Melanie is a board-certified chaplain, a licensed social worker, and a rabbi with more than two decades of leadership experience in the American Jewish community.

A native New Yorker, Melanie is the founding Executive Director of the Shomer Collective, powered by Natan, a new initiative that is designed to empower individuals, families and institutions around end-of-life experiences, inspired by Jewish wisdom. Prior to Shomer Collective, Melanie served as the Director of PJ Library in New York, a program of the Harold Grinspoon Foundation, where she led a New York-based team charged with bringing the gift of high-quality, free children’s books into the homes of families raising Jewish children in New York. Melanie has held positions at the Marks Jewish Community House of Bensonhurst, the Mandel Center for Jewish Education at JCC Association, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, and UJA-Federation of New York. An alumna of the Wexner Graduate Fellowship, Melanie was ordained as a rabbi by the Jewish Theological Seminary; she is certified as a chaplain by Neshama: the National Association for Jewish Chaplains, and received her graduate degree in social work from Columbia University. As a Jewish educator and rabbi, she is passionate about helping families to talk more openly about difficult subjects in order to deepen their connections to Jewish tradition and to one another.