Though a top-tier psychiatrist, Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski was first and foremost a link in the chain of holy forebears whose legacy informed his own holy mission

Photos: Elchanan Kotler, Mishpacha archives

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.”

About six months later, a call came to the rehab center. A wealthy Jew from Tel Aviv had passed away, and the family had decided to donate all the contents of his home to Shaar Hatikvah. “Just send someone to come and take the stuff,” they said.

The secretary asked this fellow to take a truck to Tel Aviv, load up the furniture, and bring it to the hostel. He began loading the contents into the truck, but as he dragged the sofa around a corner, an envelope fell out. Inside were five thousand dollars. No one was looking. It would have been such an easy steal. But without thinking twice, he went back to the house and returned the money.

Only after he sat down at the wheel did he realize the transformation that had come over him over these last months. From a thief who couldn’t keep his hands out of others’ pockets, he’d just returned a huge wad of cash. And then he remembered the words of his rebbe-psychiatrist. When he came to the hostel, he took a piece of tape and a sheet of paper and created a makeshift new sign for the door. It read “Diamond Polishing Center.”