Press
The latest updates from the Center for Small Town Jewish Life
April 8, 2026
This AP article delves into the Center’s work supporting, strengthening, and connecting small town Jewish communities across America. The article was syndicated to news outlets nationwide, most notably the Washington Post and ABC News.
December 12, 2025
The Montana Jewish Project (MJP) delivers Hanukkah curriculum boxes to public school teachers around the state—often in rural areas with few to no Jewish students. The Center for Small Town Jewish Life is proud to have worked with MJP Director Rebecca Stanfel through our national Makom program.
October 6, 2025
In Waterville, Maine, we celebrate the Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot under the country’s only municipal sukkah. Each year, the Center for Small Town Jewish Life and other local organizations spearhead a community art project to decorate the sukkah, and the Center hosts a potluck open to all, cultivating pride and community while honoring the area’s agricultural and multiethnic heritage.
May 25, 2025
Rabbi Rachel Isaacs writes about the ways the Center for Small Town Jewish Life is connecting and supporting small town Jewish communities and local leaders, both professional and lay, who are doing critical on-the-ground work.
April 17, 2025
With one in eight American Jews living outside of major metropolitan areas, small town Jewish communities add up. Rabbi Rachel Isaacs argues that while serving those small communities poses challenges, the payout of ensuring thriving Jewish life for all far outweighs the costs.
February 19, 2025
Rabbi Rachel Isaacs explores the importance of ensuring that all Jewish communities, regardless of size, have access to thriving Jewish life and learning.
Summer 2024
Lauren Cohen, Rabbi Dr. David Freidenreich, and Rabbi Rachel Isaacs explore what it means to be a Jewish adult, including being actively engaged as both a consumer and a producer of meaningful Jewish life.
April 6, 2024
The New York Times covered this story of small town Jewish life and ingenuity in Maine. A group of Colby College students from a variety of faiths and backgrounds helped harvest ice from a pond for a mikvah (ritual bath) at Beth Israel Congregation in Waterville, Maine.
June 19, 2023
In this Identity/Crisis podcast from the Shalom Hartman Institute, Rabbi Rachel Isaacs talks about small town American Jewish life with podcast host Yehuda Kurtzer.
March 24, 2023
Rabbi Rachel Isaacs was honored to deliver the sermon at Central Synagogue in Manhattan on March 24, 2023. She spoke about class and income inequality, sharing her experience in small town Maine and touching on geographical and socioeconomic inequities in the American Jewish community.
July 9, 2019
This article by Melanie Weiss appeared in Lilith magazine:
“It is 6:45 a.m. on a Sunday morning in April, and I am sitting in a coffee shop in Brookline, MA, with two young women. We’re staking out this very spot, across the street from the closest kosher supermarket to the town we live in, 185 miles away. The supermarket doors are due to open at 7A.M., and we’re sipping much-appreciated coffee as we watch a line slowly accrue at the door. I feel the 13 days until Passover perching demon-like on my shoulder.
We are here for Pesach shopping, naturally, and my 19-year-old ally is doing this sort of mad run for the first time. She’s a fellow for the Center for Small Town Jewish Life, where I and my other young colleague work, and president of the local Hillel. The three of us had aggressively workshopped the Hillel Passover shopping list on our ride through interminable Boston traffic. I myself have four lists in my pocket, covering what feels like the needs of every Jew for several zip codes in any direction. The teenager eyes the growing queue with frank disbelief. “I kind of can’t believe I’m doing this,” she murmurs into her coffee. I grin. “Welcome to Maine Jewish womanhood!”
I want to be clear: it is not like I did not wait in crazy-long lines at kosher supermarkets back when I lived in Brooklyn, not like I didn’t schlep groceries for friends or spend crazy time and effort on holiday preparations. But until I moved to small-town Maine, a state that clocks in with a mere 1.3 million people,there was never any undercurrent of desperation to these acts; they were never freighted with the certain knowledge that, if we didn’t drag ourselves down to do a town’s worth of shopping, there might not be food for Passover…”