The Modern Orthodox seminary Yeshivat Chovevei Torah announced today that Rabbi Ben Berger will serve as president and CEO, replacing Rabbi Dov Linzer, who served as president and rosh yeshiva for seven years and will continue in that role. Berger comes to the school after spending eight years at Hillel. 

Ordained at YCT in 2009, Berger, 47, served as director of the Wexner Heritage Program at The Wexner Foundation and, for the past eight years, at Hillel International, first as vice president for Jewish education and then as the senior vice president for education, community and culture. The common thread through his career, he told eJewishPhilanthropy, is supporting leaders.

During Berger’s time at Hillel, he led staff through the COVID-19 pandemic, the Oct. 7 massacres and the fraught post-Oct. 7 period. “I was able to lead a team that was adaptive, flexible and responsive to the needs of our time and our moment,” he said. “Through all of the chaos of that [moment, we were] still able to deliver on a mission of educating Jewish students to meet their Jewish identities with pride and with depth and knowledge and connection and love.”

His experience at Hillel also offered him the opportunity to hone his fundraising, public speaking and writing skills and manage dozens of programs. When Linzer announced he was stepping down as president, Berger was recruited onto the YCT search committee to find a replacement. After nine months, he realized, “Maybe it’s my turn.” 

Returning to YCT, which is housed at the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, just north of Manhattan, is a “homecoming,” Berger said, to the institution that forged his identity.

Founded in 1999, YCT is a Modern Orthodox seminary that promotes “open and inclusive Orthodoxy” and is known for expanding the role women serve in Orthodox Judaism. During its over 25 years, the school has ordained 158 rabbis in America and graduated 62 rabbis and rabbaniyot, female rabbis, in its Rikmah rabbinic leadership program in Israel.

Berger credits his teachers at YCT with instilling in him a “sensibility to be able to bring serious Torah to everyday lives and to make it real and to connect it to the human condition and human needs.”

His last day at Hillel is on Sept. 4 and he begins at YCT in mid-October.

“We are thrilled by Ben’s appointment to the position of president and CEO of YCT which is a seamless transition from Rabbi Linzer’s dedicated leadership,” Steve Laufer, YCT’s board chair, said in a statement. “The combination of his experience and skills, coupled with his long-term commitment to the yeshiva’s mission makes him the ideal person to lead the yeshiva into its next chapter — from 25 years to the half-century mark.”

Returning to YCT is surreal, Berger said. “Just to be in this position of going back home. To share the title with Rabbi Avi Weiss [YCT’s founding leader], Rabbi Asher Lopatin and Rabbi Dov Linzer [who will remain rosh yeshiva], who are the three presidents of the institution over its 25 years, to share the same title as the three of them, whom I admire so much, is just almost overwhelming. But also to be able to go to a place that I so deeply believe in and whose mission is so critical for our world is just one of the greatest honors I could ever imagine.”