RSI Fellows 2021-2022
Yoni Battat
BOSton, MA
Yoni Avi Battat is a Boston-based multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, and composer specializing in contemporary and traditional Jewish music from Eastern Europe and the Middle East. He has performed around the world with artists such as Yair Dalal, Shai Tsabari, and Nava Tehila. Yoni received his Bachelor's from Brandeis University and Master's from Boston University, studying classical viola performance and composition alongside Yiddish and Arabic language. He also studied oud and violin extensively in Jerusalem, where he was able to focus on Arabic maqam (mode systems) and piyutim (Jewish liturgical poems). He performs regularly with his Yiddish Jazz band “Two Shekel Swing.”
Joe Buchanan
Houston, tx
Texas born and southern raised, Joe Buchanan makes country music that is steeped in Torah. He grew up struggling with religion and his place in the world until one day outside of the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. and 13 years into their marriage, his wife revealed that she was Jewish. An exploration of faith led the way home for the whole family and kicked off a whirlwind of songwriting, ultimately leading to Joe's debut album, Unbroken. Since his conversion, he's toured the country leading services, concerts, and workshops. Joe’s goal is to help drive connection to what connects us all and to hold the door for other seekers. His latest release is Back From Babylon.
Josh Ehrlich
New york, NY
Josh Ehrlich is a composer, lyricist, arranger, music director and music educator in New York City. Josh has written hundreds of compositions, orchestrations and vocal arrangements for various ensembles including the hit off-broadway musical, The Imbible: Day Drinking. He music directs at Camp Ramah in the Berkshires and the Leffell High School and recently completed The Choral Torah: 5 Books in 4 Parts, a 54-song a cappella anthology reanimating ancient text with 4-part harmony.
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.