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depth and meaning in the relationships that they are creating is palpable, and
the single most important reason we live in community. Authentic access to
other human beings is sorely lacking in society today.

We have had to use savings and live frugally, but the rewards have been life-

changing. We have opportunities to develop deep, authentic relationships based
on shared values such as environmental stewardship, a progressive stance on
Judaism regardless of affiliation, Jewish farming, mindfulness and personal
improvement, and committment to communal living. The friendships we grow and
nurture with members of our community serve to strengthen and enhance our
own identities, interests, and independence as individuals, and ultimately,
improve our relationships with each other as family members.

This type of community experience must become available to any Jew that
desires it. In order to proliferate the creation of Jewish intentional
communities, my husband and I created New Jewish Communities, an internet
forum where ideas and views on Jewish intentional community building can be
exchanged for the purpose of 1) connecting people with existing, forming, and

conceptualized projects of intentional Jewish community; and 2) establishing
the first Jewish Ecovillage in America: an intergenerational community of people
who are consciously committed to living Jewishly, in the same geographic
location, with the intention of becoming more socially, economically and
ecologically sustainable

There has been much support for the agenda of New Jewish Communities. As a
part of a growing global movement for a more sustainable world, these
communities will integrate a supportive social environment with a low impact way

of life. They will connect Jews through active and deliberate social
participation in a vibrant Jewish context. They will strengthen and repair the
individual, the family, Judaism and society by developing a system of mutual
support that is becoming more difficult to achieve in conventional social
systems. In this way, New Jewish Communities will change the face of
contemporary Jewish life, and I look forward to being a part of that
transformation.

Rachael Cohen is a big-picture thinker, captivated by social systems and social change. She
believes in the process of community building as a means to remedy social disintegration and
repair individual well-being. Rachael has a masters degree in macro social work and community
practice, as well as a certificate in nonprofit management. She is currently working on
relationship-based social change through the internet forum New Jewish Communities, and in
Falls Village, CT, both at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center and within the local
community. Rachael’s full time job is raising two marvelous daughters.

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