Teachers at the Well

Rabbi David A. Ingber is Founding Rabbi at Romemu. A disciple of Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, famed Founder of the Jewish Renewal movement, he was ordained by Reb Zalman in 2004. He is also the Senior Director of Jewish Life and the Bronfman Center at 92NY. Rabbi Ingber serves on faculty for the Wexner Heritage Program, The Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and Israel, and other institutions.

Rabbi Dianne Cohler-Esses is a Rabbi at Romemu as well as the Director of Lifelong Learning at Romemu. She was the first woman from the Syrian Jewish community to be ordained as a Rabbi. She graduated from the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1995, where she was awarded several fellowships and a prize for academic excellence. Before coming to Romemu, she served as Co-Director of the Bronfman Youth Fellowship, Scholar in Residence at UJA Federation, and Senior Educator at The Curriculum Initiative. In 2007 she was named one of fifty top rabbis by the Washington Post online. In 2019, she was inducted into the Brooklyn Jewish Hall of Fame. She and her husband, Larry, an investigative journalist, have three children and live on the Upper West Side of New York City, a stone’s throw from Romemu!

Wendy Miles, a doctor by trade, has always loved studying and speaking Hebrew. She is a lifelong student of Torah and regularly chants Torah and Haftorah in synagogue. She has taught Hebrew privately to many and is excited to have the opportunity of teaching Hebrew at Romemu, offering the keys to the Jewish heritage to a wider circle of people!

Ronnie Scharfman, Ph.D. is Professor Emerita of French at Purchase College, SUNY.  Since retiring, she has devoted herself to deepening her connection to Judaism and to writing poetry and midrash with Romemu’s Sharon Dolin and Alicia Ostriker.  She has studied at Drisha, Hadar, Elat Chayyim, Streicker Center, Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, and, of course, Romemu, where she was in the first adult B Mitzvah cohort. Ronnie has led Romemu’s  Israeli Literature book group  with Rhonna Rogol for the past seven years, and is currently co-chair of the Lifelong Learning Committee with Robin Aronson

Alina Bloomgarden has studied, practiced and taught astrology for more than 40 years while her career was in the performing arts, currently bringing music education and hope to those impacted by incarceration. She’s very excited to be bridging astrology with Jewish learning. This ancient philosophical practice aligns with the conviction that the human being, God and the universe are in some way a unity. Seeing the continual movement of the planets in the context of “In God’s time,” and the day and time of our birth in mathematical harmony with our life path, her intention is to share astrological tools as a way to deepen and enrich our self-knowledge and spiritual journey.

Rabbi Lindsey Healey-Pollack is an educator, poet, and spiritual guide who fosters deep connection and co-creation with our authentic selves and the Source of Being. Through her teaching, ritual facilitation, and creative work, Rabbi Lindsey midwifes the Torah that emerges from within, to nourish our inner ecosystems and cultivate connections between mind, body, heart, and spirit. Rabbi Lindsey has taught Intro to Judaism courses in at the United Synagogue of Hoboken and at Town and Village synagogue, where she currently serves as the Program Coordinator for the Center for Conversion to Judaism. She previously served as spiritual leader of Congregation Kol HaNeshamah in Englewood, New Jersey. Rabbi Lindsey loves exploring creativity as an expression of spirituality. She enjoys diverse ways of making art and ritual objects, including writing, watercolor, fabric arts, ceramics, and jewelry. Lindsey lives in New Jersey with her children, where she can frequently be found in her backyard hammock and composting the remnants of garden adventures that didn’t quite go as planned.

A public historian and professor of American Jewish studies, David Kaufman has degrees from Columbia College, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and Brandeis University. Dr. Kaufman has authored two books, “Shul with a Pool” (1999) and “Jewhooing the Sixties’ (2012), the first a comprehensive history of early 20th century Jewish communal life and the second a study of American Jewish celebrity in the early 1960s. After spending a decade on the faculty of the Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles, he currently lives on the Upper West Side of New York City where he is building a new non-profit organization called ‘NEW YORK JEW: Center for New York Jewish History, Culture, and Community’.

Rabbi Marcelle Hohl was ordained a Conservative Rabbi by the Jewish Theological Seminary in May ’21. She also holds a Master’s Degree in Jewish Studies from JTS Kekst Graduate School. Rabbi Marcelle is originally from Sao Paulo, Brazil. Besides Brazil, she has lived in Switzerland and Germany. Due to her diverse background and rich life experiences, she is fluent in six languages.

Here is what she has to say about herself: “I am a multifaceted rabbi who is equally passionate about Jewish ritual, music and text study. I am a people person who thrives when creating Jewish communities where everyone can feel included and seen, independently of age and background. I strive to weave Jewish tradition into Jewish reality, so that Jews can establish a meaningful connection with it throughout their lives.”

Michael Gottsegen (Ph.D., 1989) was trained as a political theorist at Columbia University and in Religious Studies at Harvard, and, since the early 1990s, has taught at Brandeis, Brown, St. Olaf, and Columbia, where he regularly teaches Contemporary Civilization, a year-long seminar in the classics of Western ethical, social and political thought. He was also a Teaching Fellow at CLAL in NYC from 1994-2006. A book based on his Columbia thesis, “The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt,” was published in 1994. Pursuing a primary research interest at the nexus between contemporary Jewish and Christian theology, religious ethics, and political theory, he is presently completing a manuscript on the tension between ethics and politics in the thought of the French Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas. 

Betsy is a passionate and dedicated professor, producer, performer and presenter for cultural, creative, and performing arts and educational initiatives. I have developed and innovated performing arts programs that connect community and social justice and creativity. I have designed and developed inter-racial and cross-cultural and bi-lingual theaters as well as theaters which connected vision impaired and sighted, hearing impaired, profoundly deaf and hearing performing arts practitioners both nationally and internationally.