First of all, who am I?

My name is Melissa Oringer.

I am a Jew. I was born into a conservative Jewish family and raised in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan. When I was in grade school, the Rabbi at our synagogue passed away and was replaced by a Rabbi that my family (and many others) didn't like nearly as much. My parents found a new Rabbi at Temple Kol Ami, a reformed temple. Rabbi Conrad was worth the switch - he was a wise, gentle, humorous eastern european Jew who had survived the camps. He saw me through me my bat mitzvah and was proud that I sang both the torah and haf-torah portions, the first in our temple to do so. But after my bat mitzvah, I stopped going to temple.

I am a priestess. As I grew older my life-long fascination and attraction for the magical grew and branched out into folklore, mythology and the occult. I read about the religion of Wicca, or witchcraft, and endeavored to create my own solitary practice and relationship with the gods. Eventually, I moved to the San Francisco East Bay where I was introduced to the very large and eclectic Bay Area Pagan community via a Pagan chorus, Gaia's Voice. After a short time, I began formal training in the NROOGD tradition; I am an elder in the trad and have recently hived off from my original coven, taking on a study group that eventually grew into a full fledged coven in its own right.

You can learn more if you like by visiting my personal site Blessed Bees. Enjoy yourself, and drop a line in the guestbook while you're there!

Why Jewitchery.com?

Why not? I wanted a place for us, darn it. And being a web geek, I grabbed the domain and started coding. I wanted those of us who call ourselves Jewitches to have a place in cyberspace. So here it is: website, discussion group, mailing list and all. All we have to do is collect it all up and maybe something interesting will grow.

If you've read this far, it's good to meet you. Please introduce yourself by adding your thoughts to the guestbook if you have the time. And if you have something to add to the site, drop me a line!