Rae Abileah

she/they

www.createwell.io

Kohenet Rae Abileah offers life cycle ceremonies from baby naming to weddings to rituals to mark significant but often under-recognized transitions. She facilitates ritual live and online. Rae is a trainer at Beautiful Trouble, and co-creator of the global Climate Ribbon art ritual, which emerged during her studies at Kohenet, as a way to weave her spiritual practice and climate activism together. She is a facilitator with The Nature Conservancy’s Agility Lab, and founded CreateWell consultancy, where she serves as a project midwife and book doula for visionary leaders at the intersection of spirituality and social change. She is a contributing author to books including Beyond Tribal Loyalties: Personal Stories of Jewish Peace Activists, and the Olam haBa Hebrew Planner (5782). Rae graduated from Barnard College at Columbia University, was certified as a Full Spectrum Doula by Birth Advocacy Doula Training, and received ordination by the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute, when she received the priestess name Oreget haNevuot (Weaver of Prophesies). She’s a first-generation American, and her Dutch and Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry informs her work toward dismantling white supremacy. She’s based on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone land, also known as the coast side of the SF Bay Area in California.

Socials: @raeabileah

Zohar Lev

Zohar Lev Cunningham is a water baby, collaborative artist, ritual leader, healer, and friend.  A lover of love, Zoh expresses holy devotion through acts of service to beloved community.  

A licensed social worker with over a decade of experience in public health and community-based harm reduction, Zoh is currently the Acting Director of the Q Center at University of Washington.  

Zoh cut their teeth in community ritual leadership with the Jewish Voice for Peace Seattle chapter, where they continue to lead Jewish holiday celebrations and bring politically rooted, accessible ritual moments to public spaces.  

Zoh is a student of sacred touch, a steward of sacred silence, and a guardian of flames of possibility.  They practice intuitive stone-sensing, boxing, and homemaking on Duwamish Land. At the water’s edge, Zoh is usually first to get naked and jump in.

Traci Marx

Traci Marx is a musical prayer leader who prays and plays with great joy and deep reverence.  Traci serves as the Spiritual and Musical Director for The Kavana Cooperative in Seattle, Washington, where she leads prayer services, Hebrew chanting sessions, and spirituality retreats.  With heartfelt prayer and embodied song, Traci raises vibrations and offers invitations to increased presence and deeper alignment.  

As an independent ritual leader, Traci officiates weddings, B’nai mitzvah, memorials, and other life cycle events.  Drawing forth personal meaning, she elevates as sacred all of life’s experiences.  Traci brings music and Jewish ritual to political actions, uplifting community and offering spiritual focus to political work. 

Traci’s leadership style draws heavily from her life experiences, academic and artistic.  Traci earned a PhD in Clinical Psychology, and brings warmth, sensitivity, and attunement to all of her work.  Her background in the performing arts allows her to infuse her prayer-leading style with confidence and creativity.  

Traci parents two children with radical respect and a deep commitment to peaceful communication, free expression, and personal responsibility.  Traci finds balance and soul-soothing happiness collaborating with other musicians in her role as organizer of the Pacific Northwest Deadheads. 

shoshi rosenzweig

shoshi embraces paradox, recognizing the definite and the mystery. she is a priestess of plants, curator of sacred adornments, dedicated student of life and hedonist. she is currently reviving a tiny 1911 bungalow and tending land and garden in occupied Kalapuyan territory (commonly known as eugene Oregon) with her two soulmates, duke & elliott

Sarah Salem

Sarah is a teacher, priestess, and student. She has worked with youth of all ages, particularly in Jewish and outdoor education contexts. She has been an educator at Camp Tawonga, the Teva Nature Program, and Mishkan Chicago. In her roles as a teacher and facilitator, she weaves experiences that invite play, curiosity, inner knowing, and the remembering and re-configuring of our connections with each other and the larger wonders of the world. She is grateful for the teachers, communities, and more-than-human web of life who have taught her reverence, integrity, dynamic joy, and emotional bravery. These are qualities she hopes to imbue in all she offers. 

