What Matters: Caring Conversations about End of Life

Melanie Levav is an award-winning Jewish educator and Conservative rabbi who specializes in end-of-life care and conversations. Melanie is a board-certified chaplain, and a licensed social worker, 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. 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.