Farming
Continued from Page 23
The would-be obituary, penned by a friend for a party held
shortly after the successful surgery, hits the highlights: Tabor
helped create the Freedom Seder in the late 1960s, co-founded
the Fabrangen chavurah and Jewish environmentalist
group Shomrei Adamah, and created the now-defunct radical
Jews for Urban Justice and the still-active Maryland political
organization Progressive Neighbors.

Rabbi David Shneyer, who has known Tabor since the 1960s,
said Tabor has had unique influence during his decades of work.

“He’s a sage of Jewish activism,” Shneyer said. “What can I
say? He’s a pleasure to hang out with and he’s a pleasure to get
arrested with.”
Digging Deeper
Tabor was raised in a “Conservadox” household in Brooklyn.

His undergraduate experience at SUNY Oneonta in upstate New
York was his first exposure to rural culture, as the college drew
students from two-year agriculture school programs.

Those students didn’t get much respect from Tabor and his
friends back then. “If you had told me then that I was going
to become a farmer, I would have been in complete disbelief,”
he said.

After Oneonta, Tabor enrolled in graduate school at the
University of Maryland, planning to become a teacher. The 1963
March on Washington took place on the weekend after Tabor’s
first week of classes.

“I went to it and everything became irrelevant after that,” he
said. A few weeks later, Tabor invited a black classmate to grab
beers together in College Park, Maryland.

“They wouldn’t serve him because it was all segregated,”
Tabor said. “I was shocked coming from New York City — I
didn’t know I was going into the Deep South. I immediately got
involved in everything: the sit-ins, working in the South on voter
registration.” Tabor was active in Hillel during college and continued
leading an observant Jewish life during his first few years in
Washington, D.C.

“Throughout all the civil rights involvement, for a long time I
kept on going to shul on Saturdays,” Tabor said. “I kept a strong
identity but I was really unable to fuse that identity with a sense
of change happening in the world.”
It was in this context that Tabor headed north with a
contingent of fellow Jews looking to reconnect with the faith on
their own terms.

“It came out of yiddishkeit and a basic feeling that we
Mike Tabor sells his farm’s goods at farmer’s markets.

24 MAY 14, 2020
Photos by David Stuck
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were going in the wrong direction as a
community of Jews,” Tabor said. “What’s
this heritage about? Where’s it coming
from? Why don’t we dig deeper?”
On the Farm
Tabor started farming in Pennsylvania in
the early 1970s as part of the “Diaspora
kibbutz” movement, helping create a
communal farm with Jewish activists
from Washington, D.C., who wanted to
escape the bleak political scene during
the height of the Vietnam War.

“It was the time of communes,” Tabor
said. “The war didn’t want to seem to
end, no matter what we did, and there
was an attempt to look at other avenues
for resolving our mental and existential
distress.” Tabor decamped to the foothills of
the Appalachian Mountains and set
about creating a sustainable community.

The group wrote to the Baron de Hirsch
Society, which helped develop Jewish
agriculture in pre-state Israel, for advice,
and sought guidance from a handful of
similar communities in New Jersey. In
the end, it was a short-lived effort kept
afloat with funds from Tabor’s side job as
a columnist in the Jewish press and paid
speaking engagements.

“We didn’t know how to make a living
farming,” Tabor said.

But Tabor stayed, struggling through a
series of lean years to build what is now a
successful fruit and vegetable operation.

The farm raises its harvest “naturally,”
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