The Jewish Renewal movement and the related Havurah (fellowship) movement emerge in the late 1960s as countercultural responses to what their founders saw as the institutional rigidity and spiritual emptiness of mainstream American Judaism. The Havurah movement began with Havurat Shalom in Somerville, Massachusetts (1968) — a communal, egalitarian, participatory approach to Jewish learning and prayer outside institutional synagogue structures. Jewish Renewal, shaped decisively by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (1924–2014) — a Lubavitch-trained rabbi who drew on Hasidism, Kabbalah, Eastern spirituality, and feminist theology — seeks to renew Judaism from within through ecstatic prayer, meditation, and neo-Hasidic spirituality. Both streams influenced the broader Jewish world significantly, contributing to the Havurah prayer book (Kol Haneshamah) and to the spiritual revival within all Jewish denominations from the 1970s onward.