Alma

she/her

Philadelphia ~ Lenapehoking

Alma knows herself to be a human being born from the Source of Life. Alma is a child, parent, descendant, ancestor. Understanding is her kavannah. Simplicity is also her intention. What is the priority? How can she best serve life? Alma has chosen to become a stay-at-home mother. Alma understands interdependence. As a dear rabbi friend said to her years ago, “when in doubt, do the thing that is harder not to do.” May the road rise to meet you. May the wind be at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face, the rains fall soft upon your fields, & until we meet again, until we meet again, May God/dess hold you in the palm of their hand.

Cara Rock-Singer

Cara is in the final months of a Ph.D. in Religion at Columbia University. Her dissertation, Prophetesses of the Body: American Jewish Women and the Politics of Embodied Knowledge, focuses on how women are using embodied spiritual practices to transform American Jewish life. As a participant and observer in Kohenet, Cara has spent the past three years researching, teaching, and writing about its innovative ritual, theological, and textual work. She lives in Philadelphia, PA, with her husband and daughter.

Batya Diamond

she/her

www.batyadiamond.com

I am a singer/songwriter, spiritual leader, educator and activist based in Vineyard Haven, MA. The songs I write are evocative and uplifting, with themes touching on loss, survival and connecting with the Divine. I work with organizations in my community and beyond to alleviate food insecurity, protect voting and reproductive rights, and to support local musicians. You can find my latest CD, “Infinite Wisdom: Chants of the Divine Feminine” at batyadiamond.bandcamp.com and my music videos on YouTube at Batya Diamond Music.

Socials: @batya_diamond

Bekah Starr

she/her

bekahstarrart.com

Kohenet Bekah Starr is a multimedia Sacred Artist exploring ancient & weaving new connections between Jewish Mysticism and the Divine Feminine. Through her artistry she is a witness to the sacredness that is life, source, and creation. As a Kohenet, Bekah offers spiritual support through inspirational artwork and embodied ritual. Bekah’s artwork has been featured by the Jewish Arts Salon, the Every Woman Biennial, WomansWork.Art, Haggadot.com, the Parliament of World Religions, LabShul, and is held in private collections. She is the illustrator of Hamsas for the Divine Feminine, Illuminating the Moon, The Book of Becoming, Wonderful Whimsical Winter, & Divining Pleasure: an oracle for SephErotic liberation with Rav Kohenet Taya Mâ Shere. She lives with her amazingly supportive husband and their two inspiring children on the lands of the Lenapehoking First Nation people, also known as Phoenixville, PA.

Socials: @bekahstarrart

Devorah Ross

I started as a social worker, earned an MSW. After the death of my sister I became a chaplain and immersed myself in the study of suffering, earning Masters degrees in Jewish Studies and Bioethics. When my mother could no longer live alone I moved back home and lived with her for five years as she lived with dementia. I currently work as the chaplain and as a social worker in a Continuing Care Retirement Community. My two grown daughters are the joy of my life.

Ryn Silverstein

they/them

archivefeverdream.com

Ryn is a writer, priestess, and facilitator with a creative living practice that's embodied, queer, and ancestrally-rooted.‌ Ryn cultivates longing as devotional practice, creating space in the everyday for dreaming and enchantment. Ryn roots in ancient Jewish understandings of embodiment as inseparable from both temporality and Divinity throughout the creation process, which allows for the flourishing of new creative possibilities, rhythms, and ways of being. Honoring the moon as their ancestral home, Ryn tends to the connection the moon enables between our bodies, land bodies, and water bodies.

Liviah Wessely

s/he/r

Kohenet Sho'eret Liviah Oreget Shirim, ordained in the seventh class of Kohanot, is known as Guardian and Song Weaver. She regularly held ritual space for the Kohenet community, as well as leading, co-leading, and acting as Cyber-Gabbai. K'Liviah has co-led for Yelala, Kesher Pittsburgh, the Nechama Minyon, and for rituals designed for individuals around both traditional and created life events: weddings, funerals, memorials, shiva minyanim, baby namings, passages, beginnings, and endings. She teaches Theatre and English at Northern Virginia Community College, and is a theatre director, producer, designer and dramaturg. Liviah is the mother of three adults, a painter and poet, an opera singer, and an engineer, plus two cats--Cary Grant and Grace Kelly--and spends a great deal of her time in the kitchen.

