About Rami
Rami Schwartzer is an American-Israeli rabbi, educator, artist, and facilitator with over 15 years of experience working at the intersection of spirituality, community-building, and trauma care. His approach combines Jewish tradition, creative practice, and a focus on healing and human connection.
Rami was the founding director of the Den Collective, Ramah Day Camp Greater DC, Tehom, and the Ramah Israel Bike Ride and Hiking Trip. Most recently, he coordinated NECHAMA’s post-Hurricane Helene efforts in Western North Carolina, leading teams in gutting and rebuilding homes, and supporting communities through grief and long-term recovery. Rami has been a consultant for Honeymoon Israel, the Jewish Federation, the Ramah Camping Movement, Hillel International, Mem Global, and local congregations worldwide, focusing on spiritual leadership and program design. He has supported individuals in both hospice care and non-ordinary states of consciousness, offering presence and integration during times of profound psychological and spiritual shift.
Rami holds degrees in philosophy and religion from Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary. He lives a largely nomadic life, often based in nature, and draws inspiration from time spent hiking, climbing, dancing, and connecting with diverse landscapes and communities. He has lived or traveled in over 16 countries and most U.S. states, with deep roots in New England, New York, Washington, DC, Tel Aviv, Colorado, and the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Artist Statement
I am an artist of the in-between—working not in mediums, but in moments. I shape sacred space, emotional architecture, and communal ritual. My practice is how I live.
I approach life like an improvisational composition: listening and responding, erring and readjusting, building something no one could have made alone.
Art, for me, is not a discipline—it is a disposition; a way of paying attention; a practice of shaping space, time, and experience with intention. I work with what is ephemeral: energy between people, the silence around a story, the architecture of belonging. My materials are memory, grief, laughter, and breath. Sometimes fire.
To be an artist is to live attuned to the unseen—to notice where meaning hides and coax it into form. I build moments that open people, rituals that hold what words cannot, and gatherings that remind us we are not alone. The work is both delicate and disruptive. It often begins where the old structures have fallen apart.
My life itself is a kind of sculpture—nomadic, deliberate, in motion. I’ve lived in cities, camps, flood zones, and festivals, walking alongside people in their darkest hours and helping build what comes next. I enter unfamiliar, often chaotic spaces and create art by listening, and staying long enough for something real to take root.
I am drawn to disasters and trauma, and the ways we respond to people in crisis because we have been, and may again be, people in crisis. In that recognition, art becomes more than expression—it becomes an act of love, resistance, and repair.