New Mexico Jewish LinkPublished by the Jewish Federation of New Mexico

Tu Bishvat Reaches Inside a New Mexico Correctional Facility

Inside a low-security dormitory at the Southern New Mexico Correctional Facility, a small circle of inmates gathered around a folding table strewn with almonds, dates, figs, and a few overripe mangoes. The cups were filled with grape juice rather than wine. The room smelled faintly of dried apricot. It was Tu Bishvat, the Jewish New Year of the Trees, and for the first time in years, several of the men were about to mark it with a traditional Seder.

The ceremony had been months in the making. Chaplain volunteers and lay members of southern New Mexico's Jewish community hauled in fruit, photocopied haggadot, and negotiated with facility administrators for a slot that would not collide with parole hearings or work details. By the time the candles were lit, three participants who had not stepped inside a synagogue since before their incarceration found themselves reciting the four blessings over fruit in the same order their ancestors whispered in Safed four centuries ago.

The event drew about a dozen inmates, mostly Hispanic and Anglo men with a few African American participants, alongside three Jewish volunteers and the facility's contracted chaplain. What unfolded was equal parts ritual, agricultural reflection, and quiet grief for lives cut off from the orchard seasons of home.

The Setting and the Spark

The Southern New Mexico Correctional Facility sits in Doña Ana County, a few miles outside Las Cruces, in a landscape more accustomed to pecan groves and jalapeño fields than to mystical fruit meditations. The state Department of Corrections facility houses roughly 500 men across medium- and minimum-custody units, and its religious programming runs on a thin budget carried largely by volunteer clergy and outside faith groups.

The Tu Bishvat idea came from Aaron Levenson, a retired pharmacist who drives down from Silver City once a month with a duffel bag of kosher food. Last winter, while packing up leftover Passover matzah, he mentioned to the volunteer chaplain that the men had asked three times whether they could hold their own Seder. By Purim, Levenson had assembled a small team with the Jewish Federation of New Mexico, recruited a Hebrew-school teacher from Las Cruces who had never visited a prison, and started printing handouts.

Conditions inside correctional chapels are not what a congregational rabbi would recognize. The folding chairs were the orange plastic kind used in outdoor messes. The kiddush cup was a Styrofoam container borrowed from the staff break room. The dried fruit came from Costco. None of it dimmed the moment.

Walking Through the Seder

The Tu Bishvat Seder borrows the structure of the Passover Seder but trades matzah and bitter herbs for fruit, wine or grape juice in graduated colors, and readings from the Psalms and the Zohar. The volunteer teacher printed a four-page guide pairing each cup with a level of ripeness and a corresponding spiritual idea.

In the cabbalistic tradition that took root in sixteenth-century Safed under Rabbi Isaac Luria, four glasses of wine or juice are poured, beginning with pale white and deepening through rosé and pink to full red. The first cup represents the dormant winter season, when seeds lie beneath frost and intention has not yet taken form. Each successive cup corresponds to a season of ripening.

Cup Fruit Stage Season Imagery Spiritual Focus
First (white) Hard, inedible fruit Mid-winter, soil frozen Will and intention
Second (pale rosé) Pitted fruit beginning to sweeten Late winter thaw Asking and striving
Third (rose) First edible ripe fruit Early spring blossoms Giving thanks
Fourth (red) Fully ripe, sweetest fruit Late spring harvest Joy and prayer

What the volunteers carried through the gate:

The volunteers also arranged bowls of the seven traditional species of the Land of Israel: wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives, and dates. A few of the participants had worked in pecan or pistachio orchards before their incarceration, and the mention of fig trees broke open a long silence in the room.

The Heart of the Room

For participants, the ritual produced what one volunteer called "the tenderest hour I have ever spent with strangers in any setting." Several of the men shared their first names with the group and explained, haltingly, where they had last tasted fresh fruit. One described an aunt in the Mesilla Valley who sent pomegranates through her cousin every fall until she died. Another spoke about a parole officer who had grown citrus on a side lot.

A retired long-haul trucker who goes by Nachum in study group mentioned that he had not been called by his Hebrew name in fifteen years and visibly straightened when the leader said it aloud during the blessing over the first cup. A native New Mexican who converted to Judaism before his imprisonment said the most uncomfortable part was hearing the bracha for the earth's fruits and remembering how often he had taken orchards for granted while working them.

