Rising Song Artist Network

Through the Rising Song Fellowship and Rising Song Jewish Music Residency, we seek to articulate and model evolving paradigms for 21st-century musical-spiritual leaders. Alumni of these programs help reinvent the future of music as a communal Jewish practice.

The Rising Song Fellowship, in 2018-2019 and in 2021-2022, convened select international groups of accomplished Jewish musical-spiritual leaders at the leading edge of 21st-century Jewish communal music. The fellowship empowered participants to take their work to the next level and envision together new paradigms for cultivating spiritual life through song.

The Rising Song Jewish Music Residency was a full-time study and collaboration opportunity for talented musicians and prayer leaders. Based in Philadelphia, this nine-month program prepared ba’alei neginah (holders of song) to cultivate grassroots musical movements that nurture Jewish spiritual life. The first RSI Residency (2019-2020) facilitated both fresh and deeply rooted expressions of Jewish prayer and musical culture that re-energize the Jewish spiritual landscape.

***Please note: We are not currently accepting applications to Rising Song Fellowship or Residency cohorts.***

Billy Jonas

Asheville, nc

Billy Jonas is Bridging Divides—using music to help heal divisions in ourselves, our families, our communities, and our world. As a performer, songsmith, educator, and multi-faith advocate, Billy has performed worldwide for three decades. His current projects include the Billy Jonas Band (funky folk music for all ages), Abraham Jam (Jewish-Muslim-Christian singer-songwriter trio with Dawud Wharnsby and David LaMotte), and BRIDGING DIVIDES 2020: Dreaming the New Decade. Originally from Chicago, Billy lives in Asheville, NC with his wife and daughter. When home, Billy is a cantorial soloist at Congregation Beth Ha Tephila.

Arielle Lekach-Rosenberg

Minneapolis, mn

Arielle Lekach-Rosenberg moved to Minneapolis in 2017 to join the rabbi team of Shir Tikvah, a vibrant, progressive synagogue in South Minneapolis.  Her work is focused on the intersection of music, prayer and activism. She was ordained by the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College and spent her final two years of rabbinical school working as a full-time rabbinic fellow at B’nai Jeshurun in New York City.  Arielle is a classically trained singer, an accordion aficionado, and a lover of piyutim. She performs with the ensemble Sefarad-Yerushalayim-New York and hosts regular piyut song circles in her living room. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband, Noam, and daughter, Hallel.

Naomi Less

brooklyn, NY

Naomi Less (she/her/hers) is a Brooklyn-based, international singer, composer, musician, educator and Founding Ritual Leader of Lab/Shul. Naomi’s heart-projects include hosting the Jewish Women Rock show on Jewish Rock Radio and co-creating/touring “TRYmester: Jewish Fertility Journeys Out Loud.” She is a beloved educator and musician at national Jewish conferences and seminaries. Naomi has trained in spiritual leadership, music, facilitation and education for the last 18 years. Her music is sung in worship communities worldwide and can be found online at Labshul.org, Spotify and YouTube. 

Eliana Light

Durham, nc

Eliana Light envisions a joyful, vibrant, heart-centered Judaism that speaks to the soul and moves the spirit, reminding us that we are One. She crafts ritual, writes music, trains educators, and consults with communities to discover the “why” of their prayer life, allowing them to offer more meaningful experiences to more people, and is based in Durham, NC.

Zach Mayer

boston, ma

With over 11 million hits on YouTube for his “Subway Sax Battle,” Zach Mayer has performed with John Zorn, Frank London, Michael Alpert, Joey Weisenberg, and Bobby McFerrin. He performs internationally with Zion80, a 10-piece Jewish Afrobeat band inspired by the music of Shlomo Carlebach, and his folk sextet, Night Tree, has toured internationally and has released two albums produced by Seamus Egan of SOLAS. He has been on the faculty at the Brandeis Institute of Music and Art, Laguardia Arts High School in Manhattan, and teaches at the KlezKanada Jewish music festival each summer. Mayer is the musical director of Kahal B’raira, a humanistic Jewish congregation in Cambridge. He received his Masters of Music from the New England Conservatory in Boston. He released his first album of original Jewish melodies, Modeh Ani in 2019, and sings his music with communities around the country.

