2021 Ministering The Elderly Speakers

Rabbi Laura Geller
Rabbi Emerita of Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills

Rabbi Geller is the co-author of the book Getting Good At Getting Older, along with her husband Richard Siegel (z”l). She was named by PBS Next Avenue as one of the Fifty 2017 Influencers in Aging and one of Newsweek’s 50 Most Influential Rabbis in America. Prior to becoming one of the first women to be selected through a national search to lead a major metropolitan synagogue, Rabbi Geller served as the Director of Hillel of University of Southern California and as the Pacific Southwest Region’s Executive Director of the American Jewish Congress. Rabbi Geller, featured in the PBS documentary “Jewish Americans,” is the author of numerous articles in books and journals and served on the editorial board of The Torah: A Women’s Commentary. She is a Fellow of the Corporation of her alma mater, Brown University. She also serves on the boards of Encore.org and the Jewish Women’s Archive. Ordained by Hebrew Union College in 1976, she is the third woman in the Reform Movement to become a Rabbi.

David M. Elcott, Ph.D.
Henry and Marilyn Taub Professor of Practice in Public Service and Leadership at NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.

For the past twenty-five years, David has worked at the intersection of community building, cross-boundary engagement and interfaith and ethnic activism. Through his research, he has become the expert in the Jewish community on the Baby Boomer cohort, encore careers and public service. His study—Baby Boomers, Public Service and Minority Communities—A Case Study of the Jewish Community in the United States (2009)—was the first national survey and analysis of Jewish Boomers and encore careers. He was previously Vice-President of the National Center for Learning and Leadership (CLAL) and Interreligious Affairs Director of the American Jewish Committee. He is the author of A Sacred Journey: The Jewish Quest for a Perfect World and numerous articles and monographs on minority civic engagement, and cross-cultural pluralism. As a consultant, David specializes in organizational and philanthropic consulting and evaluation, mediation and reconciliation, and is a frequent lecturer on contemporary issues. He received his Ph.D. in Political Psychology at Columbia University.

Stuart Himmelfarb
Senior Fellow at NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.

Stuart has held professional and volunteer leadership positions in the Jewish community. Professionally, he was most recently Chief Marketing Officer at UJA Federation of Northern New Jersey and Director of the Berrie Fellows Leadership Program. Along with two co-chairs, he also created the Klene-Up Krewe, a volunteer corps which has visited New Orleans more than twenty times since Katrina. As a volunteer, he served on the Executive Committee of Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, was a Trustee and Marketing Chair of New York UJA Federation, co-President of Temple Sinai of Bergen County (NJ) and is currently President of the Board of the New York Jewish Week newspaper. His encore career at the Federation followed twenty-five years in marketing, advertising, media, research and consulting. He co-founded and was president of CollegeTrack, Inc., which became the leading college market research and consulting company, and which he sold to Roper Starch Worldwide. He has an MBA in Marketing from Columbia University Graduate School of Business where he was a member of the Beta Gamma Sigma Honors Society; an MA in Contemporary Jewish Studies from Brandeis University’s Hornstein Program in Jewish Communal Service; and a BA from Brown University.