YOUNG Adult JEWISH GRIEF RETREAT
January 5 – 7, 2024
Join Urban Adamah for a grief retreat for young adults ages 20 – 39 rooted in Jewish spirituality. We will build a weekend community of folks who’ve each experienced loss—whether a parent, sibling, partner, or dear friend.
“There’s nothing so whole as a broken heart,” says the Kotzker Rebbe. While some of us are actively grieving recent losses and some of us are many years out, we all know the brokenness and wholeness of that broken heart, and want to make space to be right where we’re at with it.
This retreat is co-sponsored by the Shomer Collective.
Come prepared to eat good food, laugh with new friends, celebrate Shabbat, farm, make art, talk, move, listen, sing, be. Look forward to…
- Creative workshops
- Jewish wisdom & ritual
- Social time with people who “just get it”
- & much more!
DETAILS & APPLICATION
Friday, January 5, 5:30 PM – Sunday, January 7, 1:00 PM
Registration for this retreat includes participation in the full weekend program, overnight accommodations, and catered meals with vegetarian, gluten free, and vegan options available.
We are offering this retreat on a sliding scale to better facilitate a diversity of folks attending. Scholarship Rate tickets ($175) and Reduced Rate tickets ($325) are available for participants with low income and/or limited access to wealth. Please select the highest ticket cost you can afford, so that others who would not be able to attend are able to do so. If you can afford the actual cost or higher for the retreat, please select that option. If the actual cost or higher is not feasible for you, please do select our reduced rate options.
- $750 – Sustainer
- $600 – Your Ticket + Contribution to Someone Else’s Ticket
- $450 – Actual cost
- $325 – Reduced Rate
- $175 – Limited Scholarship Rate
Once your application is received, you will hear back from our team within two weeks with information about whether we have a spot for you for this retreat. We are carefully cultivating a balanced community for the retreat, paying attention to factors like types of loss experience, identity, etc. Because we have had overwhelming interest in this retreat and expect it to fill, we encourage folks to apply early.
All participants will be housed in our retreat lodge, located on the Urban Adamah farm. Rooms are shared and offer a mix of bunk bed and single bed accommodations. If you have any access needs around your overnight stay, would like to share a room with someone else who is applying, and/or prefer to be in a single-gendered room, please note those details on your application. There are shared all-gender, ADA accessible bathrooms and showers in both the retreat lodge and a separate bath house. None of the rooms have en-suite bathrooms.
This event will be held in a mix of indoor and outdoor spaces. Participants are required to be fully vaccinated and boosted, unless they are unable due to a medical exemption. Masking is not required unless COVID-19 community levels rise to medium or high. Doors and skylights will be open throughout the event to encourage air flow and reduce exposure risk. Participants and staff are expected to take rapid tests upon arrival. Please stay home if you experience any COVID-19 symptoms within 24 hours prior to the event. Learn more about our COVID-19 policies here.
Urban Adamah’s campus is fully compliant with ADA guidelines. All program spaces and agricultural production facilities are wheelchair accessible. Most paths on the site, except those that are in growing fields, are made of decomposed granite (DG) which supports wheelchairs well except when there is heavy rain. Details regarding what is currently accessible can be found here.
Parking in our lot is very limited. If you do not need accessible parking, please consider carpooling with friends, arriving by ride share, bike, or taking public transportation! Please note that after the registration period, the parking lot will be locked and secured for the duration of the weekend. If you are planning to park a car in the lot, you will not be able to leave with your car again until Sunday.
Please include any specific questions or requests on your application.
Photo Disclaimer: Urban Adamah and persons designated by Urban Adamah may photograph in-person programs or record/screenshot virtual programs. These recordings or photos may be used by Urban Adamah, at its discretion, for marketing and/or development purposes. If you prefer that your image not be used in this way, please let us know at events@urbanadamah.org.
