Spring 2021 / 5781 Cohort

Kohenet Shoshana Brown

Kohenet Shoshana A Brown, LMSW (they/she) is a school social worker and organizes to transform the prison system as well as organizing with Jews of Color. She practices transformative justice in New York City public schools, and is also an adjunct professor at Silberman School of Social Work teaching the class she once advocated and organized students to create. As a healer, educator, and organizer, Shoshana has dedicated herself to freeing her people of oppression through healing circles, leading in Jewish prayer and ceremony, popular education workshops, social work, and facilitating social justice trainings and conferences.

Kimmy Dueñas

Kimberly Dueñas (she/her/ella) is a California native with a global spirit, tracing her roots to rural El Salvador as well as Europe. A seasoned international Jewish educator, Kimberly is passionate about providing meaningful spaces for people to develop deeper connections to their own identities and the world around them. Her enthusiasm for community building, education, and storytelling gave rise to her co-founding Jewtina y Co., a community on a mission to celebrate and elevate the Latin-Jewish community. At the heart of her work as the Community Manager, she integrates her background as a Certified Mindfulness and Wellbeing strategist and yoga teacher to practice wellness as a restorative force of healing in our communities and beyond.

Erica Goldman

Erica Goldman (she/her) has been an engineering linguist, a high school English teacher, an Israel exchange program coordinator, and an Israeli dance teacher. A two-time Brandeis University graduate, she holds an MBA and a Masters in Jewish Professional Leadership and is a grateful Wexner Fellow, class 28, and Ruskay Fellow, cohort 2. Erica is an Educator for the Cornerstone Fellowship, a program of the Foundation for Jewish Camp, and in May 2015, she launched Ma’agal, an initiative to improve Israeli dance education at schools and camps across the nation. Erica is the Director of Program and Operations for JPRO Network and is delighted to help support all those who work for the Jewish community in North America. Having recently driven cross-country in a van with two other adults, a toddler, and a cat, she hopes never to be in a motor vehicle again. Ever.

Maor Greene

Maor Greene (they/them) is rabbinical student and doctoral candidate in Hebrew Bible at Jewish Theological Seminary. They have been exploring contemplative spiritual practices since childhood and have taught classes in Judaism, Bible, spirituality, and spiritual practices at JTS, Union Theological Seminary, and a variety of congregational and Jewish communal settings. They are a certified Jewish spiritual director, accompanying others one on one on their spiritual journeys. Maor is also a musician, singing and playing guitar, writing original music, and leading communal song and prayer. They currently serve as the Rabbinical Intern at Park Slope Jewish Center in Brooklyn as well as the Ritual and Music Rabbinic Intern at Dayenu: A Jewish Call to Climate Action. They enjoy contemplative walks in nature, biking, yoga and other movement-based meditation practices, and spending time with dear friends. They are based in Durham, North Carolina.

Kohenet Keshira haLev Fife

Kohenet Keshira haLev Fife (she/they) sprinkles sparkles, disrupts expectations, and offers blessings wherever she goes. She serves as Oreget Kehilah (Executive Director) of the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute, founder/co-leader of Kesher Pittsburgh, Program Director of the ALEPH Kesher Fellowship, Lead Facilitator for Keshet’s LGBTQ+ Jewish Youth of Color programming and member of the leadership team of the JOC Mishpachah Project. Additionally, she delights in serving as a davennatrix (shlichat tzibbur), life spiral ceremony/ritual creatrix, liturgist, songstress, teacher and public speaker. 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 Kohenet smicha in 2017 and earned her BS 2000 and MS 2001 at Carnegie Mellon University. Dual-citizens of the USA and Australia and avid travelers, she and her beloved are currently leaning into stillness and sheltering-in-peace on Osage and Haudenosaunee land also called Pittsburgh, PA.

Rabbi Myriam Klotz

Rabbi Myriam Klotz (she/they) is a Senior Program Director for Somatics and Justice at the Institute for Jewish Spirituality and founding director of the Spirituality Initiative at HUC-JIR, New York, NY. Myriam developed Torat HaGuf, Torah of the Body yoga and healing practices in 1991 and has created workshops, teacher trainings and mentoring programs for the past three decades. Klotz is also a Spiritual Director and supervisor with a current focus on LGBTQ+ Jewish spiritual direction that incorporates somatic awareness and practice as integral to the discernment process. She participates in the Dimensions Educational JOC-Allies Leadership Team and Cohort, and lives near Philadelphia, PA with her spouse Rabbi Margot Stein, their son Raffi and two dogs.

Adina Polen

Adina Polen (she/her) is the Founder and Executive Director of Atiq: Jewish Maker Institute, an applied arts yeshiva based in Berkeley, CA. After earning her BA in Music from Barnard College, Adina studied design at the Bezalel Academy and Hadassah College, and Jewish texts at Midreshet Lindenbaum, at the Pardes Institute and at the Yakar Center for Creativity and Tradition—all in Jerusalem. Along with her work at Atiq, Adina has channeled her love of integrating Torah and arts into her work as a Maker Educator at the Brandeis Collegiate Institute, a Counselor/Educator on the Nesiya Institute, and as a Maker Specialist for Edah Berkeley. Adina has been steeped in the do-it-yourself ethos of the Havurah movement, Jewish Catalog style creativity, and the teachings of Hasidut from her earliest days. She believes that multi-sensory creative opportunities for meaning making sustain us as individuals, and strengthen our communities.

Cara Michelle Silverberg

Cara Michelle Silverberg (M.A., she/her) is a education consultant, camp director, writer, mover, embodiment practitioner, and herbalist living in Nipmuc and Abenaki homelands (also called Western Massachusetts). She is passionate about fostering community experiences that help people to explore and express themselves, their relationships with place, and their relationships with each other. Dedicated to trauma-informed experiential learning and wholistic leadership, Cara aims to co-create a more just, caring, courageous, and playful world. She designs and facilitates curricula for summer camps, environmental/agricultural educational initiatives, land healing projects, and leadership development programs. She is particularly interested in the role of embodied leadership and trauma healing in peacebuilding processes, and how experiences of indigeneity, diaspora, and colonization influence people’s relationships to place and community. Cara works in both Jewish and secular communities, with both youth and adults. You can check out some of her writing at http://www.onthefringesofplace.com.

Jeremy Tibbetts

Jeremy Tibbetts (he/him) studied Public Health at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and is now the coordinator at Yavneh On Campus, where he works with students on over 40 college campuses to build local Jewish communities and establish a campus-wide Jewish student movement. Jeremy is also the director of Rav DovBer Pinson’s Iyyun Kollel. His practice and studies include Abulafian meditation, rhythmic dance and ecstatic song in embodied prayer, and prophetic Judeo-Sufi movement & meditation. Jeremy lives with his wife Emily and their dog Rosie in Crown Heights where he loves to study mysticism and write. He is always in the mood for a seltzer.

Arielle Tonkin

Arielle Tonkin (they/she) is a queer mixed Moroccan and Ashkenazi Jewish artist, educator, and spiritual director based living on Ohlone land in the SF Bay Area. Arielle works to dismantle white supremacy through arts & culture work and Jewish and interfaith education work. Arielle weaves relationships, and materializes conversations: the Muslim-Jewish Arts Fellowship, Arts Jam for Social Change, Tzedek Lab, SVARA, and Atiq: Jewish Maker Institute are among her networks of accountability, collective power, creative collaboration and care. Arielle’s artwork and social practice presences, queers, and formalizes the belief that healing through relationship can shift the fabric of social space and eventually, one braided thread at a time, shift the structure of the physical world.