Riv Shapiro

Oakland, CA

Riv Shapiro is a queer multi-modal artist, educator and ritual leader living in Ohlone territory (Oakland, CA). As an ordained Kohenet, Riv is passionate about making Jewish wisdom accessible, inclusive, liberatory and engaging. They’ve served as a ritual and song leader with the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute, Jewish Studio Project, Ohel Moed, Eden Village West, Wilderness Torah and more. Their feminist drash on Avinu Malkeinu, “Slow Down,” has become part of High Holiday liturgy in communities around the world. Riv’s current projects include a collection of vocal looping compositions, Yiddish lullabies for an era of climate chaos, and “fragments: multi-media ancestral storytelling.”  

Jessi Roemer

philadelphia, pa

Hazzan Jessi Roemer is a composer and performer of Jewish music, writer, prayer-leader, and facilitator of Jewish and interfaith communal singing. Her compositions bring European, Middle Eastern, North and South American musical traditions into conversation with Jewish text. Born in New York City, raised in Washington, D.C., and having spent a decade of her adult life in Jerusalem, Jessi's musical projects range from the rhythmic, Middle Eastern-influenced melodies of her ensemble EZUZ, to re-interpretations of Yiddish, Ladino, and Western classical pieces, to the gospel-influenced, spiritual melodies of her latest project PRAISE. Ordained by ALEPH: The Alliance for Jewish Renewal, Jessi serves as the Hazzan of Society Hill Synagogue in Philadelphia, PA.

Daphna Rosenberg

Pardes Chana-Karkur, israel

Daphna Rosenberg is a singer, guitarist and a main prayer leader at Nava Tehila, the Jewish Renewal community in Jerusalem for the past 15 years. She composes original music to prayers and poetry and specializes in musically leading life cycle ceremonies. Daphna has been traveling extensively to share, present and teach the Nava Tehila t’filla b’tzibur musical methods around the Jewish world. Her music is known around the world and serves in the area of spiritual care for the ill and dying, and in creating heart-to-heart connections between people from different cultures and traditions. She is currently involved in musically and spiritually leading and organizing Jewish meditation retreats with Or Halev in Israel.

Anthony Russell

acton, ma

Anthony Russell is a vocalist, composer and arranger specializing in music in the Yiddish language. This work has brought him to Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston, Miami, New York, Toronto, Montreal, London, Berlin, Copenhagen, Warsaw, Krakòw, Tel Aviv, Symphony Space in New York City and the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. Anthony's work with klezmer trio Veretski Pass resulted in Convergence, an EP combining a century of African American and Ashkenazi Jewish music. He now writes and performs in a Yiddish songwriting duo, Tsvey Brider, with SF Bay Area accordionist and keyboardist Dmitri Gaskin. Anthony lives in Massachusetts with his husband, Rabbi Michael Rothbaum.

Basya Schechter

new york, ny

Basya Schechter is best known for her group, Pharaoh's Daughter, a 7 piece world music ensemble that travels effortlessly through continents, key signatures, and languages with a genre-bending sound.   She is also the Hazzan and musical director of Romemu, a fast growing, progressive, spiritually adventurous community on New York's Upper West Side, as well as the the spiritual leader of the Romemu Brooklyn Satellite Community. In  the summer, Basya is a the Cantor for Fire Island Synagogue, a smaller, flip flop wearing community co-led with banjo playing Rabbi, writer and scholar, Shaul Magid. Basya's most recent creative work is with Darshan, a musical midrash project in collaboration with esoteric indie rapper/poet Eden Pearlstein (aka ePRHYME). In 2017 Darshan released Raza, a radical re-imagining of the traditional prayers and mystical poetry recited on Friday night to welcome the Sabbath Bride, they are currently working on their second collaboration, "Songs from the Void: A Musical Journey into the Heart of Rebbe Nachman, the cornerstones of the contemporary Neo-Hasidic renaissance.

