Our Leadership team
Co-Founder & Executive Director
Eleyna Fugman (she/her)
is a consummate Jewish community builder, living on Chinook land in Portland, OR.
Her work revolves around building and nurturing Jewish communities that are led and centered by Jews from populations that have been historically marginalized; women, queer and trans Jews, Jews of color and Jews not raised in Jewish communities. In 2017, Fugman co-founded the alternative grassroots Jewish community The Alberta Shul and in 2018 went on to co-found the leadership development organization TischPDX, whose mission is to “Bolster the Leadership of Young and Marginalized Jews in Portland, OR.”
Born and raised outside of Jewish community in rural northern California, Eleyna’s dedication to this work is based on her own experiences of seeking to find Jewish community in her 20’s as a young queer Jewish woman. She was eventually welcomed into Jewish community in the early 1990’s by other young adult and queer lay-led Shabbat minyanim in San Francisco.
After that, it took more than 15 years until she could see herself as a leader in the Jewish community. Since then, she has been working to support other young lay leaders, volunteers and service leaders who create alternative Jewish portals for their peers to enter into Jewish community.
Eleyna is also the co-founder of SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice) PDX and has served on the boards of OPAL Environmental Justice, The Institute for Judaic Studies and The Alberta Shul.
She has a BA from Brown University and has completed two years of Jewish Studies coursework and pre-rabbinic education at Portland State University, Aleph, Hadar, Drisha, Jewish Theological Seminary and Reconstructionist Rabbinical College.
She loves hosting Shabbat meals, singing Jewish music and mushroom hunting in Oregon’s temperate rainforests.
Our Board
Blair Denniberg (she/her)
Board Co-Chair
Blair Denniberg (she/her) is an alumnus of TischPDX’s second cohort. She first joined the TischPDX board as secretary in 2021 and now serves as board co-chair. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Gender Studies from the University of South Florida and a Master of Nonprofit Management degree from Florida Atlantic University. Blair started her career as an executive administrator at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) where she found a strong sense of purpose by supporting science education, equality, and anti-racism. She currently serves as the executive assistant to the CEO at Cascadia Health, one of the Pacific Northwest’s largest community based mental health organizations. Outside of work, Blair is passionate about bringing Portland’s queer Jewish together through Shabbat dinners and queer mikvah gatherings. She is a member of Congregation Shir Tikvah and also serves as a volunteer contemporary mikvah guide at our local community mikvah, Rachel’s Well. In addition to her work in the queer Jewish community, Blair also serves as a member of the Five Oaks Museum Board. She lives in Southeast Portland with her wife Rebecca, and cats, Shmuly and Konami.
Aviva McClure (she/her/they/them)
Board Co-Chair
Aviva is an educator, artist, and mama who seeks to connect with change-makers in the Portland Jewish community for cultural collaboration. Avi brings enthusiasm and strategy to Jewish & radical spaces, often through facilitated listening sessions, restoration, retreats, and long-term planning. In addition to working in schools and the arts, Aviva has also facilitated international and wilderness experiences for youth and adults. Their involvement in TischPDX was inspired by the leadership of previous cohorts, engaging events, and community partnerships that TischPDX continues to grow.
Rachel Stern (she/her)
Treasurer
Rachel began organizing and educating in the Jewish community as a teenager, and has been teaching yoga professionally since 2006. She loves weaving Jewish stories, themes, and values into her yoga teaching, which creates a fully embodied practice of Judaism. Rachel loves to hold space for students, clients, and community members of all ages to experience life fully through their physical, spiritual, emotional, and energetic bodies. She recently expanded her offerings with the addition of life coaching and puberty education. Through these practices we discover that we are lovable and worthy of goodness despite our perceived flaws, and that when we are connected to source and sacred community, we have greater access our personal power. She believes that this work is most effective when wrapped in self-compassion, empathy, levity, and curiosity. While participating in the first cohort of TischPDX, Rachel created the Portland Jewish Yoga Collective, which continues to support Jewish yoga offerings. She is proud to serve as the Treasurer of TischPDX, and is even more proud of the ways TischPDX continues to serve the Portland Jewish community. Check out her offerings at heartshapedyoga.com.
Devra Polack (she/they)
Board Member
Devra is an aging queer Jewish femme who has lived and worked in North Portland since 2007. For an introvert, she loves a klatch and feels passionate about connecting with people across multiple communities.
For over 20 years, she has run a small tech consulting and development agency, Spinster Design, where she has also provided mentorship and pro bono services to several small businesses and organizations. During her six years on the Board of Directors of NOLOSE, a queer, intersectional radical fat activist network, she helped found their “Small Projects Across the Land” program to provide seed funding for regional programming. She currently serves as a moderator for the growing PDX Queer Jews Facebook community of 700+ local members.
Devra enjoys her time away from screens growing and sharing food, herding chickens and cats, chasing a ball or reveling in nature, and doing ridiculous things for a laugh. She is ever learning from the growing body of work of the disability justice community, which is forging collaborative mutual aid networks and modeling new and creative pathways with other activist communities.
Dorit Price-Levine (she/her)
Board Member
Dorit Price-Levine is a professional facilitator, mediator, and licensed attorney. Incorporating her expertise in Transformative Mediation and Non-Violent Communication, Dorit has led dialogue across conflict workshops for a decade and a half at over a hundred institutions. These include universities, non-profit and for-profit workplaces, houses of worship, and local government.
Dorit supports groups to skillfully engage across differences, convenes public meetings that shape state and federal policy, and designs and facilitates multi-stakeholder decision-making processes.
