Mia Resnicow | Staff Writer

A typical Rosh Hashanah may look like a family meal with round challah bread and attending synagogue services. For Moshe Cohen, it looks like a five-day retreat in Vermont.

After a career of building Jewish community in France, Cohen moved to Israel, met his wife, Leah, and started sharing advice about keeping kosher while traveling on their Instagram account, Hamsa Nomads.

The account has since grown to more than 6,000 followers. Wanting to continue building Jewish community, Cohen and his wife decided to host their first event, a retreat for Shavuot.

The retreat was a success for Cohen, with almost three dozen people in attendance. From there, Hamsa Nomads hosted a Fourth of July weekend retreat and a Renaissance Faire Shabbat weekend in Pennsylvania.

“We [brought] kosher food [to] the Renaissance Faire like [a kosher] turkey leg that everyone is eating there,” said Cohen.

Hamsa Nomads is a Jewish travel community built around kosher travel, Shabbat, retreats and local gatherings.

For Cohen, watching the retreats facilitate connections between people from different places has been the most rewarding part. People from Montreal, Brooklyn, Boston and Washington, D.C., have participated in the retreats, returning home having met new people and explored new places.

The retreats are meant to help “travelers connect before they feel alone in a new place,” according to the Hamsa Nomads website.

The name Hamsa Nomads comes from the idea of protecting travelers, students, families and Jewish people as they move through the world as nomads.

The Rosh Hashanah retreat will look similar to Hamsa Nomads’ other retreats. However, Cohen said he wanted to extend the retreat to five days to encourage participants to rest and enjoy their surroundings in Vermont.

“We have small groups, so being able to connect between each other and between art … davening, Torah learning,” Cohen said. “It [is] time to connect, time to rest. People can enjoy everyone and everything in the workshops, art and … discussion circles.”

Rachel Widman, a retreat attendee and Silver Spring resident, said the retreats offer a balance between structured programming and time to relax.

“They have a beautiful balance of being intentional with their programming but also chill,” said Widman.

“There’s this sense of ‘want to do things’ rather than a sense of ‘need to do things,’” she added. “There’s meals and games and Torah study and I think a lot of different people feel comfortable in this space.”

Widman, who attended Hamsa Nomads’ first Shavuot retreat, said each retreat has a “mainstream Orthodox structure” while remaining welcoming to Jews of all levels of observance.

“I think that it’s really rare to find spaces where different kinds of Jews can interact in a way that is just fellow Jews [and] fellow humans,” Widman said. “Everyone’s able to be genuine. There’s just an innate sense of joy and comfort and laughter and goofiness and just willingness to be a little bit outside your comfort zone because it feels like a safe environment.”

For Cohen, that sense of comfort and connection is central to what Hamsa Nomads hopes to create through its retreats.

“Bringing people together and seeing the end result of the smile [on] the face of anyone who comes,” he said. “They take [away] meaningful [connections] with each other.”

“I think Moshe and Leah put in a lot of time and thought into curating the retreats,” Widman added. “They’re very present, but also … kind of hands off. They just balance it super well, where they’ll have structure, but then kind of let the participants run with it and see where it goes.”

mresnicow@midatlanticmedia.com