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New York, New York, United States
Hybrid
Working at Atra: Center for Rabbinic Innovation means joining a dynamic team committed to strengthening rabbinic leadership and supporting a thriving Jewish future. Atra equips rabbis, and the ecosystem that supports them, to grow, adapt, and lead the Jewish people in a rapidly changing world. We envision a future where every Jew and seeker can call someone “my rabbi” and, in that relationship, find wisdom, care, guidance, and connection to a living tradition.
Jewish life depends on great rabbis, yet too few people are entering the rabbinate and too many who do leave because of isolation and a lack of support. Atra works to change that. We are the leading pluralistic platform advancing rabbinic leadership across North America. In five years, we have trained and supported more than 850 clergy ordained at over a dozen seminaries, and reached more than 300,000 members of the Jewish community through their work. Atra is fiscally sponsored by Hillel International.
The Director of Learning and Practice leads Atra’s work to equip rabbis to lead well in a rapidly changing world, ensuring that Atra’s learning is shaped by where the field is heading and results in rabbis who have the skills, confidence, and clarity to lead. This role advances Atra’s strategic priority of equipping rabbis to lead in new ways (today called Atra Academy). This is one of three Director positions on Atra’s Innovation & Impact team, which reports to our Chief Innovation and Impact Officer, Faith Brigham Leener, and works together to carry out Atra’s strategic plan.
Rabbis receive deep training in seminary, but it rarely prepares them for everything modern communities now ask of them. The Director owns Atra’s learning across its cohort programs, fellowships, coaching, and workshops: setting a clear and emergent point of view on what rabbis need to learn and how, guiding the staff and educators who design and deliver it, and making sure learning changes how rabbis lead, not just what they know. The specific programs and formats will keep evolving. Drawing on what Atra’s research is finding and what rabbis in the network say they need, the Director sees where the field and the rabbinate are headed and recommends what Atra’s role should be within the strategy set by Atra’s leadership.
The Director also keeps Atra’s learning coherent, high-quality, and grounded in evidence, and represents Atra’s approach to learning with seminaries, funders, and peer organizations across the field.
The ideal Director of Learning and Practice is a strategic leader of learning with a real feel for adult learning, leadership development, Jewish communal life, and rabbinic formation, who has shaped a vision for how professionals are prepared and has led others to bring it to life. They bring experience teaching and training adult professionals, including curriculum and learning design, and are excited to help define what rabbis will need to lead well in the years ahead.
They believe rabbis are spiritual leaders as much as organizational ones, and can design for both. They are curious learners themselves, who keep up with the newest thinking on adult professional learning, innovation, relational engagement, community leadership, management, and emerging tools, and bring it back to Atra’s work. They move comfortably between conceptual and operational modes, and are collaborative, proactive, and motivated by strengthening the field as a whole.
Learning Vision & Strategy
Leading Atra’s Learning Programs
Integration Across Atra’s Work
Each director of Atra’s Innovation & Impact team owns one pillar of Atra’s 2025–2028 strategic plan, and the three pillars work as one system:
Our directors listen closely to the field, test bold ideas, and grow what works. They share one picture of the field and plan priorities together, including what to stop.
Every director on the team brings these shared competencies, alongside those specific to the role.
Specific to this role
We care about the long-term careers of our staff. Working at Atra connects you with rabbis, institutions, and leaders across the Jewish world, and we invest in your growth so those relationships and skills carry you through a lifetime of Jewish work. You’ll have a hybrid, flexible schedule, an early close every Friday for Shabbat, and full access to Hillel International’s benefits, including unlimited vacation, paid sick days, and a generous holiday calendar that includes all Jewish holidays. Benefits also include paid parental leave, professional development funds, medical, dental, and vision coverage, an employer HSA contribution, employer-paid life and long-term disability insurance, and a 403(b) retirement plan with a 5% employer contribution after two years of service. Rabbis who work at Atra can also claim parsonage through Hillel.
Rabbis lead best when they are prepared for the communities they actually serve. Yet too many leave seminary equipped for the rabbinate of the past, and too many leave the rabbinate altogether.
This role ensures that Atra’s learning is not a set of one-off programs but a coherent, forward-looking body of work that changes how rabbis lead, informed by research, by the field, and by what rabbis tell us they need.
After one year, we hope participants in Atra’s programs are deeply engaged, and that rabbis can point to specific ways they are leading differently because of what they learned, drawing on it in real time. We hope the portfolio is reaching a growing number of rabbis across denominations, settings, career stages, and regions. We hope Atra’s curriculum reflects current field research, not only the prior year’s design. And we hope the pieces are in place to keep growing: a clear learning strategy that Atra can articulate, a supported bench of facilitators, coaches, and curriculum writers, and a smooth handoff of graduates into an ongoing community with Network and Partnerships.
Our process has three stages. We review applications as they arrive, so we encourage you to apply early.
Atra is closed from December 24 through January 1 for winter break, so we’ll plan the timing of these steps around that break.
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In 1923, Rabbi Benjamin Frankel started Hillel with humble means, a noble mission and a breathtaking vision: to convey Jewish civilization to a new generation. Today, Hillel International continues to enrich the lives of Jewish students and is the largest Jewish campus organization in the world at nearly 1,000 colleges and universities across North America and around the world. As Hillel evolves as an organization, the mission remains steadfast: to create lasting connections with every Jewish student that foster an enduring commitment to Jewish life, learning, and Israel and train them to become the next Jewish leaders.
Hillel is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to creating an accepting and inclusive environment for all.
