Sherri Mandell received a National Jewish Book Award in 2004 for her spiritual memoir, The Blessing of a Broken Heart, which was translated into three languages and produced as a play in Jerusalem and the U.S. She is also the author of The Road to Resilience (Toby Press, 2015), Reaching for Comfort (Ben Yehuda Press, 2020), and The Kabbalah of Writing: Mystical Practices for Inspiration and Creativity (Inner Traditions, 2024.) The Road to Resilience was published this year in Hebrew. She is the co-founder of the Koby Mandell Foundation which for the past 23 years has run healing groups and camps for bereaved families and children in Israel. The Koby Mandell Foundation has been very active in caring for the bereaved families of the Iron Swords War and those killed on October 7. She is a certified pastoral counselor who facilitates groups, speaks, and teaches about grief, resilience, and healing. She writes children’s picture books as well, including “The Elephant in the Sukkah” (Kar-Ben, 2019), “The Upside- Down Boy and the Israeli Prime Minister” (Kar-Ben, 2021) and “The Best Treasure” (Apples and Honey, 2024). She received Jewish Women International’s Woman to Watch Award as well as an ADL Partners in Peace Award. She also won Moment Magazine’s fiction prize and an essay prize from the Simon Rockower Foundation. Her Jewish Learning Institute Instagram post on grief has received over 600,000 views.