These testimonies mattered because the New Year of the Trees, more than almost any Jewish festival, turns on the relationship between people and the land. The Talmudic discussion in Rosh Hashanah places Tu Bishvat at the boundary of one agricultural year and the next, a hinge on which tithing and harvest calendars pivot. In a setting where both land and liberty are restricted, that hinge carries a different weight.

Community Hands and the Wider Web

Organizing the Seder required help from outside the walls. The Jewish Federation of New Mexico funded kosher supplies and coordinated volunteer background checks. The Las Cruces synagogue donated leftover lulavim from Sukkot. A faculty member from New Mexico State University assisted with Hebrew pronunciation. The facility's volunteer chaplaincy program handled security clearances and counted heads at the door.

The network that supported the Seder included:

Australian readers may notice a faint resonance with programs closer to home. In Sydney, the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies has long supported chaplaincy visits through Corrective Services NSW, and Rabbi Dr. Jeremy Lawrence of the Great Synagogue has spoken about the spiritual pressure felt by incarcerated Jews during the High Holy Days. In Melbourne, the rabbis of Caulfield Hebrew Congregation have run Rosh Hashanah and Passover gatherings inside Port Phillip Prison for more than a decade, often partnered with the Victorian Council of Churches. The Jewish community in Brisbane, anchored by the Brisbane Hebrew Congregation and Bnei Akiva schools, has begun to host dedicated holiday visits at the Wolston Correctional Centre.

Across the English-speaking world, similar prison-seder work has grown within Christian traditions as well. Catholic prison ministry has historically been among the most developed networks in the Americas, and contemporary Catholic pastoral teams frequently share curricula and chaplains with Jewish and Protestant counterparts to support sacred observances among interfaith inmate populations. In some Latin American dioceses, that coordination has been documented through communication channels maintained by Latin American bishop networks, whose reporting reaches beyond any single confession. Closer to New Mexico, correctional institutions rely on the same shared calendar of religious holidays to schedule volunteer entry.

Roots That Travel

What carried from the prison chapel into the broader Jewish community of southern New Mexico is harder to measure. Several participants asked whether they could receive Hebrew-name certificates so that, if released, they would have documents confirming the identity used during Jewish study. A few asked for copies of the haggadah to mark up during their upcoming family visits. The volunteers agreed to print spares.

The Federation received three letters in the week after the event, all addressed to the volunteer chaplain and one written in the careful cursive of a man in his seventies who has been inside for nineteen years. Each asked whether the program might extend to a Yom HaAtzmaut event later in the spring, and whether students from the local day school might come to read responsively.

That request points toward the kind of cross-generational Jewish memory work that sustains communities long after any single festival ends. In the same way that Jewish communities in Hobart have opened Tu Bishvat plantings to local secondary students, organizers in Las Cruces began to sketch a program in which teenage b'nai mitzvah students would interview the inmates about their memories of home orchards and harvest tables. The interviews, recorded and transcribed, would then travel back into the b'nai mitzvah curriculum as a living archive.

Bringing the Tree Inside the Wall

Beyond the ritual itself, the practical question of how to mark Tu Bishvat when no soil is reachable became a quiet preoccupation for many in the room. Some participants experimented during the Seder with sprouting wheat berries in disposable cups taped to the inside of their windows, hoping to see green by Passover. A volunteer from the Federation brought in a tray of bare-root saplings grown by the New Mexico chapter of the Jewish National Fund, which the facility agreed to plant on a strip of unused ground between two recreation yards.

For readers in Adelaide and Perth, where summer heat and water restrictions have shaped Tu Bishvat programming toward indoor sprout trays and balcony citrus for years, this kind of constraint is familiar. In much of inland Australia, the Jewish community has had to make holiday rituals work on apartment balconies and in synagogue courtyards watered by recycled greywater, and the lessons carry cleanly back to a correctional setting where any green thing is a deliberate act of hope.

The next step, agreed by the volunteer coordinator on the spot, is a second Tu Bishvat Seder scheduled exactly one year from the first, this time paired with a small planting ceremony on the facility grounds. The Federation has committed to funding saplings, and a confirmation class from the local congregation has tentatively agreed to attend. If the weather cooperates, by Tu Bishvat 2026 the men who came to this Seder will walk past a young almond tree they themselves placed in the ground.