Israel and the Asylum Seekers in order to bring attention to the issue of supporting the African asylum-seeking community in Israel.

Daniel B. Shapiro was named Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Tel Aviv University’s Institute of National Security Studies (INSS) in March 2017, following a a diverse career of over 20 years in senior foreign policy and national security positions in the United States government including United States Ambassador to Israel, a position he held from July 2011 until the end of the Obama Administration.

Debbie Friedman Award for Contributions to Jewish Music

Cantor Barbara Ostfeld

At age twenty-two Barbara Ostfeld became the first woman ordained as a cantor. Now that Barbara is 66, the female Reform cantorate is 336 women strong! Barbara served for twenty-seven years as cantor of congregations in Clifton, New Jersey, in Great Neck, Rochester, and Buffalo, New York, and then for ten more years as the placement director of the American Conference of Cantors.