New Mexico Jewish LinkPublished by the Jewish Federation of New Mexico

How a Farmington Rabbi Built a Grief Circle Open to Every Faith

In the high desert of northwestern New Mexico, where mesas flatten into the horizon and the nearest large synagogue sits hours away, a small Jewish community has found an unexpected role. Rabbi Mendel Stern, who leads Congregation B'nai Israel in Farmington, began holding a bereavement support group during the long evenings of late autumn two years ago. What began as a few conversations over coffee has grown into a steady gathering where Christians, Muslims, Native Americans, and people with no religious affiliation sit together in a rented room behind the synagogue, sharing the work of mourning.

Stern's group is unusual not because grief support exists, but because the invitation is so wide. In a region where the Jewish population is tiny, the circle draws most of its members from outside the faith. For Stern, that alignment feels less like a stretch than a return to first principles. Jewish tradition, he argues, has long taught that sitting with the bereaved, known in Hebrew as nichum avelim, is a duty owed to every mourner, regardless of belief.

A Small Jewish Footprint in the High Desert

Farmington sits along the San Juan River, where Colorado, Utah, and the Navajo Nation meet. The town has a few hundred residents who identify as Jewish in some way, including several interfaith families, a Chabad emissary couple who visit monthly, and a scattering of retirees drawn to the dry climate. A weekly Shabbat service in the synagogue draws perhaps twenty people on a good Friday evening.

This smallness shapes everything. There is no separate building for youth programming, no full-time cantor, no day school within a hundred miles. The rabbi also serves as the community's visiting chaplain at the regional medical center, the funeral home, and occasionally the state prison. That proximity to loss showed him what the town lacked: a regular place to speak about grief without having to explain one's background.

The Jewish population of New Mexico is concentrated in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, where institutions like the Jewish Community Center and the New Mexico Holocaust & Intolerance Museum anchor a visible presence. In the northern part of the state, the rabbi is often the only Jewish clergy anyone knows. The bereavement group, Stern says, is partly a way of being present where the denomination's footprint is light.

Why a Bereavement Group, and Why Now

The first sessions began in 2022, after a wave of losses that included the death of a local teacher from cancer, a fatal car accident on US 550, and the slow passing of an elder in the Navajo community. Stern found himself visiting three families in a single week, each holding a different vocabulary for the same pain.

He had been trained as a chaplain in addition to his rabbinic ordination, and had led shiva minyans for decades. The shift came when a Methodist minister, whose own wife had died that summer, asked whether he could sit in on a Jewish mourning practice to learn from it. Stern said yes. Several others asked the same question in the following months. The informal practice of opening the door gradually became a scheduled meeting.

The group's name, Lev Shalem, means "a whole heart" in Hebrew. The title is a quiet theological claim. Grief, Stern teaches, does not split a heart in two but asks the mourner to carry a fuller one. The name also signals continuity: even when the people in the room do not share a faith, the language of the group remains rooted in Jewish text.

A Door Without a Mezuzah: Welcoming Non-Jewish Grievers

Stern decided not to require any religious background, observance, or even a prior connection to a Jewish community. Participants do not need to know the mourner's kaddish or have visited a synagogue. The only expectation is a willingness to listen and to speak honestly.

The choice has not been without friction. Some members of the small Farmington congregation wondered whether opening the group so widely would dilute its Jewish character. Stern has answered by keeping the ritual framework Jewish while keeping the room open. Each session begins with the lighting of a candle, a reading of Psalm 23 in Hebrew and English, and a brief teaching drawn from the Talmud or contemporary Jewish writers. After that, the format is the format of any well-run grief circle: a check-in, a shared story, sometimes a poem, and silence.

This blend resembles what some Australian Jewish communities have long practiced in places like Sydney's eastern suburbs or the older neighbourhoods of Melbourne, where Jewish counselling services often run groups advertised as multifaith. The Sydney Jewish Museum has partnered with secular palliative care programs on services that reach patients of many backgrounds. Stern's circle is a smaller, more rural version of the same instinct: the Jewish community offering a framework, the wider community filling the chairs.

What Happens on a Tuesday Evening

The group meets on the second and fourth Tuesday of each month in a side room of the synagogue, on folding chairs arranged in a wide circle. Sessions run ninety minutes, and attendance varies between six and fourteen people. Ages range from a thirty-four-year-old widower to a seventy-eight-year-old retired nurse. About a third identify as Jewish, a third as Christian, and the rest as Muslim, agnostic, or part of the local Indigenous community.

Each session follows a rhythm: the candle and reading, a one-sentence check-in, a short teaching, then open sharing without advice-giving.

Ground rules posted by the door

Jewish Mourning Practice Meeting Wider Traditions

Jewish mourning has a precise shape: shiva for seven days, shloshim for thirty, a year of kaddish for parents. Most participants in Lev Shalem are not in that formal system, since the group serves people of any background and any length of time since their loss. Stern, however, draws on the structure of Jewish mourning to give the circle its rhythm.

The idea of sitting shiva — literally, sitting with the mourner — has become the group's central image. Members are not expected to comfort each other with solutions. They are expected to be present. When a Native American attendee described a similar practice of sitting with a grieving family for four days, Stern read aloud a passage from Maimonides about bikkur cholim, visiting the sick, and the two traditions rested beside each other without strain.

Some Muslim participants have brought their own du'a prayers into the room. A Pentecostal woman taught the group a hymn her mother used to sing. Stern keeps a small binder of these contributions, which he calls minhag hamakom, the custom of the place. The phrase comes from a Talmudic principle that local practice can override general law, and it has become the group's working theology.

Principles the rabbi returns to most often

Lessons for Distant Places, from the Outback to the High Desert

What a rabbi does in a town of forty-five thousand in New Mexico has a counterpart in some surprising places. In regional Australia, where Jewish communities are tiny and scattered across cities like Perth, Adelaide, and Hobart, rabbis often hold similar roles. A rabbi in Alice Springs may serve a Jewish population of a few dozen while working as a multifaith chaplain across a vast region. The arithmetic is familiar: a small Jewish community offering pastoral care to a much larger one.

Australian multifaith councils, particularly in Melbourne and Sydney, have built similar grief programs. The Jewish angle is rarely the loudest voice in those rooms, but it is often the one that insists on a particular kind of discipline. The Jewish contribution, Stern suggests, is the refusal to rush the mourner. Avelut, the state of being a mourner, has its own calendar.

Visitors who travel between the American Southwest and the Australian outback sometimes notice how the two landscapes rhyme: red earth, long drives between towns, small populations spread thin. The conditions that make a bereavement group necessary in Farmington are not so different from those in Broome, Kalgoorlie, or a coastal town three hours from Adelaide. In both places, distance from family, the slow thinning of traditional religious life, and the quiet reality of aging rural populations leave space for grief to go unspoken. A circle on a Tuesday evening, in a rented room, is one small answer.

Lev Shalem has now held more than seventy sessions. Some participants come for a few months and move on. Others return for years. The rabbi continues to teach, to light the candle, to read the psalm, and to trust that the room will hold whoever walks in. In a region where the Jewish community is small enough to be invisible to most, the group has become a quiet claim on something larger: that mourning is a human craft, and that the Jewish tradition of accompanying the bereaved still has something useful to offer a high-desert town, and perhaps a coastal one far away.