Formerly a Senior Associate at the Consensus Building Institute and Deputy Director of Resetting the Table, Dorit also spent years living in Israel and Palestine working in peacebuilding and human rights. She has lived elsewhere in the Middle East, including Egypt and Lebanon. Dorit has working knowledge of Hebrew, Spanish, and Arabic. She holds a JD from the UC Berkeley School of Law and a B.A. in Political Science and Near Eastern Studies from the University of Pennsylvania.
Thomas Garnett Grubb (they/he)
Board Member
Thomás is a mental health therapist and amateur artist with a background in healthcare, nonprofits, and community organizing. He is excited to support community-building with other Jews from diverse backgrounds. Thomás has been a member of Conservative, Reform, and Renewal congregations but finds he is most at home observing holidays and cycles with friends. He is especially passionate about learning and maintaining non-dominant Jewish histories through art, cuisine, and language preservation. Thomás lives in North Portland with his partner, dog, and assorted plants.
Rabbi Ariel Stone (she/they)
Board Member
has been the spiritual leader of Congregation Shir Tikvah for almost two decades. A caring and vibrant leader, she is an exceptionally knowledgeable teacher of Torah and a recognized scholar of Jewish mysticism.
A native of Orlando Florida, Rabbi Stone studied at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Jerusalem and New York (1986-1991). While there she was a CLAL Rabbinical Fellow, taught first year Hebrew, and helped to establish the HUC-JIR student-run soup kitchen. After two years at Temple Beth Israel in Miami Florida, in 1993 she accepted the invitation of the World Union for Progressive Judaism to teach and organize in Ukraine. She guided Congregation HaTikvah of Kiev and assisted in the establishment of progressive congregations throughout Ukraine that continue to flourish today. Between1996-2001, she was associate rabbi at Congregation Beth Israel in Portland. In 2001 she was awarded a two-year fellowship at the Mandel School for Educational and Social Leadership.
From 2003 to the present, she has served as the independent Portland east side Congregation Shir Tikvah’s Rabbi. She found the Reform movement to no longer be a good fit, and considers herself post-denominational. In 2010, she completed her doctorate at the (non-denominational) Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies under the direction of Dr. Byron Sherwin.
Rabbi Stone served as Oregon Board of Rabbi’s President from 2007-2009 and 2015-2017. In that capacity she co-founded Oregon’s Jewish indigent burial society Hesed Shel Emet, contributed to the recreation of the Portland Jewish Free Loan, helped to lead the creation of Portland’s new community mikveh Rachel’s Well, and led in the creation and filling of a new position of Portland Jewish Community Chaplain. In 2017 she became the convener of the Portland Interfaith Clergy Resistance, which focuses upon supporting efforts for police reform in the city of Portland and seeks to bear moral witness in the streets during protests. In 2018 she led the creation of an innovative outreach to unaffiliated Jews called TischPDX. She has served as adjunct faculty at Portland State University and Willamette University of Salem, Oregon. In 2018 she was honored to be the recipient of the City of Portland Human Rights Commission’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
Our Mentors
Sonia Marie Leikam (she/her)
Mentor
Sonia Marie Leikam (she/her) is a versatile professional who brings a deep understanding of non-profit operations, systems, programs and fundraising to the table. She brings experience as an educator, advocate for social justice and community organizer to her work. She and her husband also own Leikam Brewing, a Kosher craft brewery. In that capacity, she serves on the board of the Oregon Brewers Guild and in the Pink Boots Society, an organization empowering women in the beer industry. As the grandchild of a partisan in the French resistance, and a first generation American, she spent her youth traveling between the San Francisco Bay Area and Southern France. Bilingual and multicultural she lives with her partner, 3 children and 4 cats.
Shoshana Guggenheim (she/her)
Artist in Residence
Shoshana Gugenheim (she/her) is an artist, Torah scribe, essayist, and educator crossing disciplines to bring diverse groups of people together in intimate and unexpected ways. A social agitator, immersed in Jewish tradition and ritual, inspired by craft and beauty, her studio and collaborative works invite participants into borderlands. She is among the first of contemporary Jewish women to work as a traditional Torah scribe and is the founding director of Women of the Book which premiered at the Jerusalem Biennale 2015. Shoshana’s diverse works address the place of women in traditional Jewish practice, contemplations and conversations on death and dying and other loss, ethical parchment making and place-based knowledge. Shoshana spent 20 years living in Israel where she worked with Jewish and Arab communities to bridge communication and create dialogue through art making. Today she resides with her family in Portland, OR where she is an MFA candidate in Contemporary Art Practice at Portland State University.
Shoshana’s work has been supported by Targum Shlishi, The Hadassah Brandeis Institute, The Eugene and Estelle Ferkauf Foundation, The Eicholz Foundation, The Simon Benson Foundation and many other private donors and institutions.
David Shratter (he/him)
Artist, Educator, Mentor
David Shratter (he/him) has worked as a professional artist for the past 38 years. His work is about creating intimacy with the world around through direct observation. His oil paintings and pen and ink drawings include still life, interiors, streetscapes, portraits and figure drawings. Alongside his artistic life, he has worked as a librarian at Lewis & Clark College for 27 years. During those years, he served as a supervisor and mentor to many students, and is delighted to be in that role again with TischPDX cohort members.
He is a devoted student of Torah which has given him a lens through which he can look at and question life’s meaning.
Devra Polack
Mentor
Bio and image coming soon.
Roberta Hunte
Mentor
Bio and image coming soon.