Angelique YA Rivera

Kohenet/Priestess Angelique "YA" Rivera: A Neurodivergent Jewyorican Poet and Advocate for Decolonial Healing & Liberation.

she/her

Angelique Rivera, affectionately known as YA, is a neurodivergent Jewyorican who has dedicated her life to empowering others and dismantling oppressive ideology, and systems. Owner of Priestessing Liberation, her innovative coaching and consulting business, she has drawn on over 25 years of experience helping numerous individuals and organizations on a path towards healing, reclaiming agency, and shaping a decolonized future.

An esteemed poet in residence, Angelique teaches poetry as a powerful tool for healing trauma to children and teens. Her transformative classes in county prisons have brought hope and inspiration to countless individuals, while her decolonial trainings and workshops have challenged traditional paradigms and empowered communities.

Widely respected for her work in decolonizing the practice of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Angelique has extensive experience in trauma awareness, mental health, and decolonial liberation. She holds numerous certifications and is an ordained Hebrew Priestess, a Certified Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy Practitioner, and a Quantum Human Design Reader in Training.

Above all, Angelique is a mother to two powerhouse comrades. When she's not challenging the status quo, and envisioning a free Boriken you can find her savoring a slow morning with her beloved café or unwinding with a cigar at her favorite spot. Visit PriestessingLiberation.com for more information.

Naomi Joy Gershman

Joy is a life-long learner and a Seeker. She was raised Orthodox and worked as a School Psychologist and School Administrator. She was recently ordained as an Interfaith Minister and as a Life Coach. Joy is studying Shamanism for the SOPHIA Institute. She has devoted her life to personal and spiritual growth. Her goals is to create practices that elevate the mundane through dance, movement, meditation, spirituality, somatic and ancestral work and through psychotherapy/coaching. Joy's next chapter is emerging, and she looks forward to taking her next steps within the Kohenet community.

Nancy Wolfson-Moche

she/her

youarebecauseyoueat.com

Kohenet Nancy Wolfson-Moche, Kindler of Sacred Sparks, weaves together prayer, Torah, ritual and earth-based practices to guide people toward a path of deep listening, reframing eating and all forms of self-nourishment as a spiritual practice to transform and strengthen health. A certified practitioner of macrobiotics, yoga and Torah yoga, she offers food as blessing, medicine, edible art, symbolic sacred expression and magic. Nancy is a candidate for a MS in Nutrition Education.

Kelly-Chava Banker

Kelly-Chava is forever in love with the wonder, mystery and sensuality of the body. She has engaged this love affair in a multitude of ways, including as a comprehensive sex educator, Jewish community organizer, and as a full-spectrum doula. In 2016, she earned a master’s degree in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School and has since pursued work in the academic world as well as in the world of embodied healing. These days, she plays with the texts of body, soul and earth through her work as a scholar, bodyworker and community herbalist in Providence, RI. As a doctoral student in Religion and Critical Thought at Brown University, Kelly-Chava now seeks to bridge the gap between mind and body through writing constructive Jewish mystical theologies that position sexual and reproductive experiences as productive sites at which to develop new ways of relating to one another and to the divine. In her work as a licensed massage therapist in the Providence area, she makes material these theological commitments by approaching the body with reverence, fluidity and nurturance. Kelly-Chava weaves massage modalities to create a trauma-informed approach to bodywork that invites survivors of embodied trauma to return in safety and joy to their bodies. As a trained community herbalist, Kelly-Chava focuses on plant medicine for reproductive and sexual wellbeing, as well as plants that support and/or induce ceremonial practices. When she is not studying or massaging, Kelly-Chava can be found exploring the forest, dancing, cuddling with her beloved dog Blue, or practicing new jiu jitsu techniques.

Joanna Kent Katz

Joanna Kent Katz is a social justice educator, intuitive healer, drama therapist, youth worker, Theater of the Oppressed practitioner, circle keeper and rite of passage ritualist. She is a political educator who centers healing and a healing practitioner who believes in collective liberation.

Jo practices the art of deep tending. Harvesting directly the wisdom of Ancestors and Guides, she serves as witness to, container for and catalyst of profound transformation of embodied paths and ancestral legacies. Jo supports clients in building their capacity to interrupt patterns of oppression, attending to the healing required to release ourselves, and one another, from our unconscious allegiance to systems that hold us captive, availing us to imagine and embody the world we long for.

