Diamonds in the Rough

It was one of Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski’s remarkable innovations: a rehab center for Israeli prisoners, a hostel where convicted felons entangled in dangerous addictions could come clean. While outsiders looked at them with a mixture of scorn and fear, Rabbi Twerski, world-renowned psychiatrist and healer of souls, looked into their neshamos and instead of a piece of dirty glass, he saw a diamond.

Modeled after the famed Gateway Rehabilitation Center Rabbi Twerski founded in Pittsburgh in 1972 that has successfully treated tens of thousands of addicts, the Shaar Hatikvah center, run in conjunction with the Israeli Prisons Service, proved what Rabbi Twerski believed all along: that convicts jailed for drug-related crimes can reenter society as productive citizens. Yet without such intervention, most ex-convicts return to society as dealers and pushers and are back in jail within a year.

In an interview with Mishpacha not long before Rabbi Twerski passed away at the end of January at age 90, he spoke humbly of the turnarounds from the program he set up in the 1990s. Back then, he was dividing his time between his Israeli and American centers — both of which were designed to help addicts uncover the underlying reasons behind their substance abuse and move beyond the destructive behavior. He remembers one fellow who’d been in and out of jail as if it were a revolving door.

When they first met, the convict was blunt: “Rabbi, I have no chance of getting out of this,” he told Rabbi Twerski. “I’m human scum.” But Rabbi Twerski looked at him and declared, “You’re not scum. You’re a diamond. You just need a little polishing. You’re going to do the rehab in our program, and you’ll see.”