Rabbi Joshua Z. Heller has lived a lifetime of commitment to the Conservative/Masorti movement.  For over 20 years he has served as the Senior Rabbi of Congregation B’nai Torah in Sandy Springs.  Under his leadership it has grown from 400 families to over 900, and become the flagship Conservative synagogue in the region.

Rabbi Heller has developed a reputation as an expert in Jewish law and ethics, and a thought leader in the Masorti movement and beyond, focusing on issues related to the impact of technology on Jewish life and practice. He is a longstanding member of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Rabbinical Assembly, and authored  Conservative movement guidance for congregations navigating the COVID-19 pandemic.  He is one of the senior editors of a new tech-enabled lifecycle manual and resource guide for clergy.  Despite not being a Mohel himself, he serves as one of the instructors for the “Brit Kodesh” program which trains Conservative/Masorti Mohalim/ot around the world.

He has served many leadership roles in the Masorti movement and beyond. Within the Rabbinical Assembly, he has served on the Executive Committee and strategic planning task forces, as vice president of its Southeast Region, and co-chaired the Atlanta convention. Heller has been honored as s STAR PEER fellow and a CLAL Leap fellow.  In the greater Atlanta community, Heller has served as president of the Atlanta Rabbinical Association, founding president of MACOM, (the Metro Atlanta Community Mikvah), and a board member of the Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta and Jewish Family and Career Services.

Rabbi Heller’s commitment to the Masorti movement spans through the generation- he is the third generation in his family to be ordained at JTS and serve as a Conservative/Masorti Rabbi.  He grew up attending WZO Va’ad Hapoel meetings with his father, Rabbi Zachary Heller, Z”L, who was president of Masorti Olami.

Heller graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard with a degree in computer science.  He published original research in the Journal for Computational Neuroscience, but then turned down offers from Silicon Valley to become an eighth generation rabbi.

Before coming to Atlanta, Rabbi Heller served as Director of Distance Learning and Educational Technology at JTS, bringing Jewish learning to over 20,000 people each week, on levels ranging from casual adult learning to Masters’ level courses, and helped develop online resources like Learn.jtsa.edu. Rabbi Heller also supervised a number of initiatives within JTS to apply technology in training Rabbis, Cantors and other Jewish educators and professionals. During the period after 9/11, he also served as the rabbi of the Downtown synagogue- one of the synagogues closest to the site of the World Trade Center.

Rabbi Heller is married to Wendy Heller, who is a senior manager at Deloitte and the lay  Vice Chair of Camp Ramah Darom. They have raised three children with the help of the Epstein School, the Weber School, and Ramah.