Rabbi Hayim Herring was ordained from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 1984 and received his doctorate in Organization and Management from Capella University’s School of Business in 2000, where he concentrated his studies in the area of non-profit management.
For 10 years, he was rabbi of a prominent congregation in Minneapolis. He then worked at the Minneapolis Jewish Federation, where he helped to create one of the leading-edge continuity initiatives in the country and staffed a community-wide strategic planning process for Jewish formal and informal education. In July 2002, he was appointed as the Executive Director of STAR (Synagogues: Transformation and Renewal, www.starsynagogue.org), whose mission is to renew Jewish life through congregational innovation and leadership development. STAR was established in 1999 by philanthropists Edgar M. Bronfman Sr., Charles Schusterman (z”l) and Michael Steinhardt.
Rabbi Herring is a founding member of the Alumni Association of Capella University, a member of the editorial board of the educational magazine of the Jewish Education Service of North America (JESNA), the Jewish Renaissance and Renewal Professional Advisory Committee and the National Jewish Policy Center (formerly, the Wilstein Institute for Jewish Policy Studies) Senior Scholar. He has volunteered extensively in his home community of Minneapolis on behalf of Jewish youth and teens, serving on local boards including Jewish camps, supplemental schools and day schools.
Rabbi Herring has conducted studies and published articles in the areas of Jewish continuity, Jewish adolescent identity, Jewish identity-formation in postmodern America, Conservative Judaism, new organizational models of the American Jewish community, continuing education for congregational rabbis, technology, marketing and evaluation for synagogues, re-conceptualizing the role of the rabbi and reconstructing the contemporary synagogue. Currently, he is researching the impact of denominational ideology on Jewish life.