Sarah is currently training in the healing art of shiatsu, at Zen Shiatsu Chicago. She was raised on Ohlone and Miwok Land, in California. She graduated from UC Davis in 2014 with a BA in Theatre Arts and a minor in Education. In 2015 she spent three months walking a pilgrimage in Northern Spain, which strongly influences her path as a priestess. She is the descendent of Irish and Sephardi & Mizrahi Jewish immigrants.

Mikala Raver

Miki, known for her enthusiasm and passion for revealing and celebrating the feminine within Judaism, is author of the Jewish bestseller, Listen to Her Voice: Women of the Hebrew Bible and She is Wisdom: A Celebration of the Feminine Divine. Miki Raver created and facilitates Shekinah Circles, a gentle, powerful group process that uses dance, guided meditation and writing to facilitate connection with Divine Presence. Miki has lectured about the women of the Hebrew Bible and led Shekinah Circles nationally and internationally since 1997. She has also created Kabbalage, an expressive art workshop using collage to explore Kabbalah.   

In a varied, vibrant and venerable career that spans 50 years, Miki Raver has been a video producer, human sexuality instructor, counselor and Jewish communal professional. She is currently the Director of Camp Isabella Freedman, Jewish summer camp for active older adults.

 Miki graduated from Emerson College with a BS in Theatre Arts. She completed advanced training with Jalaja Bonheim at the Institute for Circlework. She is a Bibliodrama and SoulCollage facilitator. Miki lives in Burbank, California, with her husband, Marty Perlmutter.

Lois Gaylord

Lois Gaylord, a weaver, dyer and seamstress, is a maker of connections. Her passion for textiles and deeply spiritual outlook inform her art and life’s work. On this path, her goal is to help others to see the connectedness of all life and recognize the Divine Essence in everyone and everything. She seeks to integrate and restore balance in binary energy systems: female and male, the receptive and the active, or yin and yang. Weaving these seeming opposites (that can’t exist without the other) into a new cloth of balance and wholeness is her way of practicing tikkun olam, Hebrew for the healing of the world.

Along with her art she creates spiritual cloths with the intention to help people connect to Source within themselves and the world. Lois teaches beginning weaving as well as classes that utilize art as a practice for spiritual discovery. She sells her work at fairs and through her online shops and works on commission.

Lois has been a life long seeker on her spiritual path, exploring several diverse traditions and returning home to her Jewish roots through Kohenet. She has a bachelor’s degree in textile design and a certificate in fiber arts. She lives in Seattle, WA with her husband Kevin Cain.

Ruth Began

Nurtured by Jewish community since birth, Ruth is a “Jew-by-destiny” who officially converted twenty years ago. She has been an early childhood educator since graduating from Mills College in Oakland, California. Her work in the classroom focuses on outdoor education, intercultural empathy, and the ancient technology called reading.

Ruth is a hereditary gardener whose land work focuses on ecosystems, forest stewardship, and sustainable home food production. She creates earth-based meditations using the four elements and deep connection to specific patches of earth. 

Ruth is matriarch to a large, unaffiliated/intermarried yet fiercely Jewish mishpochah. Hoping to inspire other mishpochim committed to passing on Jewish identity in extranormative settings, Ruth is working with her husband and daughters to develop a simcha/yomtov/shabbos practice they call “Backyard Judaism”. 

Ruth and her family live in the Bay Area and on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Emanuellah Silverman

Emanuella aka Dr. Emily Leah Silverman is a scholar activist, knowledge seeker, visionary, healer, space holder, bridge builder, ritual leader and traveler of the interior and exterior realms. 

Emily is currently the interim V.P of programming at the American Academy of Religion Western Region. The theme for 2021 : Religious Studies after COVID-19: The Role of Religion in Times of Pandemic, Sustainability, Marginalized Communities, and Social & Economic Justice. She has been AAR/WR Past President previous V.P. of programming in 2014.

She is the Bay Area organizer Global Teach IN 2020 Democratize the Crisis  She has worked and coordinated with activistas from over 20 countries from 5 continents working together with them to  democratize post covid, climate change, health care and inequality .

