Russel Neiss

Russel Neiss is the Senior Product Engineer at Sefaria, where he has worked since 2015. In this capacity, Neiss is responsible for the development of a groundbreaking educational resource—a free living library of Jewish texts and their interconnections, in Hebrew and in translation. At Sefaria, Neiss creates interactive platforms that enable learners to engage with Jewish textual tradition from anywhere.

Neiss also spearheaded the development of Sefaria’s Source Sheet Builder tool, which has enabled tens of thousands of educators to create their own source sheets and share them with students, colleagues, and the wider community. In collaboration with his colleagues, Neiss envisioned, developed, and built Sefaria’s first mobile app, putting Jewish learning and Sefaria’s tools into the hands of users everywhere.

Neiss’ goal when creating new digital tools isn’t, as he writes, to “simply deliver and deposit Jewish content into the minds of learners,” nor to produce experiences that will be passively consumed. Rather, he aims to help empower learners to find opportunities, knowledge, and experiences that will facilitate their own growth, at their own pace.

Prior to his work at Sefaria, Neiss served as the Director of Educational Technology for BimBam (formerly G-dcast). There, he developed digital Jewish educational experiences through the creation of nearly a dozen mobile apps, as well as interactive eBooks and websites, which together served more than 100,000 individuals annually. Neiss was also a cofounder of Not-a-Box Media Lab in Brooklyn, New York, a venture through which he sought to raise the quality of Jewish learning by offering easy access to 21^st century technologies. One of the products that Neiss imagined and developed is PocketTorah, a mobile learning app that dramatically lowered barriers to access and enabled hundreds of thousands of people to learn to read Torah.

During summers from 2010 to 2018, Neiss was a faculty member at Brandeis University. In this role, he worked with the university’s Office of High School Programs to create and facilitate a course for its Genesis Program, which combined technology and Judaism in high level learning experiences for teens from around the world. Through the Genesis Program, Neiss created an early model of Jewish maker-based education that has since been adapted by other institutions across the nation.

Neiss earned his B.A. in Jewish Studies and Religious Studies (2005) and his Master of Library Science (2008) from Queens College. He also earned a Master of Science in Educational Leadership (2012) from Brooklyn College. In addition, Neiss earned a Certificate of Completion for Intermediate Yiddish (2003) from the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and a Certificate of Completion for Advanced Yiddish (2004) from the University of Vilnius.

Neiss’ honors and awards include: selection as one of The Forward’s Forward 50 (2017); selection as a Jewish Federation of St. Louis Millstone Fellow (2014); winner of The Jewish Education Project and The Covenant Foundation’s Jewish Futures Competition (2010); selection as a PresentTense Global Fellow (2009); and recipient of the Association of Jewish Libraries’ Student Scholarship (2007).