PHOTO: From left, Rogoway Committe Chair Sarah Howard presents Sarah Rohr with the 2025 Laurie Rogoway Outstanding Jewish Professional Award at the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland's Annual Meeting Thursday, June 12, at Congregation Neveh Shalom in Portland. (Rockne Roll/The Jewish Review)
For Sarah Rohr, her work has always come from her desire to connect with Jewish community. It’s a connection she’s built in a variety of ways, and one she’s now being recognized for by her community.
Rohr, the outgoing Youth Empowerment Specialist at Congregation Neveh Shalom and incoming B’nai Mitzvah and Family Educator at Congregation Beth Israel, received the 2025 Laurie Rogoway Outstanding Jewish Professional Award at the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland’s Annual Meeting Thursday, June 12 at Neveh Shalom.
“Sarah sees herself as a leader in intergenerational spaces, a mother, the partner of a Jewish poet and storyteller and someone who is committed to helping young people discover their own resilience, sacred rhythm and power as changemakers and holy first responders,” Sarah Howard said in presenting Rohr with the award. “She does all of this with sincere care, enthusiasm and a gift for making people feel seen, remembered and connected. Sarah Rohr is remarkable, and we are honored to celebrate her as this year’s Rogoway award recipient.”
Rohr began her life as part of a very tight-knit Jewish community – first in a haredi neighborhood in Chicago, where she recalls 11 rabbis living on her block, and later as part of a Conservative synagogue in Austin, Texas, where she and her family were at the shul as many as five days a week. This arrangement didn’t last, as in adulthood she made her way to the island of Hawai’i, then to Port Townsend, Wash., where she married her husband, Brian.
“While it was lovely and met so many needs, it didn’t meet the need of us being in Jewish community,” she said of her time in Port Townsend, adding that she and Brian wanted to raise their (then hypothetical) children as part of a Jewish community. That desire brought them to Portland, where Rohr jumped in with both feet.
The family joined Congregation Shaarie Torah, where Rohr started working under then-education director Dorice Horenstein, before joining Neveh Shalom just under a decade ago and working with Mel Berwin, CNS’s Director of Congregational Learning.
“Mel is a master educator and I’ve been studying, for lack of a better like term, her methodology of inclusion, of ‘how do we take the most marginalized students and give them a place in our education container?’” Rohr said. “In Jewish education in decades past, kids who couldn’t sit still were just asked to leave. Kids who had Tourettes were asked to leave. Kids who had Down’s Syndrome were asked to leave; there wasn’t the belief that they could do it.”
Her engagement with Jewish community has gone much farther than just her work. Rohr is a volunteer guide at Rachel’s Well Community Mikvah and has been actively engaged with the Jewish Community Relations Council, including its Climate Action Committee and, more recently the JCRCLegislative Advocacy Committee.
“That feels like a gift, to have access, to be able to say, ‘These are the issues facing my community. Let’s do something about it.’ That’s an incredible form of empowerment and way of having access in a time that feels like a lot of people feel disempowered by the systems that are in place,” Rohr said of her work on the Legislative Advocacy Committee.
On top of volunteering through Federation and her artistic and musical pursuit, Rohr has also found an expression of her love of Jewish community outside of it, working with Cure:PNW to address all kinds of ideologically driven violence, including antisemitism, and helping provide a Jewish perspective to the group’s efforts. (See “Antisemitic violence and Oregon,” The Jewish Review, Jan. 8, 2025, pg. 6) But her deep passion for education comes from her own experiences with learning disabilities as a child and the commitment her parents had to finding an educational setting that helped her thrive, which came in the form of a Montessori school in Austin. Her experiences there, introduced her to how supportive and powerful the teacher/student relationship could be – which has been reaffirmed repeatedly, including one particular example she recalled with one of those kinds of students she described earlier who, as a kindergartener, had trouble navigating conventional classroom environments.
“There was this offer that I put out to the class; it was based on a Yiddish folk story, and it was this idea that the universe could open up and anything you wish for could be granted, like a wish-granting genie situation. I said, ‘What would you ask for?’ And this little hand goes up and this little boy says, ‘I wish everyone everywhere had everything they needed.’ And I said, ‘I need you to stand up and I need you to shout that at the top of your lungs so the entire building can hear,’” Rohr said.
Eventually, years later, the same student approached Rohr at an event.
“He came up to me, and he’s very looking official and he’s practiced and something’s about to happen,” Rohr recounted. “He said, ‘Will you lift the Torah at my bar mitzvah?’ I just burst into tears because it was so completing of a cycle, and also of watching a student who didn’t find it easy to be in classroom spaces really thriving; just the joy of that, as an educator, to watch both his family coming up with tools to help support him and him being resilient in himself.”
Moments like those speak to the core of Rohr’s work. It’s work that even extended to her acceptance speech at Thursday’s annual meeting, which she used to lead attendees in singing Oseh Shalom – the words translate to “One who makes peace in one’s heights, may one make peace upon us and upon all Israel.”
“There are so many people I want to thank and praise and lift up and honor and recognize; so many people who have guided me to guide others, and my guidance said at this moment, at this sacred impasse, take a moment to sing together,” Rohr said Thursday. “I would ask that you all join in with me, because the thing that our community needs, the thing that our surrounding area needs, that our world needs at this moment is the deepest levels of peace.”