Emily is an invited national speaker on the theology of Spiritual Resistance of Rabbi Regina Jonas the first woman Rabbi and Edith Stein St Theresa Benedicta of the Cross. Some of her speaking engagements have included  the Program in Spirituality  at Florida International University, Miami Florida, Pepperdine University Malibu CA , Assumption College Worcester Mass, the Dedication of Edith Stein personal family papers by her niece Suzanne Bartzdorf to the Florence Lamson Hewlett Library, Berkeley CA 

She has written a groundbreaking book Edith Stein and Regina Jonas: Religious Visionary in the Time of the Death Camps  Routledge Publishing Her book intersects the field of queer studies, feminist theory and theology, Jewish and Catholic Women and the Holocaust   Emily has  organized the Festschrift for  Rosemary Radford Ruether and Co-edited Voices of Feminist Liberation: Writing in Celebration of Rosemary Radford Ruether  Rougledge Publishing Her next book is a co edited volume with Sudanese Muslim Feminist Souad T Ali Subjugated Voices and Religion with Equinox publishing.

Emily has been national evaluator for American Academy of Religion Holocaust, Genocide and Religion group and was on the national steering committee for Feminist Lesbian Studies in Religion group at American Academy of Religion. She has presented papers nationally at American Academy of Religion, National Women's Studies Association, International Medieval Congress and Hebrew Professors Association   

She has taught women studies seminars at the Graduate Theological Union Women and Religion Center, she has been a Dorot Fellow studying archeology in Israel, Newhall Fellow teaching a seminar on Jewish Feminisms and has taught at San Jose State University in the Humanities Dept. Emily has also taught at Lehrhuas Judica  Meditation and kabbalah She was an oral history interviewer for Northern California Holocaust Center

 Emily holds  a B.A from Bard College in the History and Philosophy of Science  a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School and PhD  in Interdisciplinary Studies of Religion from a joint program of Graduate Theological Union and UC Berkeley     

Emanuella is trained as a Theta Healing Practitioner, and has just co-founded The Institute for the Unseen Arts.   Emanuella enjoys swimming with the Dolphin Club  in the San Francisco Bay, hiking, taking photos and gardening. She lives with her family in Ramakush Ohlone lands ( San Francisco) .  Emanuella has felt her calling to Kohenet from the age of three when she first saw the Ancient Near Eastern Map of Ancient Cannan and Israel on the wall in Hebrew school  and knew she had been a kohenet  in previous incarnations.  She thanks the Rav Kohenot and cohort Alef  for manifesting and reclaiming Kohenet. 

Hazzan Shayndel Adler

Hazzan Shayndel Adler is a mother, a teacher, a liturgist, an ordained Kohenet and a spiritual healing practitioner living in Davis, CA. She serves as cantor at Temple Beth Hillel in Richmond, CA and also as a supervising teacher/education consultant for homeschooling families.  She is skilled in traditional nusach as well as engaging congregational melodies and has worked for over twenty-five years in a wide spectrum of Jewish settings ranging from Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Renewal, feminist, nature-based, ecumenical and interfaith. She is flexible in meeting the needs of those whom she serves.  She is a Kol Zimra chant leader, a Soul Memory Discovery facilitator, a holistic health practitioner, and a teacher of “Uncovering the Voice,” a spiritual approach to singing. Hazzan Shayndel has been a professional educator since 1997 and her specialty is Waldorf education. She was ordained by the Aleph Cantorial Ordination Program;  earned her Multiple Subjects Teaching Credential and B.A. in Liberal Studies/Elementary Education from Humboldt State University, and Holistic Health Practitioner (HHP) certification from the Healing Hands School of Holistic Health. Her website is: www.shayndeladler.com

Yael Schonzeit

Yael Schonzeit is a devotional musician, ceremonialist and lover of love. She is dedicated to cultivating spiritual community and practice that is dynamic, embodied, feminist, earth reverent and counter-oppressive. She is devoted to a Judaism that centers the experiences, narratives and resilience of those who have been historically marginalized from Jewish spaces. She supports spiritual seekers in cultivating relationship with themselves, life and the Divine by priestessing at the intersections of spirit, art, healing and ancestral memory. Yael has a Bachelors in Social Work from New York University and is currently pursuing a Masters in Divinity at Starr King School for the Ministry, a multi-religious counter oppressive theological seminary at the GTU.

