OUR FACULTY

  • April Nichole Baskin (she/her) is an award-winning Black, Cherokee & Jewish liberation leader and the founding director of Joyous Justice, a social justice and spiritual transformation organization providing trauma-agile liberatory life & leadership coaching, education, and consulting through its Leadership for Liberation Laboratory and other joyously innovative services. Recognized as a Faith Leader to Watch by the Center for American Progress, for 20 years April has helped shift communities and institutions toward more equitable outcomes and, in her personal life, has been an international, counter-oppressive trauma peer counselor for 10 years. She serves on the boards of Rise Up: Nurturing the Soul of Jewish Justice and the Jewish Liberation Fund, where she is a founding steering committee member and currently on a leave of absence. Additionally, April was a national speaker and steering committee member of the 2019 Women’s March. She is a proud member of Tzedek Lab and the Selah Leadership Network. Previously, April served as the Racial Justice Director of the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable, a Vice President of the Union for Reform Judaism, a Resources & Training Director for 18Doors (formerly InterfaithFamily), and as a President of the Jewish Multiracial Network. A dance-, dog- and food-loving multicultural Jewish priestess and mystic, April co-creates home, fosters belonging, and weaves shared power with kindred spirits globally and with her beloved partner Assane in Dakar, Senegal and on Turtle Island/USA.

  • Sarah Chandler (she/her) aka Kohenet Shamirah is a Brooklyn-based Jewish educator, artist, activist, healer, and poet. She teaches, writes and consults on issues related to Judaism, earth-based spiritual practice, respectful workplaces, mindfulness, and farming. An ordained Kohenet with the Hebrew Priestess Institute and a trainer for “Taamod: Stand Up!”, she is also an advanced student of Kabbalistic dream work at The School of Images. Previously, Sarah served as the Director of Romemu Yeshiva, Chief Compassion Officer of Jewish Initiative for Animals, and Director of Earth Based Spiritual Practices at Adamah's Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center. Currently, she is the CEO of Shamir Collective, as a coach and consultant to high profile artists and authors to launch new music and books.

  • Kohenet Annie (Annabel) Gottfried Cohen is a researcher, writer, translator and teacher, currently undertaking a PhD Modern Jewish History at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. She lives in France, where she is researching Jewish anti-fascist resistance before and during WW2. Annie teaches Yiddish at the Sorbonne University, and online with the Workers’ Circle. She has previously taught at YIVO, KlezKanada, Yiddish Summer Weimar, and the London based radical language school Babel’s Blessing. She is a 2023-2024 Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellow, for which she is translating the memoirs of Jewish Communist journalist and activist Gina Medem.

    Annie researches and translates materials relating to Jewish women’s religiosity in Eastern Europe, publishing her work on a blog: www.pullingatthreads.com. Her essays on this work have been published in Yiddish and English in the Forward, Vashti, and Strange Fire: Jewish Voices from the Pandemic (2021). She has taught on the subject at JTS, Yale, Wheaton College, Georgetown University, City College New York, Yiddish New York and Yiddish Summer Weimar.

  • Rabbi Jill Hammer, PhD, author, scholar, ritualist, poet, dreamworker and midrashist, is a co-founder of Beit Kohenet and of the Kohenet movement. She is the Director of Spiritual Education at the Academy for Jewish Religion (www.ajrsem.org). She is also the author of Undertorah: An Earth-Based Kabbalah of Dreaming, Return to the Place: The Magic, Meditation, and Mystery of Sefer Yetzirah, The Hebrew Priestess: Ancient and New Visions of Jewish Women’s Spiritual Leadership (with Taya Shere), The Omer Calendar of Biblical Women, The Jewish Book of Days: A Companion for All Seasons, Sisters at Sinai: New Tales of Biblical Women, and The Book of Earth and Other Mysteries. She is the translator of The Romemu Siddur and of Siddur haKohanot: A Hebrew Priestess Prayerbook. She has written a children’s book, The Garden of Time. She lives in Manhattan with her family.