MEET THE FACILITATORS
Chloe Zelkha is thrilled to be facilitating this retreat again. After her dad died suddenly in 2017, she felt called to grief work and completed a residency as a hospital chaplain at UCSF Mission Bay Hospital, where she offered spiritual care to those who were ill and dying and their families. Before that, she served as the Fellowship Director at Urban Adamah, a youth organizer at The Food Project, and a co-founder at the Covid Grief Network, now a project of Reimagine. She has a B.A. in Religion from Carleton College, and an M.A. in Specialized Studies in Education from Harvard University, where she studied what transformative experiences are made of. She is currently studying towards rabbinic ordination at RRC in Philadelphia.
Noah Cochran found their way to the grief world following the loss of both of their parents in their teenage years. Now trained as a licensed clinical social worker and working as a therapist at Smith College, Noah believes in the healing power of relationships and community. They also teamed up with Chloe and a handful of other brilliant organizers to start the Covid Grief Network, an organization offering free grief support to young adults who’ve lost someone to Covid-19. Noah lives in Western Massachusetts with many books and plants.
TESTIMONIALS
“I came in not knowing what to expect and walked out with 39+ friends who get me in a way no one else ever has. Sure we cried, but we also laughed, danced, sang and celebrated life.”
“It was impeccably facilitated from beginning to end—it was gentle, fierce, stabilizing, and enchanting all at the same time.”
“The facilitators were warm and welcoming, the food was wholesome and delicious, and the space was perfect for a relaxing retreat for the mind, body and soul.”
FAQ
Losing someone you love can leave a profound impact at any age. And in this death-denying culture of ours, all of us struggle to find spaces where we can talk openly about that experience. We’ve found, though, that there’s a unique kind of isolation that comes when you are among the first in your peer group to lose a parent, sibling, partner, or close friend. This is also an age group that is typically underserved by the traditional grief community — too old for youth grief support and too young for traditional grief support groups where attendees are often older. For this retreat, we’re focusing on folks in their 20’s and 30’s. But check below for resources that might be of interest to you.
Losing anyone in your life can be unspeakably hard, and the specificity of this retreat doesn’t mean to take away from that truth. (And! Loss takes many forms beyond death loss – break ups, divorces, life-altering illnesses and accidents, incarceration, family separation, deportation, and more). However, at this moment we are focusing on serving folks who’ve experienced a few specific types of loss, so that we can do that really well.
You sure can! This retreat will be structured around Shabbat and will include Jewish music, learning, and ritual, but if that sounds good to you, we welcome you to apply.
Sorry, no. Every retreat participant will be assigned a bed onsite. There’s a special magic that happens when folks spend the full weekend together in the same space (and, we’ll add, a special magic to sleeping on an urban farm!), and minimizing folks’ comings and goings on and off site is also important for us staying as covid-safe as possible for the weekend.
In order to create the kind of intentional community that allows retreat participants to feel safe and go deep with one another, attendance at the entire retreat is required for participation. We will begin at 5:45 pm on Friday (with the option to come a little early to get settled) and end at 1:00 pm on Sunday. If you have a conflict that you absolutely cannot change, please note that in your application.
This retreat is created for and by peers, and is not, in the traditional sense at least, therapeutic. We do not have the expertise to provide professional therapy or support, and, with a few exceptions, all facilitators are also participants (and all participants will play an active role in holding space for each other). This retreat should be a complement to, and not a replacement for, the places you go to see a professional.
We are huge fans of The Dinner Party, an organization that is building a worldwide community of 20- and 30-somethings who have each experienced the loss of a parent, partner, child, sibling, or close friend.
Reimagine is a non-profit that hosts online and in-person events and festivals around loss, adversity, and mortality. Check out their webinars and groups!
Writing Your Grief is a course (self-guided or live) through Refuge in Grief that we’ve heard awesome things about, and which offers prompts and community for telling the truth about your loss.
For tons of books on loss, check out The Dinner Party’s bookshop.