As an educator, Jo creates and facilitates dynamic, liberatory anti-oppression trainings, supporting youth and young-adult leaders around the country to strengthen themselves as agents of social change.

Joanna holds a Masters degree in Social Justice Education from University of Massachusetts, Amherst and is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor with a degree in Counseling Psychology/Drama Therapy from California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. Her garlic is currently planted on occupied land originally stewarded by the Nipmuc, Nonotuc and Pocomtuc Peoples, known by settlers as Northampton, Massachusetts.

Ella Gluckman

Ella Gluckman is a weaver of multiple modalities. She has experience as an artist, educator, birth worker, herbalist and natural perfumer. She began crafting and creating with a variety of mediums as a child. Her art work currently focuses on the creation of ecologically sustainable clothing, ritual textiles, and sustainably made jewelry. Her perfume and herbal work draw upon Ashkenazi and Jewish traditions, with a deep desire to decolonize plant work and honor the healing practices of her ancestors.

Ella attended college at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. It was there that she began her journey with plant and ancestral medicine through classes and self guided studies. Upon leaving university, she decided that she wanted to deepen her knowledge of holistic health practices and shortly after trained and worked as a birth doula. She studied plant medicine on her own before attending Ohlone Herbal Center, where she completed their clinical herbalism program. She also completed a massage program in Oakland, CA that focused on working with people living with chronic illness and trauma. Ella has also trained with Mandy Aftel, a natural perfumer, in Berkeley CA and has trained as an aromatherapist as part of her herbalism training. Ella is currently studying Community and Trauma counseling with an Art Therapy concentration at Jefferson University in Philadelphia PA so that she can offer ritualized, community folk art therapy practices to communities impacted by trauma.

Batya Diamond

Batya is a songwriter and mystic, teacher and spiritual leader. A native of Brooklyn, NY, Batya’s earliest days at Hebrew day school inspired her love of Jewish learning, music and ritual. She is a skilled communicator with a sharp sense of humor, whose journey to becoming a Kohenet wound through spells as a lawyer, private investigator, radio personality, and stay-at-home-mom.

Along the way, Batya has been writing, recording and performing her original songs and chants, weaving ancient wisdom with accessible teachings in English and Hebrew. Intimacy and playfulness with both languages allow Batya to discover hidden connections and deeper spiritual meaning, which she helps bring to light with her music. Whether holding b’mitzvah or high holiday services, women’s seders, healing and new moon circles, teaching the aleph-bet or studying kabbalah, Batya brings an easeful, attentive presence to the journey of those with whom she is engaged.

Batya is delighted to have received smicha in her 60th year as the culmination of a lifetime of Jewish learning, spiritual practice, ritual, parenting, creativity and community-building. She is deeply grateful to her teachers and ancestors, to the dear ones who lovingly care for her, and to this holy Kohenet community.

Shoshana A Brown

Kohenet Shoshana A Brown, LMSW is a healer, educator, and organizer. She organizes to transform the prison system as well as organizing with Jews of Color. As an educator, Shoshana works is a Dean/Social Worker in a 6-12th grade school in the South Bronx, and is also an adjunct professor at (Hunter) Silberman School of Social Work teaching the class she once advocated and organized to create: Practice Lab on Anti-oppressive Social Work Practice. She has facilitated and planned conferences and convenings of more than 200 prison activists, smaller workshops and retreats on the Paulo Freire methodology, social work engagement, trauma, and group work. Shoshana is an Infinite Possibilities trainer and supports individuals working on taking action in their life and creating their dreams. As a healer, she is trained in Reiki I and weaves earth based spiritual practice into Judaism through her training from the Urban Atabex and Kohenet Institute for Hebrew Priestesses. Shoshana is fierce, loving, and energetic. She is a Black- mixed race Jewish femme who hails from the Bronx and has made her home in Washington Heights while still working in Hunt’s Point, New York.

Rayna Daniela

Rayna Daniela, also known as Ryn, is a Ph.D. candidate in Cultural Studies at Stony Brook University, where her research focuses on queer relationality through the lens of detective fiction. She holds a graduate certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies, and an M.A. in Cultural Studies, also from Stony Brook University, where she taught undergraduate film studies courses for five years. Ryn is a ritual leader in the Jewish Voice for Peace havurah network, planning and leading Kohenet-style Shabbat services for the Brooklyn Shabbat Kodesh community. She is currently at work on a queer fantasy detective novel about diaspora that draws inspiration from Jewish ancestral magic, and her latest essay is forthcoming in the Jewish issue of the renowned lesbian literary and art journal Sinister Wisdom. Ryn can be found online on Instagram and Twitter @batpriestess.

