Book Launches New Effort To Help Jews In Recovery

by Doug Chandler
Special To The Jewish Week

Ida, a New York City resident now in her 50s, recalls days as a child when her father would rip out clumps of her hair and beat her until she was black and blue — a consequence of his addiction to alcohol. A “mean drunk,” she says, he also abused his wife, Ida’s late mother.

But the fact that her parents were “pillars” of their Long Island Jewish community, where they helped “build their synagogue from the ground up,” made the prospect of her receiving any help from those quarters a daunting one. Each and every time she approached her community’s leaders, Ida says, rabbis “would tell me I didn’t know any better — that I should be careful to say things that aren’t

true.”

Ida is one of the 20 contributors to a new book, “Jewish Sisters in Sobriety,” published by Jewish Alcoholics, Chemically Dependent Persons and Significant Others (JACS), a program of the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services.

As with all of those contributors, she chose to write under a pen name, Ida, to protect her anonymity. But her story and others in the book are candid and true, offering vivid insight into alcoholism, drug addiction and co-dependency among Jewish women, each of whom is now in recovery.

The book, in fact, is part of a wider project involving JBFCS and the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan, said Jonathan Katz, director of the Jewish Board’s Rita J. Kaplan Jewish Connections Programs, the division that oversees JACS.

The two agencies, both beneficiaries of UJA-Federation of New York, recently co-sponsored a panel discussion featuring Katz and three of the book’s contributors. That event, in turn, marked the JCC’s entry into the field of addiction and recovery, Katz said.

Susie Kessler, director of the JCC’s adult-support programs, noted that both agencies already work together to help single-parent families, as well as Jewish adults struggling with bereavement, illness or divorce. The new effort expands that work and will concentrate first on educating the Jewish community, letting members know that addiction affects Jews as surely as it does any other group and that resources exist to help.

The problem of addiction in the Jewish community is intensified when it is compounded with tendencies to deny that compulsive behavior is an issue among Jews or to stigmatize Jews who are struggling with addiction, according to experts on the matter.

“People either don’t believe you [when you discuss addiction among Jews] or they overreact,” Katz said, quoting what he often hears. “‘Oh, that’s terrible! That’s a shonda!’” He added that either response creates an extra barrier for addicts and their families who are searching for help. “All it does is drive the problem underground.”

Recognition of the problem has improved in recent years, Katz continued, “but it still has a long way to go.” Most Jewish day schools, for instance, won’t turn JACS down when it suggests a program or speaker. But some have requested that any event be kept as quiet as possible, fearing that it might generate a perception that the school has a problem. Similarly, Katz knows of synagogues that have declined to host a 12-Step fellowship, like Alcoholics Anonymous, fearing that the meetings could draw an “unsavory element, quote-unquote.” As a result, many 12-Step meetings take place in churches, deterring many Jews from attending or discomforting those who do attend.

Jewish women caught in the disease — either as addicts themselves or as relatives of an addict — are even more isolated than Jewish men, said Ida, whose father and older brother remain active addicts.
While men tend to work outside the home or outside the Jewish community, giving them “a wider view of the world,” many women spend their days within the confines of their own neighborhood, she said. In addition, she continued, “Women, in general, look to nurture their families and believe they can make things better,” as she did while tending to her father and brother. The reality, she and others said, is that no one can change or control an addict’s behavior.

Shaina, one of the three contributors who took part in last month’s panel discussion, described addiction as “a form of insanity” that involves lying, secrecy and denial — even on the part of family members, like herself, touched by the addict’s behavior.

“If you love someone, you think, ‘How can it be?’” said Shaina, who described herself as “frum from birth” and a resident of one of the city’s mostly-Orthodox communities. In an interview with the Jewish Week, Shaina, 47, said she failed to see her husband’s addiction from the very beginning of their relationship, more than 20 years ago, when he told her that he once used marijuana regularly but no longer did. “That should have rung alarm bells” for her, she said, but instead she figured that smoking pot was a normal activity for teenagers and, at most, a passing phase. “It never entered my mind that anyone with an Orthodox upbringing could have a problem,” she said.

Ignorance, though, soon turned to denial, and Shaina eventually became complicit in her husband’s addiction, ignoring his behavior or even covering it up as he smoked in their home’s bathroom, stole money from her wallet and was fired from his job. His financial woes, at one point, nearly put their home in foreclosure, which Shaina prevented, she said, by dipping into her own inheritance. By that point, he was also snorting cocaine.

Like others who contributed to the book, Shaina also discovered that Jewish institutions offered little, if any, help. One rabbi visited by the couple suggested that her husband engage in daf yomi (the daily reading of Torah) or chesed (charity work) as a way to keep himself busy and away from substance abuse — a notion that now makes Shaina cringe.

“A lot of the rabbis just blunder through,” she said. “They think religion will cure the addiction.”
Two other contributors to the book — both participants in the panel discussion — are themselves recovering addicts. One is Miriam, 58, who was raised in an upper-middle-class home in Southern California. As one of the few Jews in her neighborhood, she felt “alone and different” — a pain that led her first to an addiction to sugar and overeating and, later, to hashish and other substances. She lived for a while in Israel and Europe, hoping with each move that a new location or a new relationship would break her of her patterns. But she “ran wild” each time, engaging, she said, in dangerous behavior.
The other woman is Valarie, who began drinking when she was 13, simply because liquor was “readily available” in her Long Island home, and who turned to alcohol again in her 20s, while caught in a physically abusive marriage. Now 47 and married a second time, she recalled in the book how every day “was a struggle just to survive. On most days, I would wake up from a night of drinking and be disappointed that I hadn’t had the guts to kill myself the night before.”

Each of the women eventually found their way to one or more 12-Step fellowships and to JACS, where, for the first time, they learned that other Jews faced the same problem with addiction that they did. For Valarie, that happened after she read a book on co-dependency and “recognized myself in the book.” For Shaina, the journey began when she finally “hit my bottom,” realizing the “painful reality” of her husband’s drug use. Miriam attributes her recovery “to God.”

Several common threads run through their stories and others in the book, which was funded by a grant from the Jewish Women’s Foundation of New York, an organization that helps programs that support women and girls in the Jewish community.

One of those threads involves spirituality, an important part of the 12-Steps tradition. Shaina, Miriam and Valarie define their connections to a “Higher Power” in different ways, but all of them feel their connections have been lost and then regained. And each believes that having that connection keeps her ego in check, which is necessary for recovery.

“It’s just a consciousness greater than yourself,” said Valarie, who, though secular, considers the concept of a Higher Power “my equillibrium, my sense of balance.” Ego, she said, “stands for ‘easing God out.’ That’s the metaphor in the rooms,” where 12-Step fellowships meet.

The other thread is the importance of service to the community, which Miriam calls “one of the most important things” in keeping her sober. Valarie, for instance, works for JACS, linking Jews troubled by addiction to rehab programs and other resources.

“I have a Rolodex of every type of Jew,” she said — “every black hat, every wig, every transgender and every level of observance or lack thereof.” That Rolodex could be an apt description for JACS itself, which welcomes any and all Jews without judgment, its leaders say.

For each of the three women, contributing to the book constitutes a form of service, educating the community and letting other addicts know that they’re not alone.
Describing the difference between her pre-JACS days and today, Shaina said she “may have been religious, following an Orthodox lifestyle and keeping all the tenets, but I’m not sure it wasn’t by rote — I wasn’t living in the joy of it.” That joy today “is much greater,” she added.