Staff
Urban Adamah Staff
Adam Berman
Executive Director
Adam(at)urbanadamah.org
Adam Berman recently completed his tenure as the Executive Director of the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center (2002 – 2009), a retreat center and intentional community in the Connecticut Berkshires. At Isabella Freedman, Adam founded ADAMAH: The Jewish Environmental Fellowship, a three month leadership training program for Jewish young adults that integrates Jewish learning and living with sustainable agriculture, green living skills, teaching and contemplative spiritual practice. He also served as the program’s first Director. At Isabella Freedman, Adam also co-founded the Jewish Greening Fellowship (JGF), an intensive 18-month Fellowship program for Jewish professionals from twenty different New York Jewish summer camps and community centers. The JGF, funded by a significant grant from the UJA Federation of New York, is working to reduce the carbon footprints of Jewish communal agencies and place environmental stewardship high on the agenda of every agency that participates. For three years (1996 – 1999), Adam served as the Director of the Teva Learning Center, the leading Jewish environmental education program in the United States.
Currently, Adam serves on the Board of Directors of Hazon and the David Brower Center, and on Advisory Boards for the Teva Learning Center, Wilderness Torah, Eden Village Camp, Adamah and the East Bay Jewish Community Center. He teaches widely on issues related to Judaism, ecology and civic leadership. Adam holds a Masters in Business Administration from the University of California at Berkeley and a B.A. in Environmental Policy from Brown University.
Casey Yurow
Director of Education and Community Outreach
Casey(at)urbanadamah.org
Casey Yurow spent the summer of 2010 as the farm program director at Eden Village Camp – a new pluralistic environmental Jewish sleep-away camp in Putnam Valley, New York. Prior to Eden Village, Casey served for two years as the education director at the Kayam Farm at Pearlstone in rural Maryland. While at Kayam, Casey helped to create several innovative projects including a farm semester for an interfaith group of Baltimore-area homeschooling families and an intergenerational Beit Midrash shabbaton to explore primary sources for sustainability and social justice in Jewish agriculture. From 2005-2008, Casey worked as the program coordinator at the Teva Learning Center. Casey has led alternative break trips for the Jewish Farm School as well as a month-long backpacking trip for teens on the Israel trail with Derech HaTeva (SPNI). He studied for two years in yeshiva in Israel and received a B.Sc in Environmental Science and Policy from the University of Maryland. Casey is thrilled to bring his experience in farm and garden-based education, as well as his love of music, fermentation, and community to the Bay area.
Rachael Graber
Farm Manager
rae(at)urbanadamah.org
Rae has studied and practiced organic agriculture since 2005. During this time she’s been involved with various farms and gardens, including organic farms on Orcas Island in her home state of Washington and non-profit urban gardening projects while studying at McGill University in Montreal. Through her degrees in Human Geography and Women’s Studies, Rae focused on issues of inequality through anti-racist, feminist, and post-colonial lenses, and became deeply intrigued by the question of how individuals and communities respond to systemic oppression through local acts of resistance. After graduating from school in 2010 she interned at The Egg Farm in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, where she discovered her love for goats and blue hubbard squash, and decided to combine her passions for organic agriculture and social justice in her life’s work. Rae arrived at Urban Adamah as part of the fall fellowship class of 2011, and spent the winter working and co-managing the sadeh before becoming the full time farm manager in February of 2012. Rae is thrilled to be able to continue questioning, giving, receiving and learning from those around her at Urban Adamah.
Sarah Gill
Business Manager
Sarah(at)urbanadamah.org
Sarah has been living and teaching in the Bay Area for almost 15 years. After running Jewish Education Programs and Camps in the 1990s, in 2000 she received her Masters in Education from Mills College and enjoyed some incredible years teaching 1st and 2nd grades in Oakland. While teaching, Sarah built Native Plant Gardens with her students, founded recycling and compost programs around her school, and wrote curriculum on everything from Shallow Seas to Vermicomposting. Nature was calling! Next Sarah went to the Richardson Bay Audubon Center & Sanctuary in Tiburon, CA, where she was a Teacher Naturalist/Youth Programs Coordinator. She taught visiting school groups every morning, and organized Salt Marsh Habitat Restoration Projects after school. Sarah fell in love with the hearty yet endangered Salt Marshes, but missed the Urban World, so she moved to San Francisco, where for the last 5 years she has been working to empower children and youth. Sarah is also a supporter of large community art and has been building Big Art for 10 years.
Kat Morgan
Program Associate
Kat(at)urbanadamah.org
Kat received a BA in Religious Studies in 2010 from Virginia Commonwealth University. During her studies she completed a four-month research project investigating the negative health consequences of industrialized agriculture and the roll of globalization in expanding these methods. Upon graduation Kat joined the Allegheny Mountain School/Rout 250 Fellowship, an 18-month leadership-development and training program for young adults beginning careers in small-scale sustainable agriculture. Kat came to Urban Adamah through this program and is enthralled to begin planting new roots in the Bay Area. When she is not thinking about the joys of healthful eating, Kat enjoys writing and performing music, salsa dancing, traveling to foreign locations, forming connections with those around her, and delving into life through both the unexpected and extraordinary.
Lizzie Baron
Farm Educator
Lizzie(at)urbanadamah.org
Lizzie lives to cultivate community centered on ecological and personal sustainability, social justice and spirituality and spent the 2011 growing season doing just that as a Farm Education Apprentice for the Jewish Farm School at Eden Village camp. Here she fell in love with earth-based Jewish living, herbalism and guiding others to new discoveries at their growing edges. Prior to this, Lizzie earned a B.A. in Contemplative Education from Brown University while working on various community-oriented sustainable food initiatives in Providence, RI. She spent breaks and summers farming and teaching in intentional communities in India and across the U.S. Lizzie is excited to build upon these experiences with Urban Adamah and set down roots in the East Bay where she spends her free time crafting, fermenting, strumming her ukulele and exploring with friends.
Yotam Yosefyan
Farm Educator
yotam(at)urbanadamah.org
Yotam Yosefyan is Urban Adamah’s education intern. He spent the past year working with the Center for Creative Ecology at Kibbutz Lotan, Israel, where he fell in love with the desert and with the kind of work an intentional community requires. While working and studying at Lotan, Yotam learned many skills, including human waste treatment and management, gardening in extreme conditions and how to get cob stains out of your clothes (it’s really not that hard). Yotam also used this time to sharpen his ability as an educator and a volunteer coordinator. Prior to the year he spent at Lotan, Yotam worked for renowned agronomist Elaine Solowey after studying for a year at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies. The time he spent in the Arava Institute taught Yotam the value of community and the power of friendship. Yotam lives and dreams Permaculture. He believes it is the best way for creating a better life for himself, his community, and for generations to come.
Sarah Karlson
Farm Educator/Mentor
Sarah teaches the ten week core urban agriculture course to all Urban Adamah fellowship cohorts. In addition to her role as Urban Adamah’s Senior Farm Educator, Sarah also works at City Slicker Farms where she supervises the construction of gardens in pre-schools throughout Alameda County. She is also a garden and nutrition educator at Bay Farm Elementary School, where she created and teaches a garden-based curriculum to 4th and 5th graders. Sarah has a bachelor’s degree in Biology and Environmental Studies from Oberlin College and a master’s degree in Culture, Ecology, and Sustainable Community with a concentration in Ecological Agriculture from New College of California. Sarah also holds a Certificate of Herbal Medicine from the California School of Herbal Studies and a Certificate of Permaculture Design from New College of California. She brings to her work a passion for gardens as tools for individual and community health, connection and well-being.
