Tamara Rebick

Founder of CORIPHERY

A) What qualities make the nominee deserving of the Z3 Bridge Builder Award?

Being a bridge builder is AT THE HEART of everything Tamara does, most recently as central to her professional pursuits. The name of her consulting agency, CORIPHERY, is an intentionally purposeful, made up word, combining “Core” and “Periphery” to highlight the insider/outside dynamic that is often at play and that prevents communities from flourishing. Tamara’s work has always aimed to create welcoming and inclusive spaces for all despite systemic and philosophical divides.  

In her decade working as the Director of Student Activities at one of the largest Jewish community high schools, one of her main responsibilities was to rebuild the Shabbaton program that engaged approximately 750 students and faculty annually. Traditionally run for an Orthodox experience, Tamara, who was the first non-orthodox woman hired to run this program, completely re-imagined the program to ensure that all felt welcome and included, including the Orthodox students and faculty who were already committed to this program. Through her deeply intentional and relational approach, Tamara strategically engaged General Studies faculty as well as numerous faculty who were not Jewish, which communicated a clear message to hundreds of non-observant students that there was an opportunity for everyone.

She refreshed the Madrichim, student leadership, program to ensure proportional representation of student leaders who matched the student body in skill, knowledge and personality. She built the most popular leadership platform in the school, resulting in a 4:1 ratio of applicants to needed Madrichim, attracting the broadest cross-section of students based on the values of diversity of thought and lived Jewish experience.  Furthermore, her focus on nurturing unity among multi-denominational participants (students and faculty) through understanding the many advantages, interpretations and benefits to celebrating a collective shabbat experience reduced enrollment attrition from over 25% to less than 2%. 

When Tamara took a senior executive role at a regional Hillel, she brought her passion for fostering understanding and building bridges as she supervised and supported campus Directors across the network’s campuses. Tamara helped to bring together Jewish students, student groups and professionals that had historically been at odds with each other and with Hillel to fortify the Jewish student experience on campus.  At one particularly divisive university, Tamara successfully convened all the Jewish student groups to work collaboratively to overcome antisemitic and anti-Israel barriers deeply entrenched in the student government.  Through this combined effort, Tamara built trust and credibility with each group, its student leaders and professionals. 

Since founding CORIPHERY (2017), Tamara’s efforts to support organizations and their leaders in strengthening their engagement strategy is anchored in convening courageous conversations across differences. Tamara leads with a spirit of empathy and genuine curiosity, models a deep respect for human dignity and encourages intentional collaboration. Tamara’s signature method, Respectful Disruption, demonstrates her commitment to change management through creating dialogue, and fostering alignment, buy-in, unity and understanding in service of organizational and professional growth.  Tamara’s ability to validate a wide range of experiences and create spaces for nuance, has made her a valued strategic thought partner to Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, non-denominational and community institutions, as well as Zionist organizations from legacy to grassroots, and ranging from left to right wing politics.  

Most recently, Tamara developed and led a cutting edge Israel education program for senior Jewish educators. Tamara successfully engaged over fifty educators and administrators from six Jewish day schools and five congregational schools in an immersive professional development program that promoted a new pedagogy for teaching Israel through a lens of complexity. Divided into cohorts based on student needs (elementary, middle school, high school, congregational), educators from Orthodox through non denominational schools, Israelis and Canadians, religious through secular, learned about the complexities of contemporary Israel together.  Tamara created and led multiple experiences that strengthened the capacity and empathy of the participating educators, which could have easily been fraught with disagreement, disengagement and disappointment given the content being presented.

B) In what ways has the nominee demonstrated exceptional leadership and commitment to their work in bridging divides?