  • Or Har-Gil (she/they) is an Art Therapist, artist and ordained Kohenet. She facilitates workshops on creativity as a spiritual practice (including Intuition Card making, Altar Creation, and Vision Boards), supports people in individual sessions, and works in cancer care with patients and caregivers.

    Or is queer, of mixed Moroccan and Ashkenazi ancestry, and is currently living between Toronto (Tkaronto, Dish with One Spoon territory) and New York City (Lenapehoking).

  • Shoshana Jedwab is an intuitive who feels gifted by uncanny experiences that have helped her to orient in this incarnation. Shoshana (Batshemesh) Jedwab served as founding faculty member and sacred drummer for the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute where she facilitated powerful primal prayer, vibrant Torah service ritual translations, and taught Jewish sacred foolery, contemporary mystical experience, Jewish spiritual practices, and Jewish history. Shoshana Jedwab lives in the world as a percussionist, singer-songwriter, worship leader, prize-winning Jewish educator and the Jewish Life Coordinator at the A.J. Heschel Middle School. 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 anthem, “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 released her popular prayer singles, “Openings” in 2020, “Torah Orah” in 2022 and “Life Is Born” in 2023. Shoshana Jedwab was included in Jewish Rock Radio’s Jewish Women Who Rock the Worship World. https://www.shoshanajedwab.com/

  • Step into the sacred dance with Kohenet Angelique (YA), a Jewyorican Teacher, Poet and Mystic in service to healing the past, stepping fully into the present, and igniting the boundless possibilities of our future.

  • Noam Sienna is a historian and artist whose work focuses on medieval and early modern Jewish culture, especially in the Islamic world. He holds a PhD in Jewish history from the University of Minnesota, and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto. He is also the author of the award-winning collection A Rainbow Thread: An Anthology of Queer Jewish Texts (Print-O-Craft Press, 2019).

  • Kohenet Bekah Starr (she/her) is a multimedia Sacred Artist exploring ancient & weaving new connections between Jewish Mysticism and the Divine Feminine.

    Bekah is the illustrator of Hamsas for the Divine Feminine, Illuminating the Moon, Wonderful Whimsical Winter, & Divining Pleasure: an oracle for SephErotic liberation with Rav Kohenet Taya Mâ Shere. Her 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.

    Bekah also contributes to the vibrant religious and spiritual life at Ursinus College where she is the Jewish Life and Interfaith Relations Coordinator. She offers Jewish students and allies opportunities to explore embodied ritual, engage in inspiring interfaith experiences and participate in a supportive community. Bekah has facilitated classes and workshops in Jewish arts and theology for over 2 decades, including at Romemu NYC, The Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute, and the Parliament of World Religions, among others.

    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.

    @bekahstarrart ~ BekahStarrArt.com

  • Rabbi Jericho Vincent is the founder and spiritual leader of Temple of the Stranger, a mystical community rooted in Jewish ancestral wisdom and open to all. They are a leading teacher of queer mystical Torah on Instagram (@thealef) and as a guest of communities around the country. The author of the acclaimed memoir Cut Me Loose (Doubleday 2014), Jericho's writing has been published in The New York Times, Hey Alma, The Rumpus, The Cut, and elsewhere. Jericho has been named to the Jewish Week's 36 Under 36 and the Forward 50 for their work. They live on Lenape land in Brooklyn with their family.

  • Kohenet Sho'eret Liviah Oreget Shirim, Priestess, Guardian, and Song Weaver, has regularly held ritual space for the Kohenet community, as well as leading, co-leading, and acting as Cyber-Gabbai. She writes and arranges liturgical music for chanting and choral settings. K’Liviah has led or co-led for Yelala, Kesher Pittsburgh, the Nechama Minyon, and numerous rituals, including weddings, funerals, and shiva services. She has catered events and taught cooking classes through her company MamaBakes, teaches college theatre, English, and humanities, 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—residing in Silver Spring, Maryland.