Batya Levine

Philadelphia, PA

Batya Levine is a Jewish educator, ritual leader, facilitator, and musician. She leads spirited prayer and song in a variety of communities, including Isabella Freedman, Linke Fligl, SVARA, and Kavod Boston. She is a co-founder and organizer of Let My People Sing!, a national gathering which brings together a diversity of Jewish cultural and ethnic music for the sake of learning, sharing and creating liberatory singing space. Batya writes original music and her songs have traveled across prayer spaces and street protests, connecting people to themselves, each other, and spirit. Coming from a lineage of Jewish musicians, she has learned to use music as a powerful tool for healing and transformation. Batya is dedicated to carrying this practice forward, building resilience and interconnection on individual and communal levels. Batya’s debut album, Karov, was released on Rising Song Records in 2020.

Gedalia Penner

Philadelphia, pa

Gedalia Penner is an experiential music educator, vocalist, composer and arranger from New York City. He received his BA in vocal composition from Yeshiva University. During his time there, he sang with his collegiate group, Y-Studs A Cappella. Since graduating, he has served as musical director of the now professional group, and continues to inspire communities with concerts and Shabbat engagement programs around the world with the Y-Studs and various other groups. He hopes to bring a “schmaltz” — a raw spiritual energy that is deeply authentic, personal and easily accessible — to more and more communities across the globe.

Sam Tygiel

San Francisco, CA

Sam Tygiel is a musician, prayer leader, myth-weaver and aspiring rabbi who draws on the rich narrative and musical traditions of Judaism to create emotional openings for people to discover connection, curiosity and healing. Jewish myth becomes real through communal prayer and Sam uses nigunim, nusach and mythological imagery to animate the rich music drama that underlies Jewish liturgy. His teaching and storytelling employs unusual and forgotten Jewish narratives to illuminate the treasure trove of Jewish mythology and expand notions of what is normative, permissible, and possible within contemporary Judaism. Through stories and music, Sam uplifts communities and individuals while encouraging them to confront the parts of Judaism and the parts of themselves that feel wild, messy and scary. By not turning away from discomfort and confusion, Sam believes communities and individuals can find new, stronger ways to connect with Judaism and with each other. 

Ariel Root Wolpe

Atlanta, GA

Rabbi Ariel Root Wolpe is a mother, musician, and spiritual educator. She currently resides in Atlanta, GA, where she founded and directs Ma’alot, a growing community of artsy, outdoorsy Jewish folk in Atlanta. Originally from Philadelphia, Ariel grew up in an observant household where hiking was a typical after-shul activity and blessings were sung harmony. Ariel began performing Jewish music during a gap year in Israel, and facilitating interfaith music and programming through her undergraduate years at Emory University. In the San Francisco Bay Area Ariel met her husband Jon in a band and explored ritual innovation in Jewish Renewal circles and earth-based education through Wilderness Torah. While at Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies, Ariel focused on the process of t’shuvah, hasidic commentaries, and feminist interpretations of Jewish history and ritual. Her daughter Oriah’s birth was the impetus for a study of Jewish texts and rituals to usher in motherhood. Her album Ruach Neshama was released by Rising Song Records in 2021.

Gayanne Geurin

Atlanta, GA

Gayanne Geurin serves as music director and lay cantor at Atlanta’s Congregation Bet Haverim, directing a uniquely relevant program that is rich in innovation, collaboration, and ruach. She works relationally with communities as an organizer of creative and spiritual endeavors. A former psychotherapist who is now a vocal coach, Gayanne offers a multidimensional approach for singers. She performs with Bet Haverim’s celebrated chorus and can be heard on their album Beyond the Veil: Chant. 

Rabbi Yosef Goldman

Philadelphia, PA

Yosef Goldman is a spiritual artist, activist, and community builder. Raised Orthodox in New York City in a mixed Ashkenazi and Mizrahi home, Yosef has taught and facilitated sacred prayer space in communities throughout the Jewish denominational spectrum. He performs as a vocalist with Joey Weisenberg and the Hadar Ensemble and is creative advisor to the Rising Song Institute. He is a founding member of the Epichorus, a Middle Eastern Jewish music ensemble, and of the Shir Singing Circle, a Jewish music collective in Philadelphia. Yosef serves as co-rabbi of Shaare Torah in Gaithersburg, MD.

