Recovering from addiction is difficult, and made all the more cumbersome if one is part of a community that for years was all too quick to sweep such problems under the proverbial rug.
South Florida Jewish Center Provides Spiritual Help for Recovering Addicts
Recovering from addiction is difficult, and made all the more cumbersome if one is part of a community that for years was all too quick to sweep such problems under the proverbial rug.
Just ask Eitan, a 54-year-old man who grew up as an observant Jew in the Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood of Borough Park. Name the addiction, and he’s struggled with it.
“Our biggest problem is our stigma,” says Eitan, who like many recovering alcoholics and drug addicts prefers to not give out his last name to publications. People in the Jewish community tend to think “that only non-Jews are alcoholics.”
Not Rabbi Meir and Frumi Kessler, directors of the Chabad Humanitarian Center in Boca Raton, Fla. The couple moved to South Florida three years ago as Chabad-Lubavitch emissaries and quickly found themselves catering to an expanding group of recovering addicts and people dealing with dependency issues. Soon after, they founded the city’s Jewish Recovery Center.
