Center for Jewish Leadership and Learning Opens Its Doors in South Florida

The Center for the Jewish Future – RIETS is proud to announce the opening of several new transformational community initiatives.  These new initiatives, currently located in Chicago, South Florida, and San Francisco, serve to position Yeshiva University-RIETS as a “Yeshiva without walls”, primed to spread the values of Torah Umadda to the broader community.  Each in their unique way, these initiatives look to enrich and engage the greater Jewish community with inspired Torah living and learning, celebrating the core values of the primacy of Torah, embracing the larger world through the prism of Jewish ideals and the religious significance of the State of Israel. 

The Center for Jewish Leadership and Learning (CJLL) in South Florida has brought together a diverse team of community scholars who will deliver shiurim and coordinate programs for the greater South Florida Jewish community.  Targeting communities from Miami to North Palm Beach, the CJLL looks forward to partnering with local synagogues, federations, schools and rabbis to increase the level of Torah study and a commitment to the values of Torah Umadda L’chatchila. CJLL is led by Executive Director Rabbi David Gutterman. Rabbi Gutterman served as the rabbinic scholar for the Philadelphia Jewish Federation and directed the Hillel at Rutgers University. The community scholars include YU-Riets graduates Rabbi Avi Billet, Rabbi Josh Flug, and Rabbi Yaakov Gibber, who also serves as the rabbi of Ohev Shalom in Boca Raton.  The CJLL reaches out across the spectrum to share the values of Modern Orthodoxy, serve as a resource to rabbis from all denominations and aid the rabbis in South Florida.  The fellows will also work with the local day schools: the Hebrew Academy Brauser Maimonides, Solomon Schechter, Donna Klein Day School, Weinbaum Yeshiva High School and Hillel of Boca Raton, to name a few.

“We are thrilled that Yeshiva University Center for Jewish Leadership and Learning is partnering with the Federation in our shared aspiration to nurture a more literate and Jewishly engaged community,” noted Bill Bernstein, president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of South Palm Beach County. “In the short amount of time that Rabbi David Gutterman has been leading the CJLL initiative, we have greatly enjoyed his dynamic teachings and genuinely warm and welcoming personality.  We look forward to working together with him and his team to benefit our community.”

Rabbi David Gutterman, executive director, added: “Some men see things as they are and ask why— others dream things that never were and say … YU! The Center for Jewish Leadership and Learning is an initiative that is groundbreaking in its conception and breathtaking in its intention. As a community partner of Yeshiva University Center for the Jewish Future, the CJLL has as its most noble aspiration the desire to become a community gift by bringing our version and vision of a Torah Umadda renaissance to the south Florida Jewish community. Together with our creative cohort of Rabbis Avi Billet, Yaakov Gibber and Josh Flug, we, the ‘rabbis-without-borders’ will work mightily to make this vision a reality.”