Leah Kiser

she/her

www.AhavahAriel.com

Ordained in October of 2021, Leah is building out her Kohenet Priesting paths and creating classes, rituals, and prayer services for women looking for a deeper Jewish spiritual path - as well as coordinating and officiating tradition & non-traditional lifecycle events. Leah is a small business owner by day, a creator of sacred Jewish space-time, and a fledgling artist and herbalist. Leah has a Degree Magna Cum Laude in Philosophy with minors in Linguistics and Judaic Studies, as well as an AAS in Architecture and a long interest in urban design & sustainability, climate crisis mitigation, and economically just social democracy. Leah hopes to intertwine all these threads with Kohenet Priestessing to serve a new & vibrant eco-feminist mystically connected communal interpretation of Jewish life and spirituality.

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kohenet@ahavahariel.com

Claudia Hall

she/they

Kohenet Rev. Dr. Claudia Hall lives on Kaskaskia & Osage lands and serves as Missouri's first Kohenet, as a Parent Ambassador at Cardinal Glennon Children's Medical Center, as a consulting minister with various Unitarian Universalist churches, and as the Religious Education coordinator for First UU Church of Alton, IL. She is the author and editor of several books including the Madrichat HaKohenet and Jewish Prayer Beads. She is also a shepherd, restoring land and preserving heritage breeds with her family.

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Avra Shapiro

Avra is lover of flowers and sloths, two of their greatest teachers. One of their most potent prayer experiences is during Kabbalat Shabbat at Kohenet when they ended up halfway across the room, didn’t remember how they got there, and we were one pulsing.They learned boundless love through the love they receive through their parents and siblings. They discovered radical imagination and sacred time through building time machines in the living room on Shabbat afternoons. They have two Fayegleh ancestors, one on each side, and wear Faygeleh as their middle name. They reclaim and re-remember their deviant nature, and are proud of their rebel ancestors. They currently reside on occupied Potawatomie, Ojibwa and Odawa land known as Chicago. 

They worked as an adjunct instructor at the Wolcott School, supporting students with learning differences to find their gifts through the power of spoken word poetry. They are currently an organizer and trainer at the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs, where they organize Jews around police brutality and other anti-racist efforts and facilitate trainings on racial justice, the intersections of antisemitism and white supremacy, and organizing skills. They are a song-leader and musician. 

Rakia Sky Beimel

“Down Telegraph Road – where the Rouge River runs through Ridge Road in the Riverdale neigh- borhood – is Kibbutz Detropia. On 1.5 densely wooded acres, it’s the home base for a growing Jewish nonprofit conceived by co-founder/ executive director Sky Brown, shown here with son Avi, 3. Sky has an undergraduate degree in criminology and forensic science from South Uni- versity and a Juris Doctorate from the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. She is also a reli- gious school teacher at Congregation Shir Tik- vah and teaches psychology and political sci- ence at Wayne County Community College Dis- trict. As former program coordinator of gardens and food for Hazon Detroit, she helped set up many gardens for local synagogues and de-signed the Sensory Garden at Tamarack Camps Farber Farm. She’s a doula, urban farmer, “weaver of ritual and keeper of sacred space,” and soon to be ordained through the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute.”

Sharon Jaffe

Sharon Jaffe lives in Minnesota, works as a hospice chaplain and is taking a break from grassroots lesbian feminist organizing to tend her mother. Vision centers around increasing visibility of kohenet and a focus on Jewish Water Rituals...mikvah & taharah.  So stay tuned. Also, Makom Shalom, a Jewish Women's Sacred Circle is a kohenet style monthly adventure.

Sarah Ester Richards

Sarah Ester Richards is a spiritual engineer and priestess of manifestation. She designs and creates physical apparatus, mathematical processes, and ritual elements which can be used to express spiritual concepts, solve spiritual problems, or achieve spiritual goals. Her technique blends intuition, symbol, journey, and logic, leading to an innovative approach to ritual and teaching. Sarah Esther is also an archery instructor and finds tremendous joy in teaching this ancient craft to children and adults.

Hadassah Nechushta bat Yah Shekhinah

Hadassah Nechushta bat Yah Shekhinah, The Bronze One, is a widow who lives in Canton, Ohio. She has a BA in business management and operates a small woman-owned business as a Commercial Mortgage Broker. She teaches Torah with an emphasis on its relevance to our everyday lives and she is a healer, prayer writer, and sacred drummer. She is also the President of the East Lincoln Highway Neighborhood Association and holds a certificate in the Neighborhood Leadership Program. She has one daughter who has earned an M.D. and is working on her Pharm. D.

Riv Ranney Shapiro

Riv (they/them) is a queer artist, outdoor educator and Jewish ritualist. After seven years working with innovative Jewish organizations and film clients in the Bay Area, Riv now serves as Arts & Culture Producer at the Minnesota JCC (Dakota land). Their creative work is process-oriented and often participatory, reveling in the intersections of ancestors, interspecies relationship, justice, queerness and spirituality. Blending the roles of Educator, Priestess and Artist, Riv is dedicated to sharing the wisdom and the medicine of their Jewish ancestors through adaptive, accessible, and liberatory means.

Alumah Schuster

Alumah (www.alumahschuster.com) draws on her experiences as chaplain, yogi, mother, grammie, friend, seeker, aromatherapist, ritualist, creating safe space for ritual with a calm, compassionate wisdom. Her scenting and sensing of space helps her to help others deepen the arc of devotion with both reverent and irreverent methods to experience and study Torah, enter prayer, and experience the power of the Hebrew alphabet. Her deep commitment to learning thru embodiment elizaand text opens others to remove and drop their outer garments to reveal their inner light, under the skin, revealing their truest nature and bringing them ever closer to self and Self. Her teaching is a fusion of being in third cohort of Kohenet, a Masters Degree in in wisdom literature, mythology, fairy tale and religion as well as three years of study at Siegal College of Judaic Studies. She is a RYT, certified in Yoga and Jewish Spirituality, a certified aromatherapist, trained in the somatic process of Unified Body, and works as a visiting chaplain to nursing homes, hospitals and homes. With all of these, she enters, explores, delves and honors the often silent, vast expanse of potentiality that exists in the innermost spaces between. Hidden deep inside the body, in the body of Torah, the. Body of earth or between bodies in relationship, this journey brings devotion and understanding on the path to becoming luminous bodies of being and constant becoming.