OLP LEADERSHIP TEAM

Yardaena Osband, MD is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at New York Medical College in Valhalla, New York. Yardaena has taught in many schools, synagogues, and has been a scholar in residence in many communites.  She lectures on Tanach, Halacha, and Talmud with a specific interest in the biographies of the Taanim and Amoraim.  She is also the co-host of the Daf Yomi podcast Talking Talmud.

Yardaena also serves on the board of ORA - Organization for the Resolution of Agunot, The Riverdale Minyan and is a founder of the Orthodox Leadership Project. She and her family also started the Michael E. Osband Senior Swab campaign with Gift of Life. Yardaena currently resides in Modiin, Israel with her husband and children.

Dr. Michelle Sarna is School Psychologist at SAR Academy and Camp Psychologist at Camp Stone. She holds aa Ph.D. in School Psychology from Fordham University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Tikvah Center for Law & Jewish Civilization at NYU Law on the subject of emerging adulthood as a life stage and its legal implications. Michelle formerly has worked across different developmental stages, including as the Director of the Early Childhood Program at the Educational Alliance, Associate Director for Training and Professional Development of the OU's Jewish Learning Initiative on College Campuses (JLIC), and the JLIC educator at NYU. Michelle participated as fellow on Padaieia's Jewish Communal Fellowship 2017 cohort in Sweden. Michelle was recognized as a recipient of the Jewish Week's "36 Under 36" for founding the Orthodox Leadership Project and recently founded Downtown Mishpacha. She has worked and lectured in both public and private schools, in mental health clinics, on college campuses, and in synagogues. She and her husband Yehuda Sarna are blessed to be raising 6 children in downtown Manhattan.

Jennifer Raskas is on the leadership, teaching and coaching team of the Orthodox Leadership Project. She is the Washington DC Director at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, where she spearheads the institute’s efforts to provide Washington-based leaders with applied scholarship rooted in Jewish text to help them tackle the biggest challenges facing the U.S. and the Jewish people. She also serves as a Co-Director of the Institute’s Muslim Leadership Initiative.

Jennifer is a founder and an inaugural scholar in the International Halakha Scholars Program of the Susi Bradford Women’s Institute of Halakhic Leadership of Ohr Torah Stone, a certificate granting, four-year, part-time program for woman to study advanced hilkot shabbat, kashrut, aveilut and nidah.

Jennifer received her Master’s in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and graduated from Columbia University, Magna Cum Laude. She is a trained facilitator for Resetting the Table, an organization that builds meaningful dialogue and deliberation across political divides. Jennifer has extensive experience in formal and informal Jewish education. She teaches classes widely on Hebrew literary approaches to readings in Tanakh.  Her writings have appeared in academic journals and in online Jewish learning forums.

Aliza Abrams Konig is the Senior Program Director of the Yeshiva University Leadership Scholars. Passionate about Jewish education and communal life Aliza previously served in a variety of different positions at Yeshiva University. Most recently as the Director of Alumni Engagement. Throughout Aliza’s career she has worked within areas of student life, team building, creating curricula, and enriching the experiences of thousands of students through Experiential Education.  Earlier in Aliza's career she served as Assistant Principal at Central, Yeshiva University High School for Girls, Director of Student Life at Stern College and as the Director of Jewish Service Learning for the University, where she built the service-learning curriculum and established chessed missions around the world.

Aliza is a member of the inaugural Wexner Field Fellows program through the Wexner Foundation. She has spoken worldwide in synagogues, community centers, and schools, and is a sought-out consultant on experiential education.

Aliza has written a number of articles for the YU Torah to Go series and is published in Ennoble and Enable, Essays in Honor of Richard M. Joel (Yeshiva University Press).

Aliza holds a BA in Judaic Studies from Stern College, and a master’s in social work from the YU Wurzweiler School of Social Work. Aliza and her family live in Riverdale, New York, where they are very involved in their community, synagogue and other local organizations.

Chana Shefa's passion for life lies in Jewish community development, and youth leadership through Jewish education. Chana seeks out spaces to bring people together to bolster individual skills and to strengthen their communities. She has been a General Studies teacher in grades 3-5 at SAR Academy for the past 13 years, where she worked to inspire and educate the children in and out of her classroom. In addition, she was the 'Founding Mother' of the SAR Student Council, where representatives as young as 6 years old gathered with 14 year olds to facilitate meaningful discussions with the principal on various school issues.

In addition to working as a teacher, Chana served as the Executive Director at Sephardic Adventure Camp in Seattle, Washington for 6 years, an orthodox Sephardic overnight camp, which dedicates itself to continuing the life, passion, and knowledge of Sephardic culture to the next generation of Sephardic Jews in America. She currently serves as a volunteer for the Orthodox Leadership Project on the cohort design team,  allowing for Jewish women to enrich their communities using their unique skills and passion.

Shoshana Batya Greenwald, program associate at Micah Philanthropies, is passionate about making positive change in the Jewish community. She has collaborated with several organizations on issues surrounding antisemitism advocacy and women’s leadership including the Orthodox Leadership Project, Repair the World, USC Hillel, Hasbarah Fellowships and OKClarity. She was previously Director of Collections at Amud Aish Memorial Museum where she oversaw the Holocaust museum’s archival, artifact and photography collection. She worked on both on-site and traveling exhibitions and developed and taught workshops to middle, high school and college age students. She has worked at and with several museums and institutions on exhibitions and collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Museum of Jewish Heritage, New York State Supreme Court and Brooklyn Public Library and holds an MA in design history and material culture from Bard Graduate Center and a Bachelor’s from Stern College.

She and her husband and children live in Fair Lawn, New Jersey and she writes about design history in her spare time.