Meet the Communities Live Streaming in 5781

Meet the phenomenal communities offering live streaming of their Rosh Hashanah & Yom Kippur Services.

If you haven’t registered yet, you can here!

Chochmat HaLev (Berkeley, CA)

Chochmat HaLev is a loving community of spiritually courageous seekers, a place of connection, a home for all people. We are an inclusive, multigenerational, and family-oriented synagogue offering joyful ceremony, music that lifts our spirits and touches our souls, passionate learning, and contemplative practice. We seek justice and healing for ourselves, our communities, and the world. We are a home for your Jewish heart.

Congregation Shaarei Shamayim (Madison, WI)

Shaarei Shamayim is a growing, open, pluralistic congregation of 165 households. We believe that Judaism is a means for bringing justice, holiness, and joy to our world. We are building Jewish community rooted in creativity and authenticity, and we are reimagining the possibilities for Jewish life, identity, and community.

We invite people of varied Jewish backgrounds to join us. We value the participation of singles, families, twenty- and thirty-somethings, and empty-nesters. We are LGBTQ and interfaith inclusive, strive to accommodate people with disabilities, and welcome Jews-by-choice and Jews of color.

We embrace community. We create space for our members and friends to deepen their Jewish lives, reconnect to their Judaism, or encounter it for the first time. We do this through our monthly havurot (fellowship groups), Shabbat potlucks, learning opportunities, social justice work, and congregational committees. We do it by dropping off a lasagna when there’s a new baby or by driving a fellow member to chemo. We find going through life with others is preferable to going it alone. We invite you to read more about Shaarei Shamayim’s vision.

Hinenu: The Baltimore Justice Shtiebl (Baltimore, MD)

Hinenu: The Baltimore Justice Shtiebel is a community rooted in joy, pursuit of justice, and radical kinship. We offer a home for people of all backgrounds seeking Jewish life to land, feel safe, and be welcomed.

We are a spiritual community that celebrates Diaspora Judaism through ritual, learning, song, and prayer.

We are a Baltimore community committed to pursuing justice and to acting in fierce solidarity with our neighbors.

We share and mark life cycle events, celebrating joyous occasions and supporting each other through healing and hard times.

We hold space for diverse practices and navigate them together, reveling in the multitude of voices that comprise us.

We strive to become for one another a mishpacha, one that rejoices in queer and trans identities, welcomes converts, celebrates interfaith families, and honors Jews of color.

We assert that our political and Jewish selves need not be in conflict with one another, and fearlessly declare our intention to live our Jewish values in the public sphere for the benefit our city.

Hinenu: Here we are!

Kadima (Seattle, WA)

Seattle’s premiere progressive Jewish Community. Offering Shabbat and holidays, programs, celebrations, social activism and alternatives in Jewish education for all ages, in a warm welcoming Reconstructionist community.

As a Reconstructionist community, Kadima uses metaphor, poetry and a relevant, accessible liturgy to welcome members whose Jewish beliefs and practices span a spectrum from theistic to humanistic.

Multicultural households are welcome, including non-Jewish partners and family members. Everyone is encouraged to celebrate and learn more about progressive Judaism.

Kadima seeks to integrate a wide range of Jewish experience into its priorities and practices. It is committed to making its programs and community accessible to its members and to those searching for a Jewish home.

Kehilla Community Synagogue (Oakland, CA)

Kehilla builds loving Jewish community through joyful spiritual practice and organizing for justice.

You’ll find lots of centers of energy here – people coming together for Shabbat practice, Jewish meditation practice, radical Talmud study (through 700 Benches, our SVARA-style beit midrash), Immigrant justice work (including our Sanctuary Guest Suite), Economic justice (including the Interfaith Coalition for Justice in our Jails, and the Homeless Action collaboration with Love and Justice in the Streets), Anti-racist work (through our Belonging & Allyship Initiative), justice for Palestine (through our Middle East Peace Committee), tending to those who have died (through our devoted Chevra Kadisha), supporting folx in need (through our Chesed Committee), Indigenous justice (through Jews On Ohlone Land) and much more!

Our practice is filled with music, dancing, joy and a blend of creative and traditional liturgy that can meet us where we are and elevate us to where we long to be – closer to our truest selves and more deeply aligned with G-d, however we understand Them.

Kehilla was founded in 1984 by Rabbi Burt Jacobson, and offered a spiritual home to Jews who opposed Israel’s occupation of Palestine, and who were not welcome in other synagogues.

Kehilla has a collaborative spiritual leadership structure that includes Emeritus Rabbis Burt and David J. Cooper, Senior Rabbi Dev Noily, Hazzan Shulamit Wise Fairman, Avi Rose, Howard Hamburger, and Sharon Grodin.

We are a Jewish Renewal community committed to radical inclusion of queer and trans people, people with disabilities, Black people, Indigenous people and people of color, anti-, non- and post-Zionists, and all who share our mission and values.

Kol Tzedek (Philadelphia, PA)

Kol Tzedek, a Voice for Justice, is a young and growing Reconstructionist social justice-focused synagogue in West Philadelphia, founded in 2004. We currently have 250 member households. We are artists, organizers, academics, parents, professionals, students, social workers, midwives, and misfits. We are a mixed multitude; people of varied ages, abilities, and genders committed to racial and economic justice. We are people who ask a lot of questions. We are neighbors and friends who cook, sing, and care for one another. And we have decided to bind our lives together in sacred community.