Mimi Rhys

Maryam discovered drums and fell in love with them at the age of 9, after which her parents in self-defense got her to take lessons at the age of 10. She graduated from playing with sticks to playing with her hands in her 30s, and after joining B’nai Or was allowed the honor of playing for her congregation. Now she is a sacred drummer and plays for 4 Jewish congregations and one coven, as well as other Jewish groups. 

Maryam is a Jew by choice who has avidly embraced Jewish Renewal since 2001. She is also an initiated Wiccan priestess of over 20 year’s standing in the Alexandrian tradition. She finds that each tradition enriches the other and is a member of both SOPHIA coven and B’nai Or of Boston, the third oldest Jewish Renewal congregation. 

Maryam has been on a healing journey from trauma and has used the wisdom she has gained to help others along that path. She has studied bodywork, trauma release techniques, shamanic work with Kohenet Tiana Mirapae, and reiki over the past 15 years. She opened her practice, Phoenix Healing Arts in 2007 to enable her to offer her clients many possible roads to health. She weaves together healing in all four worlds of the body, heart, mind and soul to help clear pain and trauma for those who come to her for care. She sees the whole person both in this life and in past lives. To this end she utilizes shamanic journeying to reunite lost parts of body or soul with the current selves of her clients.

She is continuing studies in shamanism and aromatherapy to expand her offerings.

Dori Midnight

Dori Midnight practices community- based intuitive healing that weaves plant and stone medicine, ancestral and queer magic, and liberation work. Drawing on ancestral wisdom from her Sephardi and Ashkenazi lineage, Dori’s work is supported by a web of teachers, healers, dreamers, witches, plants and stones, wild and wise ones rooted in disability and healing justice work, queer liberation, and Earth based Judaism. 

Ordained as an interfaith minister and spiritual counselor from the New Seminary in NYC in 2005 and trained as a clinical and energetic herbalist, Dori’s work is grounded in self-determinism and love. Dori offers in person and long distance intuitive healing, teaches workshops on Jewish plant magic, healing for apocalyptic times, and queer magic, and crafts ritual and remedies for helping heal wounds of trauma, oppression and disconnection. 

Dori also weaves collaborative, reverent and irreverant, joyous and deep ritual with Nishmat Shoom, a radical, queer, non-Zionist minyan project, organizes with Jewish Voice for Peace, a Palestinian solidarity organization, and tends to and is tended by her gardens, family, and community on Nipmuc/Nonotuck/Pocumtuck land, known by settlers as Northampton, Massachusetts.

Yedida Landis

In her daily life, Yedida weaves together family, food, cleaning, gardening, managing a chiropractic office, playing harp and offering healing services. She also teaches gardening at a nearby school. She has an M.A. in Environmental Education and a B.A. in Environmental Studies and Spanish. Yedida is deeply passionate about co-creating gardens with Nature Spirits and making herbal medicines from those gardens. She and her beloved, Owen, were recently blessed with land in Dublin, New Hampshire, where they plan to co-create prolific gardens and be guardians of the Earth and Waters there. They are blessed with two children - Amara Nampreet and Tobin, a majestic cat named Shaman and a sweet little dog, Buddhita. 

Judith Breier

she/they

Into the Deep:
I am a Life Legacy Letter Writing facilitator and certified Sage-ing facilitator from Sage-ing International and end-of-life doula. The focus of the way I am in service is to support people in doing life completion work using age-ing as a time for deep reflection and spiritual growth
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Legacy letter writing or leaving a legacy is an important part of life completion work. Life Legacy Letter writing is an easy way to share your stories, values, and memories with those whom you love and to future generations. They articulate how you have made meaning of specific events in your life, what you’ve learned, and the values that were highlighted through decisions that were made or not made but learned in the process. It is a way to bridge the past with the future allowing you to be seen, to be known, to bless others and yourself, to be remembered, to make a positive difference, and to celebrate your life and finally, to be a good ancestor. In addition to legacy work, I also run workshops on expanding elder consciousness, life review, forgiveness, healing relationships, and embracing our mortality.