Getting Yourself Into A Pickle

Adamah Fellowship Program at Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center, Falls Village, CT

Beginning in the 1990’s, Zelig Golden became interested in community agriculture and dreamed about farming through experiences he’d had on farms in Idaho and South America.  In 1998 he became the first program director of the Northwest Jewish Environment Project in Seattle, Washington (a COEJL affiliate), which drew connections between Judaism and environmental protection.  Some of his training to undertake this task came from Adam Berman, Executive Director of the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center (IFJRC).  After graduating from Berkley Law School in California, he learned about the Adamah Fellowship at IFJRC through a friend.  He was a fellow for the summer term of 2006, thus reuniting with Adam Berman, and remained as a staff member into the fall.  Zelig wanted to focus his interest and passion for farming within a Jewish spiritual community context, and he found that through the Adamah Fellowship.

Zelig describes his time as an Adamah fellow as a huge experience.  It confirmed for him an achievable self-determining power, and the presence of his highest self, whether he was working, teaching, leading, or living in community.  He found that his Judaism became alive, a living practice though direct contact with the land.  That connection was a fundamental part of his spiritual practice, it even depended on it, and it was a perfect continuation of the path he had begun to walk and life he had been leading.  This was the kind of Jewish living and belonging that was true for him. 

During his internship, the July harvest revealed a bumper crop of cucumbers – what to do with them?  He began a pickling operation in the basement of the IFJRC kitchen using 5 gallon buckets.  He experimented with numerous recipes, ran a contest, and selected the tastiest to be packaged under the label “Adamah Dills”. 

This is now a successful concession for the retreat center, and Adamah Dills have been featured products for Hazon’s annual bike ride fundraiser to New York City.  Once the cucumber season concluded in August, Zelig moved on to the cabbage crop and produced sauerkraut and kim chee, creating a whole line of fermented foods.  When Zelig, by then known as “Pickleman”, left in the fall of 2006, he passed the pickling baton to Joshua “The Pickler”, followed by Miriam in 2007.

After leaving IFJRC, Zelig began Jewish environmental work in the San Francisco Bay Area of California through teaching students at Jewish day schools pickling and other techniques of preservation.  This outreach was featured in The Jewish News Weekly, a San Francisco publication, along with a Hazon-sponsored food conference that Zelig chaired in 2008.  Learning how to preserve foods encourages consumers to buy locally grown produce during the harvest season, and continue to have those foods for consumption throughout the rest of the year, as the produce becomes no longer available locally.

Zelig works full time as Staff Attorney for The Center for Food Safety (a non-profit consumer advocacy group that is a watchdog for the FDA and USDA, protecting consumers from allowing unhealthy/harmful food technologies and their products from entering the American food stream, and promoting organic and sustainable agricultural systems), as well as actively works with the Jewish community in the San Francisco Bay Area, Chochmat Ha Lev in particular, to cultivate and create earth-based Judaism.  He has created small group, land-based pilgrimages for Jewish festivals where Sukkot is celebrated on a farm, Passover is observed in the desert wilderness, and Tu B’shvat is celebrated among the Redwoods.  He serves on Hazon’s Board of Directors.  And he is also an educator and advisor for the Jewish Farm School– helping to organize annual West Coast projects, and a weeklong local Hillel projects.  In 2008, Zelig also began co-leading Jewish Vision Quests in the high California desert wilderness to facilitate meaningful, earth-based rites of passage.

Looking into the future, Zelig considers pursuing Jewish Studies and investigating thoughts of a rabbinical path.  He attributes his experience as an Adamah fellow for opening the way for him to be the Jewish and community leader he wanted to be.

Contact: Zelig Golden, Staff Attorney, Center For Food Safety, at 415-826-2770, or
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For further information about the Adamah Fellowship please visit the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center.