Aly Halpert

Millerton, NY

Aly Halpert is a queer, Jewish, young adult musician based in Millerton, NY. A singer, pianist, and guitar player, Aly writes songs for community, collective liberation, and visioning different worlds. She believes deeply in the power of music both to awaken us to the loss and hope we carry, and to shift what we perceive as possible. Over the last five years, Aly has been immersed in Jewish song communities and has had the privilege to co-lead music at Eden Village Camp. Whether the songs she writes or leads are serious or seriously goofy, her awe at the importance of this work to mark time, heal grief, connect people, and bring more life only grows.

Anat Hochberg

New York, NY

Anat Halevy Hochberg grew up in the Boston area with family roots in Israel, Yemen, Poland, and Hungary. A pianist and singer, she went on to study music education and piano performance at UMass–Amherst. Anat has taught music in high school and elementary school settings and has also been a year fellow at Yeshivat Hadar. She has served as the Jewish life and ritual team leader at the Moishe Kavod House Boston and as music director at Eden Village Camp. Anat is a member of the Hadar Ensemble and recently appeared on and co-produced the albums Elul: Songs for Turning and Tishrei: The End is the Beginning.

Batya Levine

Philadelphia, pa

Batya Levine is a Jewish musician, ritual leader, facilitator, and educator. She leads spirited prayer and song in a variety of communities, including Isabella Freedman, Linke Fligl, SVARA and The New Synagogue Project. She is a co-founder and organizer of Let My People Sing!, a national gathering that brings together a diversity of Jewish cultural and ethnic music for the sake of learning, sharing and creating liberatory singing space. Batya writes original music and her songs have made their way to prayer spaces, living rooms and street protests across the Jewish diaspora. Coming from a lineage of Jewish musicians, she has learned to use music as a tool for healing and connection and is dedicated to carrying that practice forward. Batya is currently a Rising Song Resident, spending this year deepening her craft, and has just finished recording her first album of original music!

Jessie Reagen Mann

Philadelphia, PA

Cellist Jessie Reagen Mann is involved in a variety of musical projects. Jessie is part of the Indian/Jewish Om Shalom Trio, has composed two works for Carolyn Dorfman Dance, and wrote a left-hand cello technique book 60 Seconds to Excellence, now published by Ovation Press. She is often found performing in NYC, Philadelphia, and around the country as a prayer musician in traditional and mindfulness Jewish settings as well as with a variety of singer-songwriters. Jessie has recorded for may labels and has performed at the White House, Kennedy Center, Radio City, Live 8 and on TV with Adele, Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Billy Joel, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Savion Glover and many others. Jessie is thrilled to join the Lullaby Project (through Carnegie Hall and Live Connections) working with new mothers to compose a lullaby for their child. She is also currently working on a solo project for cello and voice inspired by nigunim and baby's first syllables. 

Rabbi Miriam Margles

Toronto, Canada

Miriam Margles is an artist, educator, and activist and has served as the rabbi of the Danforth Jewish Circle in Toronto since 2010. She is a graduate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, an alumna of the Wexner Graduate Fellowship, and has been a Jerusalem Fellow at the Mandel Leadership Institute. Miriam earned a master’s degree in theological studies from Harvard Divinity School and a BFA in creative writing from York University in Toronto.

Rabbi Jessica Kate Meyer

San Francisco, CA

Jessica Kate Meyer serves as a rabbi at the Kitchen in San Francisco. She strives to build community through prayerful music, and music through prayerful community. Jessica has studied and performed sacred (and profane) Jewish music with rabbis, paytanim, and klezmorim in Jerusalem and in the United States. In her previous life, Jessica appeared in many film, theater, and television projects in Europe and the United States, most notably in a principal role in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist.

