Heather Rossi
Finance strategy, operations, and AI transformation at McMaster-Carr. Outside that work, Torah teaching and Modern Jewish History.
About
I'm a builder, a mentor, and a lifelong learner.
After starting my career in investment banking at JPMorgan, I joined McMaster-Carr, where over the past 20 years I've grown into my current role leading a 70-person finance operations organization and running AI transformation across our payment processes. Outside that work, I teach Torah to women, organize Shabbatons and Jewish heritage tours for groups of over a hundred women, serve on the board of L'Chaim Center, and lead BE IN Binah, a project I founded where my love of building, Jewish history, and women's stories comes together. I'm also pursuing a master's in Jewish Studies at Yeshiva University, with a focus on Modern Jewish History.
The work looks different in each room. The craft is the same.
In finance and AI, I ask the questions that reframe the problem. We've automated most of the work and realized significant productivity savings, but we still have too many people dedicated to the small portion that remains. What process are we still defending that we shouldn't be? What are the real hurdles to automating the rest? In Torah teaching, the move runs the other way: I take complex texts and distill them into something meaningful and relatable, nuggets of Torah that can actually inform and shape a modern woman's life. In mentoring, both moves are needed. I help new leaders trust the questions they're already asking with beginner's mind, and I show them how to turn those observations into tangible results.
This way of working came from the women in my family. My mother kept her own identity while building our Jewish home with care and intention. My parents started a small business together and showed me what it takes to build something from scratch.
If any of this is useful to your organization, board, or community, I'd like to hear from you.
What I do
At McMaster-Carr, I lead a 70-person finance organization. The scope is strategy, operations, and AI transformation for payments. Twenty years in. The current work is asking the questions that reframe the problem, getting the team to ask them too, and mentoring early- and mid-career managers as they grow into leadership.
I teach Torah to women learners in Deerfield and beyond: Parsha, classic sources, and Jewish history. The move runs the other way from the AI work. I take a complex text and distill it into something meaningful and relatable for a modern woman's life.
I serve on the board of L'Chaim Center in Deerfield, build educational programming and gatherings for women learners, and lead BE IN Binah, a project I founded where building, Jewish history, and women's stories come together.
I'm pursuing a master's in Modern Jewish History at the Bernard Revel Graduate School of Yeshiva University. The questions: what Eastern European Jewish life looked like before destruction, who built it and rebuilt it, and what documentation survived. Current research: the Jewish community of Suwalki, a thousand-year center of Polish Jewish life and learning, and the mechanisms of its erasure during the Holocaust.
How I teach
I teach Torah and Jewish history to women learners: taking complex texts and stories, distilling them into something meaningful and relatable for a modern woman's life. The sheets and the Between Deck below are samples of how I do that in practice.
A Talmud session on patience, conversion, and the dignity of the searching question. Includes a participant handout and a facilitator script for chavruta study.
A Talmud session on the seventy-year dream, the planter who knows he won't taste the fruit, and what our grandmothers planted in hundreds of towns we now travel through. Includes a participant handout and a facilitator script for chavruta study.
Four minutes spoken aloud at the entrance to a thousand years of Polish Jewish life. Reframes the Jewish heritage trip from rupture to continuity.
My signature teaching format for women learners. Five nuggets per sheet: a primary text, one good question, one clear takeaway. Distilled into something a modern woman can carry into a regular week.
118 Jewish women, 118 cards. The deck is the heart of BE IN Binah.
ביןBEIN — between
The struggle. The space between who you were and who you're becoming. Not a waiting room. Where it begins.
BE IN — the choice
The turning point. You stop hovering and choose in. You name what you want before you know how.
בינהBINAH — understanding
The clarity that follows the choice. Commit first; everything else follows.
Selected work & writing
A 90-minute guided experience for Jewish women in transition. Built on a 118-card deck of Jewish women across history (Tanakh to today) and the framework hidden in the word בינה: BEIN, the between. BE IN, the choice. BINAH, understanding revealed.
beinbinah.com →A recurring workshop I run for new leaders. The premise: the questions you're already asking with beginner's mind have real value. Most leaders just don't know how to convert observations into outcomes. The workshop teaches that path. It draws on twenty years of mentoring early and mid-career professionals at McMaster-Carr, including the "how to mentor" sessions I lead for new managers stepping into the role themselves.
Master's research at Bernard Revel: a thousand years of Jewish life in Suwalki (yeshivot, women's networks, the trades that built the town) and the mechanisms of erasure during the Holocaust. Sources: Yizkor Books, USHMM testimonies, JTA dispatches, oral histories. Thesis in progress.
Education committee work and adult learning programming at L'Chaim Center, Deerfield, Illinois. The board work is where the program building gets institutional reach.
I organize Jewish heritage trips for groups of over a hundred women. Most recent: Poland and Prague, spring 2026.
What's next
Connect
If any of this is useful to your organization, board, or community, I'd like to hear from you.