In 2016, Tamara helped to launch the first circle of The Sisterhood of Salam Shalom (SOSS) in Toronto. As the Toronto circle expanded rapidly, the group was subdivided into smaller geographic groups. Driven by a sense of urgency to expand her network and build relationships with Muslim women, Tamara quickly grew active and served as the first Jewish co-leader of the North York circle.  Seeing a need for dialogue between Muslims and Jews, Tamara actively engaged in allyship, including traveling distances to support and stand with Muslim women advocating for greater protection against Islamophobia in a local school board. Her involvement in bridge building events positively engaged other Jewish and Muslim women in becoming active members and leaders, ultimately leading to her helping to identify two women to scale the Sisterhood of Salam Shalom’s presence across Canada. Her collaborations with minoritized groups have led to greater insights of their lived experiences, challenges, and opportunities to create a more inclusive and accessible society. She helped create opportunities for members from across the Greater Toronto Area to share their culture with the broader community. Tamara was instrumental in eliminating barriers between Toronto’s Jewish and Muslim communities by demonstrating solidarity like the 29 Letters of Love video she helped create to mark the 1 year anniversary marking the Mosque shooting in Quebec on January 29, 2017. The collection of letters of solidarity from members of the Toronto Jewish community was no small feat, requiring much outreach over many weeks, activating relationships and attempting to overcome mistrust, suspicion and protectionist attitudes within the Jewish community. Tamara is known for her commitment to constant dialogue, being open to discussion, courageous conversations and following up with action. 

Despite years of building trust and honest relationships around faith, peace and justice, two sides emerged from the violence in Israel’s mixed cities and subsequent incursion in Gaza in May, 2021, with each blaming the other. Neither group wanted to talk to each yet Tamara reached out to individual Muslim women with whom she had built relationships to ensure that a political crisis on the other side of the world would not undermine hard-earned relationships and shared hopes for local social justice. This helped to bring some women from each community together, which eventually led to more discussions of peace and unity. Sadly, the group could not withstand the divide triggered by the horrific events of October 7th and its seemingly endless aftermath, though Tamara continues to remain connected with some of the Muslim women, and is still working towards mutual understanding and the pursuit of human dignity, most recently building a new relationship with a Palestinian Canadian woman. 

On campus, Tamara created a strategy to unite and align all Jewish campus groups, mitigating proprietary and territorial behaviors that were negatively impacting and obstructing Jewish student engagement. Tamara built or renewed relationships with campus Chabad rabbinic couples, brought estranged Israel advocacy groups into the Hillel community and served as a connector and convenor for multiple Jewish organizations with student initiatives. Tamara also worked with campus professionals through professional development and new educational frameworks to appeal to students who had previously expressed experiences of alienation around certain Jewish or Israel programs. During this time, Tamara also built relationships with students and adult mentors in the Toronto Muslim student community.

C) How has the nominee's work impacted the Jewish community and beyond?

Tamara’s legacy at the Jewish community high school remains alive and active almost ten years since she left her role.  Many of her former student leaders are now professional and volunteer leaders in the local Jewish community, as well as in their workplaces - including many who have become teachers at the school. Many of the systemic changes to ensure pluralism, mutual respect for diversity and understanding between students of different backgrounds are now fundamentally entrenched in the Madrichim and Shabbaton culture.  The current program remains true to Tamara’s original design including multiple prayer service options, the engagement of Jewish and non-Jewish faculty, and the training of student leaders to be peer educators. Tamara remains connected to many of her former students and recently, some have turned to her for perspective, advice, validation and clarity regarding their complex emotions about the Israel-Hamas war.

As a consultant, Tamara works with communities and Jewish community leaders from around the world - from Canada to the United States, to Europe and Israel - to help them bridge differences and foster unity and mutual understanding among their constituents and within their local communities. Tamara facilitates and trains leaders - from synagogue Boards to senior community leaders and educators in building trust, fostering genuine belonging in Jewish spaces - particularly when there is a wide range of backgrounds, knowledge bases and viewpoints.   

Over the past four years, Tamara developed a deep relationship with the Paul Penna Downtown Jewish Day School. Tamara has supported the faculty in their development of 36 hours of curriculum across three middle school grades. The curriculum is courageous in its ability to provide multiple perspectives on different critical points of modern and contemporary Israeli history. The curriculum allows students, from various Jewish backgrounds, to consider multiple viewpoints that have contributed to their perceptions and understandings of Israel. 

Bridging differences is so important to Tamara, that a main focus of her work is centered on helping Jewish institutions with inter-generational dynamics. Referred to as “Generational Whispering”, Tamara advises leaders on how to create safe spaces for narratives that are alternative to their mainstream norm, and guides leaders to embrace opportunities for change without alienating the “core” membership of these institutions. Tamara is dedicated to ensuring that the Jewish community and its institutions stay relevant to the newer Millennial and GenZ demographics, by inviting older generations to learn and understand the deeper motivations and behavioral choices of the younger generations, and by guiding younger generations in navigating organizations that are dominantly led by older generations.