Yachad fellowship named for late local leader
The Joel Daner Yachad Communal Fellowship — named in memory of a longtime leader of the Greater MetroWest Jewish community — will be inaugurated at the 30th anniversary awards dinner of Yachad, the flagship program of the Orthodox Union’s National Jewish Council for Disabilities.
The event will take place on Monday, Dec. 15, at 6 p.m. at Congregation Keter Torah in Teaneck.
The Daner fellows are recent college graduates who contribute to Yachad and its role as a rights organization fostering inclusion of individuals with disabilities. The program supervisor is Yachad associate director Eli Hagler.
As a local lay leader, Daner served the Jewish Service for the Developmentally Disabled of MetroWest as a board member for 10 years, four of them as president. He also served as president of Ahawas Achim B’nai Jacob and David, in West Orange, where he lived with his wife of almost 50 years, Selma, and daughters Ellen and Linda. Daner died in 2010.
An early graduate of Yeshiva University’s Wurzweiler School of Social Work, where he later served on the board of overseers, Daner held vice presidencies at federations in New York and Baltimore. At United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ, the forerunner of the GMW federation, Daner was instrumental in establishing what is today the Jewish Community Foundation of Greater MetroWest. A recipient of the Saul Schwartz Distinguished Service Award of the NJ Association of Jewish Communal Service, Daner was also interim executive director of the Jewish Education Association of MetroWest and later worked as a consultant for a variety of organizations, including Hillel and the Jewish Education Service of North America. He also served as director of professional resource development at the Council of Jewish Federations, the predecessor of Jewish Federations of North America.
Yachad international director, Dr. Jeffrey Lichtman, said Daner was “a consummate professional who mentored and counseled so many of today’s leading Jewish communal professionals…. There is no more fitting an individual than Joel to model for our own distinguished fellows the values and practices that define professional excellence and service.”
The dinner honorees are Isabelle and Aharon Orlansky, Yachad Family Award; the Marder Family, Community Leadership Award; and Rachel Frohlich Orenbuch and Yisroel Orenbuch, Young Leadership Award.
To RSVP, contact OU development associate Elaine Grossman at grossmane@ou.org or 212-613-8350.
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