New Synagogue Project (Washington, DC)

We are building a community that is spiritually vibrant, radically inclusive, and reflects our vision for a world of justice, equity, and liberation. Be a part of it! Our community includes religious, secular, and atheist Jews, families with kids, partnered and single people, queer and trans people, disabled and chronically ill people, D/deaf and hard of hearing folks, interfaith families, Jews of color and white Jews, and anyone interested in exploring and experiencing Jewish life.

Nishmat Shoom (Western MA)

We are Nishmat Shoom: the soul/breath of garlic

We take inspiration, literally breathing in, from the wisdom and medicine of the garlic plant. Garlic is one of our Jewish diasporic ancestral plants, first grown in the fertile crescent, used in food and medicine for thousands of years by Mizrahi, Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews. In Roman times, Jews were known pejoratively as “Garlic Eaters” and as garlic traveled with some Jews into Europe, so did the term “garlic eaters”. As many Jews immigrated to the US, the connection with garlic was lost; as the pressures of assimilation often take form of shame and embarrassment of looking and smelling different, essentially forcing us to denounce and shun the magic, medicine and scents of our homelands. By strengthening our immune systems and our hearts, and drawing on the protection from our ancestors and plantcestors, garlic supports us to be strong as individuals held in a healing, well, pungent, alive community. In the grand tradition of reclaiming words hurled at us in hatred, we are excited to reclaim the powerful stink and the stinky power of being GARLIC EATERS.

We are a small group of people that includes queer and trans* artists, farmers, healers, educators, writers, organizers, witches, and spiritual leaders coming together to reclaim the wisdoms and traditions of our ancestors, to connect with ourselves, land, each other, and spirit to dream, sing, pray, and work towards another world we know is possible. We are non-zionist and diasporist, traditional and non-traditional, experimental and emergent, rooted and radical. We believe that all land is holy and all people are chosen. We believe that rooting into our diverse, ancient, and new Jewish traditions for sustenance and resource can support us in dismantling white supremacy and other structures of oppression and help us move towards collective liberation.

We first came together in 2018 to respond to a need we felt and witnessed for High Holiday services that centered queer and trans Jews in leadership and reflected the anti-colonialist, non-zionist, and diasporist values we hold. Since then, we have held Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services, a vigil in response to the shooting in Pittsburgh, a Chanukah party, and a Passover Seder.

Tikun Olam Chavurah (Philadelphia, PA) 

The Tikkun Olam Chavurah is a Philadelphia-based spiritual and political community grounded in Jewish tradition. Working in the pursuit of tzedek (justice) and tikkun olam (repair of the world), we focus on interfaith work to support social justice in the Philadelphia area and in Israel/Palestine.

Our work includes supporting immigrant rights and environmental sustainability, preventing gun violence, resisting the assault on public education, and promoting economic justice in the Philadelphia region. We also work to support peace with justice in Israel/Palestine.

We are building a community committed to radical inclusion that supports one another’s paths in seeking justice. We gather to study, pray, and celebrate holidays as well as take action for social change.

The Tikkun Olam Chavurah provides a welcoming environment, particularly for those who have not always been welcomed into the mainstream Jewish community: the queer community, people of color, those whose views on Israel/Palestine challenge the mainstream Jewish community, the economically disadvantaged, and those who are part of interfaith or multifaith households.

Children approaching their Bar/Bat Mitzvah can connect with us to make their social justice project truly transformative. We will open up many possibilities for them in our new monthly program:

Fringes Havurah (Philadelphia, PA)

Fringes: a feminist, non-zionist havurah was founded in Philadelphia in the winter of 2007 by Elliott batTzedek, Karen Escovitz, and Hannah Schwarzschild. The members of Fringes come from all kinds of backgrounds, from growing up Orthodox or Conserva-dox through completely not-religious to no formal Jewish background to not Jewish. We are mainly, but not entirely, women, heavily lesbian and queer-identified. We range in age from late-20’s through early 70’s, and come to Fringes from all across the Delaware Valley. After praying together for 9 years, we’ve developed many of our own prayers, rituals, and ways of reading and singing.

Fringes takes our name from the tzitzit, or knotted cords on the corners of the tallit; while these threads are the fringes of the garment, they are responsible a turning a schmata into a prayer shawl. Those of us who founded the group are on the fringes of Judaism in many different ways, and we came together to make our experiences as outsiders the heart of this community.

The three co-founders, and many of the members, are also Jewish activists for justice in Palestine/Israel and for Palestinian human and civil rights. This put us at odds with our synagogue and the other choices for service communities. While U.S. Jewish spiritual practice has only been Zionist for a couple of generations, calling the Zionist worldview into question is a strong taboo. We needed a prayer community in which our range of opinions was welcome, and our questions could be explored rather than silenced. And so, like thousands and thousands of Jews before us, we set out to create the community we needed.

Tzedek Chicago (Chicago, IL)

Founded in 2015, we are an intentional congregational community based on core values of justice, equity and solidarity with the oppressed. In our educational programs, celebrations and liturgy, we emphasize the Torah’s central narrative of liberation, the prophetic imperative to speak truth to power, and an expansive diasporic vision that views the entire world as our homeland.