On 4/5, at 7pm, we're thrilled to have Rabbi Jill Hammer and Shoshana Jedwab will lead us for Kabbalat Shabbat (open to the all, in person and online). 

Rabbi Jill Hammer, PhD, is an author, teacher, midrashist, mystic, poet, essayist, and priestess.  She is committed to an earth-based and wildly mythic view of the world in which nature, ritual, and story connect us to the body of the cosmos and to ourselves.  She has been called “a Jewish bard.”Rabbi Hammer is the Director of Spiritual Education at the Academy for Jewish Religion, a pluralistic rabbinical and cantorial seminary in Yonkers, NY.  At AJR, she specializes in ancient and contemporary midrash, mysticism, ritual, and contemporary spirituality. To learn more about AJR, visit here. Rabbi Hammer is also the co-founder of the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute, a program in spiritual leadership for Jewish women.  As a leader of the Kohenet Institute, she creates and teaches earth-based, embodied ritual and study that transforms Jewish conceptions of prayer and ceremony.  To learn more about the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute, visit here. Rabbi Hammer is the author of five books: Sisters at Sinai: New Tales of Biblical Women (2001), The Jewish Book of Days: A Companion for All Season (2006), The Omer Calendar of Biblical Women (2012), The Hebrew Priestess: Ancient and New Visions of Jewish Women’s Spiritual Leadership (forthcoming 2014), The Garden of Time (2014), Undertorah (2021).

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 34 years of experience bringing sacred Jewish texts to life for a wide variety of grateful audiences.   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. http://www.shoshanajedwab.com/