Rabbinical Students Visit Jails, Bringing A Message

Hagerstown, MD — As Avraham Levin and Schneur Yecheilov stepped out their rental car in the parking lot of the Roxbury Correctional Institution last Friday morning, suitcases, garment bags — and boxes of food — bulged from the back seats.

“It’s hard sometimes when you’re traveling to find kosher food,” said Levin, with a small laugh. “So, we have to bring a lot with us.”

Levin and Yecheilov, both 20, were conservatively dressed in white shirts, black pants, yarmulkes, and thick traditional Jewish beards. They grabbed religious literature and ritual Teffilin and Kipahs for prayer with the men they were going inside to visit. They may have appeared out of place walking from the gravel lot towards the tower, gate and barbed wire, but they did not seem the least bit uncomfortable or apprehensive.

Maybe it’s because they have been doing this all summer.

Nationwide program

Levin and Yecheilov, volunteer rabbinical students from the Talmudical Seminary Oholei Torah in Brooklyn, N.Y., are part the Aleph Institute’s nationwide prison outreach program that will visit 5,000 Jewish inmates in 450 prisons in 45 states over six weeks this summer.

In June they began their effort at several New Jersey institutions to acquaint, or re-acquaint, Jewish offenders with their faith. Staying in motels and living modestly along the way, they carried their message into Delaware, finally arriving in Maryland at the beginning of this month. When they finish their mission this week, visiting three prisons in Jessup, they will have traveled the length and breadth of the state, from the Eastern Correctional Institute on the Eastern Shore to Baltimore to Cumberland.

The Aleph Institute, headquartered in Miami and founded in 1991, provides outreach and social services to families in crisis, works with Depart- ment of Defense on religious and chaplain issues within the U.S. military, and attempts to address the religious, educational, humanitarian and advocacy needs of incarcerated.

They often advocate for the availability of kosher food. The Aleph Institute also may send cheese in place of other dairy products that prisoners might not be able to receive through the commissary. They help prisoners prepare for Passover and will contact prison officials on behalf of inmates wishing to light candles as part of their celebration of religious holidays.

Religious education, whether it be an introduction or re-introduction to Judiasm, however, is central to the mission of the volunteer rabbinical students like Levin and Yecheilov, and the Aleph Institute’s work.

]“The first thing is we want to ask how they are doing and find out what they are lacking in terms of their Judaic practice, and what we can do to help fill those needs,” said Leah Sherman, a spokeswoman for Aleph, which maintains a database of Jewish prisoners in the United States — “If someone cannot set a Seder plate — for instance, the prison may provide an egg and lettuce, but not a shank bone — we will cook it and send the shank bone, vacuum-sealed, to them.”

Levin and Yecheilov said they take copious notes of the inmates status and take an inventory of their requests. They exchange and copy down mailing addresses, meaning block and unit numbers, Levin explained. They also ask if the prisoners have experienced any anti-Semitism while incarcerated.

“For the most part they say ‘no,’” Levin said. “They’re treated well.”

Seek understanding,

ask for forgiveness

Levin and Yecheilov said for the most part they’ve been treated well, too. In Maryland, they’ve found there are fewer Jewish prisoners than in New Jersey where typically a rabbi will visit once a week.

Here, with a smaller Jewish population, comes fewer rabbis to serve the incarcerated population.

Roxbury Correctional Institution chaplain Abdul Mateen noted Jewish Big Brother and Big Sister volunteers are among the many groups that visit prisoners in the state. However, highlighting a shortage of professional Jewish and other clergy nationally, there is only one full-time paid Jewish chaplain in the state’s entire correctional system, Rabbi Harold Axelrod, who is based in Baltimore. Axelrod presented a plan to make kosher food available to the state’s estimated 250-260 Jewish inmates last November, but that effort has apparently stalled in the bureaucracy.

In the Maryland prisons, Levin and Yecheilov said they’ve generally met with a half-dozen or so men. Not all are Jewish, some are just interested in Judiasm, perhaps in conversion. Levin and Yecheilov said prison chaplains serve the men the best they can, according to the inmates they’ve interviewed.

Some prisoners, Yecheilov said, have become observant for the first time in their lives while incarcerated.

“It varies in intensity,” Yecheilov said, “but many are beginning to pray and are learning the Torah.”

Levin and Yecheilov have said they’ve found men and women (they visited Maryland Corrrectional Institute for Women in Jessup) open to what they have to say, too.

“I had someone look me in the eye and ask me how old I was,” Levin recounted. “I told him, I was 20. He looked at me and said, ‘I’ve been locked up longer than you’ve been alive.’ Then he listened to what I had to say.”

Corrections, the Aleph Institute believes, needs to be about more than the warehousing of criminals or removing the symptoms of criminal behavior and not the underlying causes. They believe successful rehabilitation can only come as the result of compelling positive change in an inmate’s life. However, they believe the majority of time that inmates spend is wasted.

The rabbinical students encourage inmates to learn and seek understanding about righting their wrongs. The visiting students let inmates know that they are not alone and that someone cares about them.

“We want the person to think about their past, and the future,” Levin said. “And when they think about today, to think about what it means to live a spiritual life.”

A second chance

Usually, the rabbinical students meet with prisoners in a quiet room, or chapel. Sometimes in the larger visitor’s waiting area. A lot depends on the particulars of each inmate’s status. They have had to walk through different sections of the prisons. They have met men who have committed the worst of crimes. Many, of course, profess their innocence.

It would be hard to hold out hope to others if the young rabbinical students were full of fear themselves while visiting institutions, but that has not been an issue.

“I wouldn’t say I have anxiety while I’m in there,” Levin said. “I mean, if I’m in the courtyard I keep my eyes open, but I’m not nervous or anxious.”

Yecheilov described visiting the prisons as, “in general, a very nice experience,” which may seem odd until you remember where they are from.

“There are guards around,” said Levin. “I would say I’m more worried in Brooklyn at 2 a.m. when no one else is on the street.”

Crucial to their mission beyond even the promise of correspondence, kosher food, candles and contact with the outside world, they say, is the promise of hope.

“Everybody has a second chance,” said Levin. “As long as they are willing to look at their past, offer repentance to God, He will forgive them.

“The beauty of life is overcoming the past,” Levin continued. “Every person should have good and bad things in their life — that is part of God’s plan — that is why evil and desire and lust exist. But you should turn your interest away from those things. If you do, God will help you. And He will help you do the things you cannot do for yourself.

Even the man facing 40 years, Levin said, “can spiritually live a new life.”