Staff

Itzik Yarkoni

Founder and Executive Director

Itzik was born and raised in Israel and earned his BA in Communications at Sapir College in Sderot, Israel. He joined the Ayalim Association as a student and helped establish Yachini, the first student village of Ayalim in the Western Negev. During his studies, Itzik taught young Ethiopian-Israelis in the city of Netivot. While living in Sderot, he experienced countless rocket attacks launched from the Gaza Strip.

In order to raise awareness about the intolerable situation in Sderot, Itzik joined the Sderot Media Center as the Director of Marketing and New Media.The SMC staff began to train groups of students and ordinary civilians to tell their personal stories. The SMC believed that only through storytelling would their voices be accurately heard and appointed Itzik as Interim Director during Operation Cast Lead in 2008.

After more than three years with the SMC, Itzik came to UC Irvine as an emissary of the Jewish Agency. There he found that students had to deal with blatant anti-Israel hostility on campus. When he realized that skewed media coverage was causing many Jewish parents to hesitate to send their children to the school, he launched an initiative to create the first social media team at UCI. As with the SMC’s Israeli students, Itzik worked to empower American students to effectively use social media to tell their personal stories to the world at large.

Itzik is the founder of BOMAH. He graduated with an MA in International Conflict Resolution at Bar Ilan University.

Rachel Jetter

Assistant Director

Rachel graduated from Franklin and Marshall College, with a double BA in Business and Sociology. She studied abroad in South Africa, exploring many of the continents southern countries and returned to Africa to teach Geography in Ghana. After college she was the Interim Director of Jewish Life at Dickinson College and spent a short time at American Jewish Committee in Manhattan before deciding to come to Israel.

Once in Israel, Rachel did a 10-month Masa program through Yahel-Israel Service Learning where she lived in an Ethiopian-Israeli neighborhood in Gedera working at a local non-profit and a community garden, while tutoring Ethiopian-Israeli students and adults in English.

Rachel has since made Aliyah, moved to Jerusalem and is beginning her Masters in Public Management from Johns Hopkins online.

Shalom Shore

Content Writer

Shalom Shore is a creative writer, marketer and growth consultant. Combining creativity, originality, and out of the box thinking with a systematic, big-picture approach, Shalom has created marketing materials for multiple organizations and businesses, from websites and webcopy, to creative graphics and promotional videos. A consultant for several startups and organizations, he also runs workshops and lectures on online marketing, social media strategy, and personal growth.

Shalom enjoys creative writing, and has written multiple humor articles and scripts for films and plays. An ordained Rabbi, Shalom also writes and counsels others about personal growth and personal actualization. He currently lives in Jerusalem with his family.