For many, walking into a synagogue or Chabad House for the first time can be harder than it looks. There is a door, and a room, and people who already know each other.
At Pardess Chabad Farm, there is a driveway, a field, and a goat. “People aren’t even walking into a building,” Rabbi Zalman Sandhaus says. “They just go outside and walk around.”
The children’s programs are where the farm does its most literal work. Hebrew school meets on Sunday; Camp Gan Israel runs in the summer; in both, the children plant, harvest, care for animals and ride the tractor. They have learned to card, clean and spin wool into yarn, and to make cheese from goat milk. This past summer, teens and preteens came every Tuesday to volunteer, learning to mow, plant and harvest.
“They always involve them,” says Shari Spinale, whose three children have all gone to Chabad’s farm programs. “That’s extra special for the kids. They all feel very involved.” Her older two volunteer on the farm now; when a new synagogue went up on the grounds, her husband was asked to build something for it.
And then there’s the market. A weekly kosher market brings in food otherwise unavailable in Dutchess County, and a farmstand at the end of the driveway sells tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, zucchini, cucumbers, garlic, spinach and lettuce — no listed prices, pay what you can. Much of what is grown also goes back onto the Chabad House’s own tables; Rabbi Sandhaus says he has not bought a tomato in months. A good share of the customers are not Jewish, and many are regulars.
“We have someone that comes almost every Shabbos,” Rabbi Sandhaus says, “just from stopping off the street and buying a watermelon five years ago.”
None of this was part of the original plan.
Rabbi Zalman and Goldy Sandhaus, two Brooklyn natives with no experience of rural life, arrived in southern Dutchess County in 2014. With the goal of serving Jewish families scattered across a corner of the Hudson Valley, they started the way most Chabad Houses start: in their own home, hosting whatever they could fit inside it. They outgrew it, and then spent several years failing to find anything that felt right.
Southern Dutchess is full of farms, and the Sandhauses had spent enough Sundays taking their children fruit picking to notice. The idea of running a Chabad House on a farm was, by the rabbi’s own accounting, unrealistic. They went looking anyway.
The property they found belonged to a horse veterinarian: twenty-five acres on Blue Hill Road in Hopewell Junction. They bought it and moved in during the summer of 2019. The maintenance alone — before animals, before a single crop — was more than either of them had anticipated. The first real planting came in 2021, alongside more goats, sheep, and alpacas.
The theory underneath all of it is not sentimental. “Farming and Judaism are synonymous,” Rabbi Sandhaus says, and then runs through the proof: Sukkot’s four species, matzah milled from wheat, the biblical gifts of bikkurim, the shemitah year, the Torah’s numerous laws about grafting and vegetation — the list goes on. A farm makes a Jewish year legible in a way a classroom cannot. It also, he notes, makes a Chabad House approachable to people who would never walk into one.
Dr. Tom Bloom has lived in the area for twenty-five years and witnessed the whole arc, from the rabbi’s first visit to his office through the rental years to the farm. “The Sandhauses bring people together,” Bloom says. “That’s all I can say.”
The driveway is still there, and so is the goat, and every so often someone pulls over.
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