Rabbi Jill Hammer, PhD
Co-Founder and Rav Kohenet
New York
Jill Hammer (Yeilah) is an author, educator, midrashist and ritualist. She is the co-founder of the Kohenet Institute, and the Director of Spiritual Education at the Academy for Jewish Religion. Rabbi Hammer is the author of Sisters at Sinai: New Tales of Biblical Women, The Jewish Book of Days: A Companion for All Seasons, The Omer Calendar of Biblical Women, The Garden of Time and the co-author of The Hebrew Priestess: Ancient and New Visions of Jewish Women's Spiritual Leadership and Siddur HaKohanot: A Hebrew Priestess Prayerbook. She holds a doctorate in social psychology from the University of Connecticut and received rabbinical ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary. She lives in Manhattan with her wife and daughter.
TAYA Mâ SHERE
Co-Founder and Rav Kohenet
Taya Mâ Shere is co-founder and Rav Kohenet of Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute, co-author of The Hebrew Priestess: Ancient and New Visions of Jewish Women’s Spiritual Leadership and Siddur HaKohanot: A Hebrew Priestess Prayerbook. Taya Mâ hosts the Jewish Ancestral Healing podcast and offers online courses through the Kohenet Virtual Temple including Embodied Presence, Jewish Ancestral Healing and Sex and the Sephirot. She is Assistant Professor of the Practice of Organic Multireligious Ritual at Starr King School for the Ministry and on faculty at the Chaplaincy Institute. Taya Mâ is the creator of the Liberate Your Seder Haggadeck, and co-creator of The Omer Oracle and Divining Pleasure: an Oracle for SephErotic Liberation. She co-leads Makam Shekhina, a multireligious Jewish & Sufi Muslim community and co-founded Al Kahina Journeys. Taya Mâ’s Hebrew Goddess chant albums — This Bliss, Wild Earth Shebrew, Halleluyah All Night and Torah Tantrika — have been heralded as “cutting-edge mystic medicine music.” Her newest album, Makam Shekhina is pulsing Hebrew-Arabic prayer in cahoots with her beloved collaborator Shaykh Ibrahim Baba z’’l, and their spiritual community.
Socials: @tayatransforms
SHOSHANA JEDWAB
faculty and Rav Kohenet
New York
she/her
As a child, Shoshana Jedwab, would drum on parked cars, plates, tables, books and other people’s bodies. Shoshana Jedwab is a percussionist, singer-songwriter, worship leader, prize-winning Jewish educator and the Jewish Life Coordinator at the A.J. Heschel Middle School. As a Jewish educator, Shoshana has more than 30 years of experience bringing sacred Jewish texts to life for a wide variety of audiences. Shoshana Jedwab, aka Batshemesh, serves as a founding faculty member at Kohenet where she drums, leads worship, and guides the exploration of ancestral texts, practices, history and humor. Shoshana Jedwab’s original, hip-shaking, prayer music grounds body and spirit, and brings the ancestral past into joyous contemporary practice. The original songs of Shoshana’s 2016 debut album, “I Remember,” and her 2018 zipper song single, “Where You Go,” emerged from ceremonies Shoshana was leading, and are now being sung, and danced to, in churches, synagogues, weddings and protest marches around the world. Shoshana Jedwab was included in Jewish Rock Radio’s Jewish Women Who Rock the Worship World.
https://shoshanajedwab.bandcamp.com/track/openings
Twitter: @shoshana_jedwab
For information about Kohanot in your local area, email kohenetinfo@gmail.com.