Clergy and Staff

Rabbi Ariel Stone has been Shir Tikvah’s spiritual leader since the congregation’s founding in 2003; she is first female rabbi to be the head of a congregation in the state of Oregon. Within the congregational family and beyond, she delights in sharing scholarship in Torah, mysticism, and ethics in support of building meaningful community. She received the 2018 City of Portland Human Rights Award for Lifetime Achievement and the 2023 Compassion & Choices Dr Paul Smith National Award for her advocacy in Death with Dignity rights work.

Rabbi Stone is also currently the chair of Hesed Shel Emet (the Oregon Jewish Indigent Burial Society), Rabbinic mentor for TischPDX  and Convener of Portland Interfaith Clergy Resistance. She has served as adjunct faculty with the Judaic Studies department at Portland State University and Willamette University of Salem, and advises younger rabbis in the Clergy Leadership Incubator. 

In 1993 she became the Rabbi of Congregation HaTikvah of Kyiv, Ukraine, and was instrumental in seeding multiple Jewish spiritual communities throughout the former Soviet Union which still exist today. In addition to her rabbinic ordination Rabbi Stone is a Jerusalem Fellow of the Mandel Educational Institute and has a doctoral degree from Spertus Institute of Chicago. She has published Because All Is One, on the relevance of the doctrine of the sefirot in Jewish mysticism, and The Alef Bet of Death: Dying As A Jew. 

Taking Charge When You’re Dying, an interview with Rabbi Ariel on KMUZ radio

For more on Rabbi Ariel, see this story by Oregon Jewish Life. 

STAFF

  Katie Schneider, Executive Director

.Katie provides for the day-to-day management of Shir Tikvah's fiscal, physical, security and administrative affairs. In her former life, she was a writer, a historian and a teacher, all skills which serve her well as she coordinates programming, education and congregant care. Contact her if you’d like information about membership, education, communications or planning our next party. 

   Amelia Schroth, Operations Manager

Amelia answers your phone calls, emails and questions about everything from membership to finances and all of the small details in between. She’s the woman you contact to schedule a movie, a bar mitzvah or anything else in the building. Our plants always look fantastic because Amelia is also a landscape contractor – in the summer and on the weekends, look for her outside.