Pop-up healing grounds in Jeffersonville, New York, and on our own land at Sde Trumot in the Beit She'an Valley. We are asking those who know this work to put their name to it.
There is a practice in our world older than any of us. Before a sefer goes out, it carries haskamos — the names of those who have read it and are willing to stand behind it. Not money. Names.
We are asking for that.
Homa U Migdal Inc. is a 501(c)(3) that builds pre-fabricated sustainable infrastructure — solar, water, food, shelter — for Jewish communities. We are now opening two pop-up healing grounds: one in Jeffersonville, New York, and one on the forty dunam we have owned since 2012 at Sde Trumot, in the Beit She'an Valley.
We are calling them Sanctuary City Campground, after the arei miklat, the cities of refuge. Those cities were not prisons and they were not hospitals. They were places a person went to live, in safety, until what had happened to him could be set right.
That is what we are building: ground, air, water, animals, work, and a beis medrash for whoever wants one — for people carrying more than a person can carry alone.
Soldiers and veterans back from the war. Families sitting with a loss that has not finished happening to them.
And our own children.
Chassidishe teenagers who have left home, or been put out of it. Tonight they are sleeping in cars, in stairwells, on whatever couch is open to them. What happens next to a fifteen-year-old with no address and no money is not slow, and it is not a secret: they are found by people who go looking for exactly them. Some of them are trafficked. These are our children, out of our own neighborhoods, and it is happening while the matter is still being discussed.
An ir miklat was a place a person could go when he could not go home. That is the whole idea, and it is the reason for the name. A child who cannot go home needs somewhere to go that is not the street.
Off-grid, self-sustaining, and built to be repeated wherever it is needed.
Sde Trumot is the same valley where the first Homa Umigdal went up in 1936: a wall and a tower, pre-fabricated, assembled between sunrise and nightfall. Jeffersonville is where our American community already comes to breathe.
What we are asking of you is not a donation. It is your name and your position — so that when we sit across from a municipality, a foundation, an army social-work office, or a father deciding whether to send his son, we can show them who stands behind this.
If you are willing, add your name below. If you would like to add a few words of your own, there is room for that, and they carry weight.
Our American grounds, within reach of the communities that already come up to the mountains for air and quiet.
Forty dunam we have owned since 2012, in the valley where the original tower-and-stockade movement began.
Rabbanim, roshei yeshiva, dayanim, physicians and mental-health professionals, community leaders, officers, tradesmen, and anyone whose name and position would help this work go forward. Your name, your title, and — if you wish — a few words of your own. If you can offer more than your name, there is a place below to tell us what.