Whitney Aliyah

Whitney Aliyah is a free-style-life-est, who joyfully weaves an eclectic background and future. As an eternal traveler and student, she intends to continue honing and broadening the edges of her Priestess role. She is experienced as a clear reflector and space holder. She is also an aspiring astrologer, facilitator, creative writer and explorer of all things embodied.

Sheryl Shayndel Adler

Sheryl Shayndel Adler is a mother, cantor, teacher and holistic health practitioner. She is receiving ordination as a Hazzan/ Spiritual Leader from Aleph Ordination Program; is a teacher of Uncovering the Voice; a Kol Zimra Chant Leader and a graduate of Healing Hands School of Holistic Health. Shayndel has been an educator for over 23 years with a focus on Waldorf Education and she has a Teaching Credential and BA in Liberal Studies/ Elementary Education from Humboldt State University.

Sarah Tziporah Moser

Sarah Tziporah Moser answers the Divine call to her most rooted sovereign self as she receives smicha as a Kohenet. She tends portals with gevurah (holy boundaries) and chesed (lovingkindess), embodying wisdom and sovereignty through empathic, allied, and loving resource in all acts of reaching into the beyond. In 2018, she began rabbinical school with the Academy of Jewish Religion, California where she is working towards a Masters program culminating in expected ordination in 2023. Her current work specializes in intuitive herbal and energetic healing, altar-work, poetic prescriptions, and open-tent hospitality. She helps facilitate the discovery of open portals in wilderness through courageous ritual leadership, fierce boundary-tending, and wilderness and fire-tending skills.

Rebekah Erev

Rebekah Erev is an artist, ritualist, somatic practitioner, teacher, dream worker, activist, community herbalist and storyteller. They celebrate the beauty of Jewish diaspora with Queer Mikveh Project and by creating ritual tools: The Malakh Halevanah / Moon Angels Oracle Deck, the Dreaming the World to Come planner & podcast and incantation bowls. They teach about Jewish magic and ritual, cultivating creativity, the Hebrew letters and somatics. They are inspired and guided by Indigenous led movements for #LandBack, abolition, Disability Justice and Black liberation movements. They live on Squaxin land in Steh-Chass, known colonially as Olympia, WA. with their partner, beloved animal companions and a magical garden.

You can learn more about their work and schedule a session to explore somatic coaching, mentorship or ritual facilitation at RebekahErevStudio.com. Find her projects at queermikvehproject.org and dreamingtheworldtocome.com

Rayna Grace Matthews

Rayna Grace Matthews is a ritual Priestess, an accomplice for Social Justice, a wild lover of the cosmos, a songstress and a story-teller. A self-taught star-gazer, Rayna Grace loves to watch the star and moon-cycles and to share these wonders. With a B.A. and M.F.A. in the performing arts, Rayna Grace loves the magic of humans gathering to tell our stories; through theater, song, and ritual. She is attentive to the details of lighting, setting, and the sensory needs and delights that encourage us to go deeper into the stories and transformation. She is committed to making our communal gathering spaces be the most welcoming with the widest embrace possible. She is an intuitive and trained mediator, bringing deep listening and empathy as the primary tools to hear people’s experiences of hurt and separation, both in one-on-one sessions, and in mediation between groups. She strives for careful words, that when she speaks it is with truth, and not harmful to others. She is currently the steward of land in a rainbow-filled valley in Northern California, where she gardens and keeps seasonal time. She lives with her Beloved partner, her niece, a growing and changing community of adults, and many animals. She is delighted to welcome her just-born child into the earthly realm to share this human dance together.

Nomy Lamm

Nomy is a multi-media artist whose offerings have included lullabies, rock operas, an experimental novel, zines and comics, a children’s book, many bands and solo albums, live performances, animated videos, and more. Nomy offers space for creative exploration and engagement with our wounded places as a source of transformation. She has been teaching people to sing for almost two decades, helping students move through fear and self-judgement to take up space and find equilibrium in radical authenticity. She has a BA in Multimedia Art and Political Economy from The Evergreen State College, and an MFA in Fiction from San Francisco State University. She has been working with Sins Invalid, a disability justice performance project and movement building organization, since 2008. She lives on occupied Squaxin/Nisqually/Chehalis land in Olympia, WA with her partner Lisa, their dogs Dandelion and Momma, and their cat Calendula.