New retreat center, new possibilities at Berkeley’s Jewish urban farm

Ari Eisen, director of public programs at Urban Adamah, in front of the farm’s new residency and retreat center (Photo/Maya Mirsky)

A three-story, 32-guest dorm with apartments at the edge of the property. It will give the participants in Urban Adamah’s fellowship program — which teaches urban agriculture, community building and leadership development over 10 to 12 weeks — a place to eat, sleep and hold functions.

By Maya Mirsky
Jweekly
November 12, 2018

Excerpt:

As chickens step carefully through the dirt, and brown goats gaze curiously through the fence, Ari Eisen points to an area of dirt that will become the site of a new building.

“Are we more of a community center or are we more of a farm?” asks the director of public programs at Urban Adamah in Berkeley. “I think we’re both.”

The urban Jewish farm, set between warehouses and close to the train tracks, is in the midst of some big changes — launching a new retreat program, opening new living quarters and planning a new center that will offer more infrastructure while still maintaining the agricultural nature of the site.

“The question of how you’re going to do those things together [has] been a creative tension possibility for us from the beginning,” says Adam Berman, the founder of Urban Adamah and its executive director since it opened in 2010 in southwest Berkeley. Five years later, it moved to a new, creekside location in northwest Berkeley, a few blocks behind the Target store that’s just off Highway 80.

Read the complete article here.