Rabbi Jill Hammer, PhD
Co-Founder and Rav Kohenet
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 Shere (Taya Mâ) plays passionately in the realms of transformative ritual and embodied vocalization. Taya is co-founder and co-direct of the Kohenet Institute. Her chant albums Wild Earth Shebrew, Halleluyah All Night, Torah Tantrika, and This Bliss have been heralded as "cutting-edge mystic medicine music." She is co-author of The Hebrew Priestess: Ancient and New Visions of Jewish Women's Spiritual Leadership and SIddur HaKohanot: A Hebrew Priestess Prayerbook. Trained in the folklore of religion at the University of Pennsylvania and as a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, she is Spiritual Leader Emeritus of a Washington D.C. area Jewish congregation. Taya co-leads Makam Shekhina, a multi-religious Jewish/Sufi spiritual community, teaches at Starr-King School for the Ministry and mentors emergent spiritual leaders in embodied presence and counter-oppressive devotion. She makes home, music and other magic in the California East Bay.
SHOSHANA JEDWAB
faculty and Rav Kohenet
As a child, Shoshana Jedwab would drum on parked cars, plates, tables, books and other people's bodies. Hailing from a family of rabbis and community leaders decimated by the Holocaust, Shoshana became a prize winning sacred text teacher, the Jewish Life Coordinator at the A.J. Heschel Middle School as well as a founding faculty member at the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute where she goes by the name Batshemesh. As one of congregation Romemu’s regular hand drummers, and as worship leader, singer-songwriter, and teacher, Shoshana brings depth, humor, voice, feminism and sizzling rhythm to her grateful audiences. Shoshana Jedwab’s original sacred music grounds body and spirit, and brings the ancestral past into joyous contemporary practice. The seven songs of Shoshana’s 2016 debut album, “I Remember”, and her 2018 viral 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. In 2017 Shoshana Jedwab was included in Jewish Rock Radio’s Jewish Women Who Rock the Worship World. Shoshana released her new single, “Openings,” on Sukkot 2020. www.shoshanajedwab.com and https://shoshanajedwab.bandcamp.com/track/openings
Keshira haLev Fife
Executive Director and faculty
Keshira haLev Fife sprinkles sparkles, disrupts expectations, and offers blessings wherever she goes. Lovingly called “the priestess who priestesses the priestesses”, she delights in serving, supporting, up-leveling and weaving Kohenet community. She also pours love and intention into her work as founder and community shepherdess of Kesher Pittsburgh, as Program Director for the ALEPH Kesher Fellowship, and more broadly as a shlichat tzibbur, life spiral ceremony officiant, ritual creatrix, liturgist, songstress, public speaker and writer. Her work in these realms is informed by her lived experience as a queer Jewish Woman of Colour and the quandries she encounters as a scholar of the Orphan Wisdom School. Keshira received smicha as a Kohenet in 2017 and earned her BS (Social History) and MS (Public Policy and Management) at Carnegie Mellon University. Dual-citizens of the USA and Australia and avid travelers, these days, she and her beloved are leaning into stillness and sheltering-in-peace at home in Pittsburgh, PA.