At our annual meeting on Monday, May 23rd, Rodeph Sholom elected two congregants to the board of trustees, Dina Bakst and Rob Bernstein.
Dina Bakst is Co-Founder and Co-President of A Better Balance (ABB), a leading national legal advocacy organization, headquartered in New York City, dedicated to advancing the rights of working families.
In 2012, Bakst’s op-ed in The New York Times – “Pregnant and Pushed Out of Job” – inspired the introduction of the federal Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. Dina also helped draft, and contributed to passage of the New York City Pregnant Workers Fairness Act of 2013 as well as similar laws in New Jersey, Washington, D.C., Illinois and Rhode Island. In 2015, Dina was awarded the Edith I. Spivack Award. Dina is also co-author of Babygate: How to Survive Pregnancy and Parenting in the American.
Prior to co-founding A Better Balance, Dina was an attorney with the NOW Legal Defense & Education Fund (now Legal Momentum). She also served as a litigation associate with Kaye, Scholer LLP. Dina is a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Michigan. In addition to leading A Better Balance, Dina is a National Commissioner of the Anti-Defamation League and proud mother to three daughters: Emily, Arielle, and Talia.
Ron is the founder of Great Spruce Capital Partners, a real estate investment and advisory firm focused on residential and mixed-use projects in the New York metro area. Ron has extensive experience with condominium development and rental properties in New York. From 2004 until 2012, Ron was the Co-Head of Real Estate and a Senior Managing Director of Marathon Asset Management. At Marathon, Ron was responsible for co-managing the real estate business, which evaluated, invested in, and managed real estate developments.
Prior to joining Marathon, from 1995 until 2004, Ron was a senior acquisition specialist at Goldman, Sachs & Co. Prior to joining Goldman Sachs, Ron was at The Irvine Company, one of the largest private real estate owners and developers in the U.S.
Ron began his career at Morgan Stanley in New York, where he worked in the Merchant Banking Department. Ron is a graduate of Northwestern University with a dual degree in the Honors Program in Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences and Economics.
Ron is currently serving his sixth year as a Trustee and his fourth as Treasurer of the Board of Trustees of the Rodeph Sholom School.
Ron and his wife Keri have been members of CRS for over 14 years and have two young children who attend RSS. Their son, Zachary, is in the seventh grade (and recently celebrated his Bar Mitzvah at Rodeph) and their daughter, Sophie, is in the fourth grade.
We are so grateful to Dina and Ron for their service and enthusiastically welcome them to the board.