Chava Mirel

Seattle, WA

Chava Mirel is a singer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist who combines rich, luxurious vocals with deep pocket rhythms to bring a new approach to Jewish music. With themes of gratitude, self-acceptance, balance, and responsibility for one other, Chava’s songs bring comfort and uplift the spirit. Chava’s songs are featured on Together as One: New Songs of Social Justice (an album benefiting the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism), in Jewish Rock Radio’s “Gift of Music” initiative, and in Behrman House’s “Hebrew in Harmony” curriculum. In early 2019, Chava released Into the Light, a dreamy and deeply personal reinterpretation of the Great American Songbook. Her latest album, Source of Love, is a soulful and melodic collection of original and liturgical songs written with universal themes of hope, caring, connection, inclusion, and women’s and environmental issues.

Cantor George Mordecai

Sydney, australia

Born in Sydney, Australia, to Iraqi and Indian Jewish immigrants, George Mordecai was immersed in the musical liturgical traditions of his family from an early age and weaves this rich cultural heritage into his work. He was invested as a cantor by JTS in 2000 and has sung with internationally renowned music ensembles. George has worked as a cantor in Philadelphia; Miami; Stamford, CT; and White Plains, NY. He recently returned to his native Sydney to become the cantor of Emanuel Synagogue. Co-creator of the performance project Shalom/Pax, George continues to pursue devotional music that speaks to the sacred interconnectedness of all humanity.

Rabbi Bronwen Mullin

New York, NY

Rabbi Bronwen Mullin is the rabbi of Congregation B’nai Jacob in Jersey City, NJ. She has developed numerous artist programs and residencies at both institutions with the support of a Myers Grant and a JTS Seeds of Innovation Grant. She is a musical theater composer whose newest project, Bat Yiftach: A Tragic Punk Opera, will premiere in October 2018.

Chana Raskin

Israel

Chana Raskin’s song-filled Chasidic upbringing infuses her with tefila (prayer) and nigun (Jewish melody), and carries her in each moment of work and rest. Her appreciation for quiet spaces that invite deep listening, receiving, and connecting in with our simple selves, with Higher, and with our communities, has moved her to lead tefila spaces, as well as teach and perform nigunim in and around New York, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv. Still on a journey of her own self-healing from injury and trauma, Chana strives to hold a space with others recovering from illness or traumatic injury, through the healing powers of quiet, laughter, humming, singing, and movement. Chana released her debut album, Kapelya by RAZA רזא, on Rising Song Records in 2023.

Rabbi Dorothy Richman

Albany, CA

Rabbi Dorothy Richman serves as the rabbi of Makor Or: Jewish Meditation Center. Her album of original songs, Something of Mine, is largely based on texts from the Jewish tradition and is available on Bandcamp. SongCycle, her year-long project of posting an original song video each week of the Jewish spiritual calendar, can be found here on YouTube.

Rabbi Micah Shapiro

Philadelphia, PA

Micah Shapiro was ordained from Hebrew College in 2017 and serves as a rabbi at Penn Hillel. A songwriter, composer and band leader, he trained with Nava Tehila in Jerusalem and is the founder of Nariya – The Shabbat Sing Out and Yetzira – The Jewish Songwriters Collective. Prior to rabbinical school, Micah toured and recorded as a drummer, vocalist and arranger in the Montreal based acoustic rock group Throwback and the Brooklyn based music comedy duo The Young Dads. His Kabbalat Shabbat album, Ta’ir Eretz – Light Up The Earth, was released in April 2019.

Taya Shere

El Cerrito, CA

Taya Mâ Shere co-founded and co-directs Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute. She is co-author of The Hebrew Priestess: Ancient and New Paths of Jewish Women’s Spiritual Leadership and Siddur HaKohanot: A Hebrew Priestess Prayerbook. Taya Mâ’s chant albums Wild Earth Shebrew, Halleluyah All Night, Torah Tantrika, and This Bliss have been heralded as “cutting-edge mystic medicine music." She teaches at the Starr King School for the Ministry and is a practitioner of somatic experiencing and ancestral lineage healing.