Kashi Ashram (Ma Jaya)

Joyce Green's transformation — Brooklyn housewife to Ma Jaya, guru of a Florida ashram, via visionary experiences she dated to the early 1970s — produced one of American alternative religion's more distinctive figures: profane, funny, theatrical, teaching an interfaith devotionalism centred on service ('feed everybody'), with Hindu iconography and her own guru-status at the centre. The ashram she founded on eighty riverfront acres in Sebastian, Florida drew several hundred residents and students at its height.

The public-service record is real and was widely honoured: from the mid-1980s, when AIDS patients were being turned away elsewhere, Ma Jaya and the ashram nursed, housed, and buried them; the River Fund and related service arms carried that work onward. That face of the community — interfaith, charitable, publicly engaged — is part of any honest accounting.

The control allegations come overwhelmingly from the community's second generation. In memoirs, interviews, and reporting across decades, adults raised at Kashi describe a childhood architecture familiar from this catalogue's communal entries: children separated from parents into ashram child-houses, with parental bonds actively de-emphasised in favour of the guru ('Ma is your real mother' in multiple accounts); discipline — including corporal punishment — administered within that system; schooling and outside contact controlled; and adult members' money, property, and labour flowing to the community under intense personal loyalty to Ma Jaya, whose word organised marriages, moves, and members' standing. Several second-generation accounts describe leaving as rupture: families divided between stayers and leavers, and departure treated as betrayal of Ma. The ashram has consistently disputed characterisations of abuse, framing the child-houses as communal education of its era and pointing to reforms; the allegations have not been adjudicated.

Ma Jaya died in 2012. Kashi continues at reduced scale — yoga school, interfaith services, the service foundations — led by senior students. The entry is scored in the moderate band on the strength, consistency, and independence of the second-generation testimony, with confidence low and every axis-relevant claim attributed: the case sits, with several others in the catalogue, in the category of communities whose documented service record and whose ex-member accounts must both be held in view.