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!

Andrea is a Rabbinic and Cantorial Student at the pluralistic seminary The Academy for Jewish Religion in Yonkers, New York. She is the Cantorial Soloist at Congregation Beth Israel in Bellingham, WA. She has taught all ages in synagogues for over twenty years, and provided spiritual inspiration through her music and prayer leadership for ten. Andrea feels drawn to aspects of many Jewish denominations, and has worked for Conservative, Reform, and Renewal synagogues. She is a singer/songwriter and Maggidah, a Jewish storyteller, and is currently working on her first album. This musical modern midrash lifts up the voices of women in the Torah. This past year Andrea studied at Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, where she was selected as an Arts Fellow. She will be traveling to Romemu each month to participate in person, and will be teaching remotely in the weeks in between. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband Josh and their two sons.

Chris joined Romemu a little over a year ago when he moved here from Texas. He is a long time Jewish educator and currently serves as the head of school at Solomon Schecter day school. You can find Chris chanting Torah at Romemu almost every Shabbat.

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.

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.

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

My path shall be a path of love for all peoples
My heart shall be a dwelling for All Life
Beauty upon Beauty upon Beauty
Light upon Light upon Light
My life is devoted to the Third Temple:
A path of softening into kindness
A healing into God.

Nili is a midwife for the soul’s journey. She has a healing practice, is a teacher, companions 2 leggeds and 4 leggeds into the next world at the end of life, she is a painter, a weaver, a sacred object maker, a handspinner of wool and life, a visionary, a grief tender and lover of all things holy. She loves the natural world and is famous for her Raw Vegan White Chocolate Cherry Cashew Cheesecake.