Ancestor Season Friends & Family Fundraiser

🍂 In this fall season where people across cultures honor the dead, we invite you to honor your ancestors through supporting the powerful work of pilgrimage – putting feet on the earth in our ancestral lands, an act that creates healing up and down our lineages and beyond.🍂

When our group arrives in Poland, we say to our ancestors and the land:

“HINEINI. I am here.”

Today, we invite you into this presence with our ancestors by making a gift in honor of your own ancestors.

We know this work of ancestral recovery creates ripples of healing and justice far beyond the 18 people who journey with us physically. When you make an offering, you further amplify this impact while supporting folks who couldn't otherwise afford to take part in this transformational journey, which is made on behalf of us all.

When you make your contribution, you’re invited to share the names of the ancestors you are honoring – wherever they're from – along with the word HINEINI in the “dedicate” section, so that we may honor them together.

(In “payment notes” please put the name of the person who sent you here.)

Ancestral Recovery for Collective Liberation: More About This Work

Returning to the forgotten places of our Ashkenazi ancestors offers us the opportunity to restore our connection to the land, culture, and lineages that still live within us, and to seed from them a new expression of Judaism beyond nationalism – one of solidarity and collective liberation.

For the past two summers, 18 Ashkenazi Jews have travelled on a transformational healing pilgrimage to Poland, where we emphasize truly facing the massive grief and pain – and the immense beauty and LIFE – our people experienced in European lands for one thousand years.

Wandering through ancient Jewish cemeteries, overgrown and tangled with nettles and grandmother trees, singing Yiddish revolution songs in our great-grandparents’ towns, grieving and celebrating Shabbat together on ancestral ground — this is the ground our healing takes root in.

Through visceral explorations of Jewish history, immersion into ancestral traditions and rituals, celebrating Yiddish language and culture, studying texts of radical rabbis, and connecting with the plants, trees, and rivers, we go deeper than touring Holocaust sites.

And when we do encounter these places, we use witness, ceremony, song, prayer, and direct earth and ancestor connection to metabolize our grief – memorializing Jewish historical trauma in a way that doesn’t harden us into fear, anger, victimhood, and perpetration —  but instead softens us into empathy, compassion, and creating a Judaism  of Never Again For Anyone.

Our Ask:

We see this work as our generation's role & responsibility – so we can help to stop the cycle of violence that has now led the descendants of a genocide to commit a genocide in the name of Jewish safety. Through emerging spiritual and cultural technologies, we hope to transform a story of perpetual victimhood into a story of strength and solidarity – in service of collective healing, peace and justice, and to do the paradigm-shifting work of metabolizing – instead of weaponizing – Jewish trauma.

We are a young, grassroots project with a small annual budget and no institutional funding, just a growing community of individuals who believe this work matters. Most of our 500 donors last year gave between $18 and $360. Each of our 18 group members is aiming to raise $1,000 toward our $18K goal. If you're seeing this because you know someone in the group (or even if you don’t!) — your gift is how we get there!

By giving, you are directly supporting ancestral recovery work that goes far beyond each of our individual lineages into the collective.

To learn more about this work, check out:

Our website: www.ashkenaziancestraljourneys.org

Our Short Film, Mending Memory: https://vimeo.com/1128676417 (PW: HowWeRemember)

2026 Travelogue, photos, and other writings: https://medium.com/@juliewolk

Our Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/juliecwolk/


If you’re interested in travelling with us next year, email juliewolk@gmail.com (We are currently taking applications.)


***If you're inspired to support this work at a higher level, we'd love to hear from you. We have big visions. Get in touch with juliewolk@gmail.com.***

Make a gift to your ancestors this season that serves collective healing.

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Ashkenazi Ancestral Journeys is a fiscally sponsored organization of Fiscal Sponsorship Allies. By donating, you agree to the Fiscal Sponsorship Allies Donor Terms & Conditions.