Yoni Bock is a member of Cohort II of Rabbinic North America at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. He has spent most of his twenty-year career in the field of international humanitarian and emergency response in an array of government, NGO, and academic positions. With USAID and the U.S. Forest Service, he has responded to more than twenty international disasters in leadership, civ-mil coordination, programmatic, and communications roles. (These include responses to the 2011 Japan earthquake/tsunami, the US government’s response to ISIS’ invasion of northern Syria and Iraq in 2014, the West Africa Ebola outbreak in 2014, the 2015 Nepal Earthquake, and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, among many others.) He also led a multi-year effort inside USAID to set up an incident management process specifically for international health crises.

Since October 7, Yoni has worked for two different NGOs providing assistance in Israel and in Gaza. As Regional Team Lead for Project HOPE, he directed the organization’s activities in Israel, representing the NGO to international and domestic stakeholders, and supporting the Gaza-based team with technical and strategic advice. Yoni is currently assigned to Tel Aviv as the deputy team lead for a large, global NGO where he works with Israeli civil society organizations and government authorities to deepen awareness of humanitarian work in the region.

In addition to operational response positions, Yoni is adjunct faculty at Florida International University, where he teaches on the roles and functions of the international humanitarian system. He holds a BA from McGill University (Religious Studies, Middle East Studies) and a MALD from the Fletcher School (2004).