Rabbi Benjamin Spratt

Ben Spratt is the Senior Rabbi of Congregation Rodeph Sholom in Manhattan. His religious journey took him from the Orthodox, Reconstructionist, and Renewal worlds to becoming ordained from the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary, and eventually landing him as Rabbi here, one of the country’s renowned Reform congregations.

It is with a passionate drive that he works to build and shape community beyond existent boundaries. In 2009, Ben helped found CRS’s Shireinu, an inclusion initiative for families with special needs that now serves as a spiritual model for synagogues and churches around the world. With prominently featured articles in the New York Times, The Jewish Week, Autism Speaks, Huffington Post, Jewish Journal, and Times of Israel, the Shireinu program has also received numerous national awards and grants including the Union for Reform Judaism’s Exemplar Award for Inclusion and the UJA-Federation of New York’s First Place Synagogue Inclusion Award. Ben serves as co-chair of Inclusion and Disability Awareness for the Central Conference of American Rabbis.

In 2016, Rabbi Spratt and Cantor Shayna De Lowe collaborated to reimagine the future of a large legacy congregation, planting the seeds of Minyan, a Jewish small-group-based approach to human flourishing through connection. With his co-author of Awakenings, Rabbi Josh Stanton, he co-founded Tribe, a joint initiative to engage Jewish Millennials through grassroots leadership and a community of empowerment, co-edited of a special symposium edition of the CCAR’s Reform Jewish Quarterly Journal on Millennial Engagement, sparked the New Day Fellowship to foster connection between Muslim and Jewish Millennials, and together they appear regularly in podcast and in published writings.