By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
Louisville’s Ralph Green has been named to the national board of Jewish Federations of North America
Ralph Green, a prominent Louisville oral surgeon with long and deep service with the Jewish Federation of Louisville, has been elected to Jewish Federations of North America’s national Board of Trustees.
“I’ve been very active in the community here in leadership roles,” Green says. “I want to translate that to the national level. And I want to do the opposite: bring national issues and methods, if you will, back to Louisville to benefit our community.”
Louisville belongs to what JFNA terms “Intermediate” sized Federations, a category that includes trustees from such cities as Memphis, New Orleans, San Antonio, and the Canadian capital of Ottawa.
Green will serve an initial 2024-25 term, with an option to continue for up to four more years. As a Trustee, he will commit to attend four meetings per year of the entire board (either in-person or virtually) and serve on one or more board committees.
He acknowledges that his onboarding process will take some time to gel. “I am so new at this, I don’t yet know the whole dynamic of the organization,” Green says. “I’ve sat in on a few Zoom board meetings, and our Intermediate Federation meetings. We haven’t really gotten to the nuts and bolts of how we interact on a local level with the national organization.”
Green has held various senior positions within the Jewish Community of Louisville, which comprises the Federation and the Trager Family JCC. During fiscal-year 2021, he was co-chair (along with Jon Fleischaker) of the JCL’s board of directors, serving as chairman through 2023-24.
That vantage point has afforded Green insight into the intersection of philanthropy and administration. “From both a funding, programming and resource standpoint, we’ve had a strong relationship with JFNA,” he says. “I call it a ‘best practices’ thing. There are a lot of different approaches, different communities, and so forth. If something works well in one place, it might work well here – there might be things we, as a Federation community, haven’t thought of. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time we do something. We’re a group for a reason. We have similar sizes and similar issues.”
Green’s ascendancy to the National Board is especially welcome after an extended period without a Trustee voice at the National level.
“Louisville hasn’t had anyone on the JFNA board for a very long time,” acknowledged Sara Klein Wagner, president of Louisville’s Federation and the Trager Family JCC, “certainly not that I can remember in the past 20 years. But his national role looms considerably larger than as merely a point of pride.
“It’s important to make sure that we can talk to one another about how to interpret what’s going on a national or international level,” Wagner added, “and what that means to us here. For instance, during the Israel Emergency Campaign (launched shortly after the October 7 attacks), if I were in contact with only much smaller communities or much larger communities like New York or Boston – you can’t compare the peer relationships.
“We have so many opportunites to connect with volunteer leaders and professionals,” Wagner said. “Bringing young leaders up in a Federation system when you’re a community of 14,000 Jews is much different than a community of 100,000 Jews.”
For someone so steeped in Jewish leadership, Green is decidedly modest about his achievements. For decades he’s forged a career as a leading oral and maxillofacial surgeon, though these days he’s content to ply his profession on a part-time basis. Married to Louisville pediatric dentist Shellie Branson, he’s a familiar presence at the Trager Family JCC and elsewhere around town.
Founded in 2009 after the merger of the United Jewish Appeal, the United Israel Appeal and the Council of Jewish Federations, JFNA has an enormous presence in the international Jewish landscape. Collectively its “nearly 400 independent Jewish communities raise and distribute more than $2 billion annually,” according to JFNA’s website.
Though his JFNA committee assignments are still pending, Green already has an idea of where he’d like to concentrate his energies.
“First and foremost, I want to be involved in something having to do with Israel. That’s my biggest desire.”
Green’s old enough to recall times generations ago when Israel was under existential threat, most notably the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Fast forward to the Hamas attacks of October 7, in which almost 1,200 civilians and military personnel were murdered, with an additional 250 people taken into Gaza as hostages, and the enduring scope of Israel’s challenges becomes all too clear.
JFNA and its predecessor organizations have always responded with considerable financial and humanitarian aid.
“Throughout the history of Israel, there have been multiple emergency campaigns,” Green says. Immediately after October 7, JFNA launched such an effort that to date has raised almost $900 million in crisis support. Recipients include “people hurt by the attack, families, displaced people, and all kinds of social services that have to be provided to Israelis.”
Green is fully cognizant of the fraught nature of Israel’s military presence in Gaza, and the challenges parsing support for the nation.
“We have a large constituency,” he acknowledges, “and certain parts of our constituency don’t necessarily agree on our support for Israel, which baffles me.” He points out that JFNA does not channel funds directly to the Israeli military. “We support Israeli social services, plain and simple.”
Though he’s eager to plunge into his role as a JFNA Trustee, Green realizes he’ll need to balance eagerness with a degree of patience. Drawing on more experienced board members will be crucial to achieving his own multifaceted goals.
“They know we’ve got to get our feet wet and learn the lay of the land,” he says. “That’ll be my whole first year. In my second year I’ll be a lot more active.”