Staff

Julie Gales, Madrikha and Ex-Officio Board Member
Contact: madrikha@jewishculturalsociety.org

Julie Gales has been the madrikha of the JCS since 1999. As a native Detroiter, she grew up in the Jewish Parents Institute, one of America’s earliest secular Jewish organizations. Her desire to give back to the secular Jewish community that was so influential in her life led Julie to study at the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism (IISHJ). In 1993, she was ordained as a madrikha.

Julie performs all Jewish ceremonial services for the JCS community: officiating at bar and bat mitzvah celebrations, weddings, baby namings, and funerals; conducting First Friday Shabbat, High Holiday, and Second Night Pesach Seder observances; assisting members with pastoral counseling; and helping JCS members interpret and find meaning in Jewish foundational texts as contemporary Jews.

Julie graduated from Tufts University in 1983 with a bachelor of science degree in geological sciences and earned a master of science degree in structural geology and geophysics at the University of Michigan. For twenty-one years, she worked for the Legislative Service Bureau’s Research Services Division as an assistant director and a science research analyst, advising Michigan legislators and staff on a wide range of scientific, engineering, and environmental issues. She is currently working as the administrative director of the Molecular and Behavior Neuroscience Institute at the University of Michigan.

Julie’s family is both intercultural and transracial and blends the many traditions from their secular Jewish, British, African American, and Muslim backgrounds. The JCS is a very welcoming home for this type of diversity.

In her free time, Julie loves to downhill and cross-country ski, hike, and bake with her husband and their two daughters.

Board Members

Alon Yaffe (President)

Alon is the current board president of the JCS. He and his family joined the organization in 2004, and his son, Ari, graduated the JCS B’nei Mitzvah program in 2017. Alon grew up in a secular Jewish community in northern Israel and immigrated to the US in 1998.

Ruth Freedman (Treasurer)

Ruth is from Brooklyn and passed through Minneapolis on her way to Ann Arbor. She earned a bachelor’s in math from Hofstra and a Master of Public Health at Hunter College’s School of Health Sciences. She’s retired from her position as an administrator at the Molecular & Behavioral Neuroscience Institute at Michigan Medicine, where she worked beginning in 1989. While at Michigan Medicine, Ruth co-chaired the U-M Breast Cancer Advocacy & Advisory Committee.

Vicki Patraka

Dr. Vivian Patraka, professor emeritus, directed the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society at Bowling Green University in Ohio, where she taught English and American culture for thirty years, often writing on the subject of Jewish culture. She earned her doctoral degree at the University of Michigan and now lives in Ann Arbor again part time, spending her winters in Florida. During her time at Bowling Green Vickie was known for her mentorship of younger faculty, and she is now a dedicated volunteer in Ann Arbor, contributing not just to the Jewish Cultural Society but to the local Protectors of Equality in Government.