She was a Jewish girl, very active in Chabad, in her late 30’s, with two teenage kids.  “A very popular person,” Rabbi Avi Richler, founder of Chabad of Glouchester County, remembered.  “I knew she was using prescription medication and that she had been in a car accident 5-10 years before.  One day she called me and said ‘Rabbi, there’s no food in my house.’ I went to Shop Rite, filled the cart with food, and drove to her house. The next Tuesday, I got a call from her boyfriend. The girl was dead.”

Richler said it was her son who had found her, with a needle in her arm. “I saw all the red flags. No food in the house, even though she earned $95,000 a year… yet, I never put the signs together because I didn’t know what those signs pointed to.  I had no clue about the dangers of prescription meds.  Had I known what I know now, at least I would have asked the questions and had the conversation…”

Richler said he met the medical examiner who told him everything pointed to a drug overdose. Still, the family refused to publicize the real cause of death because of the stigma it would have in the community. Richler is also an independent associate of Behavorial Crossroads Recovery (BCR), an addiction treatment center in New Jersey.  “People see addiction as a human deficiency, or a series of bad choices,“ Richler said.  “You have to understand that addiction is a disease.”

Rabbi Abraham J. Twersky is one of the leading experts on addiction and recovery. He has written over 60 books on the topic. “It is classic that an addict denies his problem,” Twersky said. “The Jewish community, like the addict, denied the problem. I lectured widely to Jewish groups to face the facts. Addiction is an ‘equal opportunity destroyer.’ Unfortuantely, the family of the addict chose to deny the problem because it was a shonde. There is no immunity. I found alcoholism to occur in yeshiva students, but [be] ignored by the roshei yeshivos.”

Tzvi Gluck is the founder and CEO of Amudim, a confidential resource center for individuals and families impacted by trauma, abuse and addiction.  Since Amudim started tracking its progress in 2015, they’ve serviced over 2,000 clients, whose primary issue was alcohol or drug abuse. That caseload jumped from 75 in 2015 to over 500 new cases in this year alone.  “That’s a 582% increase in addiction-related calls in 2020 compared to 2015,” Gluck said. Just over 62% of their addiction clients have been male and just over 32% have been female. Out of a total of 845 new and recurring addiction clients this year, 348 were single, 262 were married and 37 were divorced.  Interestingly, while the largest age group of need tended to be the ages of 20-40, Amudim has helped over 160 people over the age of 50, who were struggling with addiction since its founding.

Gluck says the Coronavirus has not helped the growing problem.  “During COVID alone, our caseload has increased by 59%.  We also saw a number of people that were doing well, that relapsed. We know of at least 65 deaths directly related to overdoses during COVID.  They were easily hidden…because [it is assumed] anybody that dies during COVID, died of COVID.”

Addiction, Trauma and Treatment

Nate Nagelblatt has volunteered at Amudim on their COVID hotline. “It has given me a bit of a different feel for what’s going on in sort of the underbelly of the community.” Nagelblatt is an Orthodox Jew who grew up in Flatbush. He is also a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and Outreach Liaison at BCR. “Anxiety, depression and trauma are like the trinity of underlying conditions in addiction. These things push people to find a way to cope.  It’s not that they want to destroy their lives, they’re trying to find ways to get through the day-to-day.” He said that, ultimately, the self-medicating becomes a monster in and of itself, but it’s important to not lose focus on the core issue. “If we only focus on the drugs and alcohol, we miss the boat. It’s what’s behind the use. If we don’t address [this], the client may get clean for a while, but [when] they leave treatment, go back to their environment, with all those underlying issues, they’ll [use drugs] again, and we’ve done them a disservice.”

“One thing [COVID and] 2020 has done is trigger a sense of powerlessness,” says Dr. Alberta Montano-Di Fabio, Clinical Director at BCR. “When powerlessness comes, the addict looks for ways to feel better or find some type of false strength- and alcohol and drugs have been filling that purpose since the beginning of time.” Dr. Montano-Di Fabio has worked internationally with trauma and addiction, and says that trauma comes in many different forms, such as domestic violence, childhood abuse and sexual abuse, sometimes by someone whom the person knows or trusts. “I would say 90% of our clients have identified trauma in their life. It gets tricky sometimes because we are asking them to deal with some of the most painful things that ever happened to them, at a time when they no longer have the alcohol or substances to sooth their feelings. We have a frum group [who often] struggle with their belief of if HaShem is really there for them. Why wasn’t he there when they were being hurt?”  

A Safe Place For Jews

Kosher Recovery at BCR was created to cater to Jews seeking treatment in an environment that understands a frum person’s needs. Nagelblatt said that, at first, many Jews approach the program with skepticism.  “For the first ten minutes, people are tiptoeing around me wondering if I know about Shabbos, do I know about shmura matza,” Nagelblatt said.  “They want to know they can go to a facility where they’ll be accepted for who they are, and if they want to keep Shabbos [they can], or the staff’s going to know what they’re talking about when they say they want to put on tefillin or want to daven three times a day.”  

Spirituality and Twelve Steps

In the end, every Jew who struggles to overcome addiction should feel like they’re being the best Jew they can pssibly be. “People should be proud of overcoming the challenges of addiction,” Richler suggested. People living in recovery are some of the greatest people I’ve ever met.” Richler credits this, in part, to the 12-step model, universally used by meeting groups and treatment programs as a model to healthy living and sustained sobriety. “The twelve steps are all about bettering oneself. [They comprise] the principles of Torah, Chassidus and pirkei avot.”  And, during these challenging times of COVID-19, the 12-step model can be utilized to help people struggling with addiction during isolation and quarantine. For those who are tempted to relapse, Dr. Tweskey reminds that drugs will “give you a little rest from the anxiety, but as soon as it wears off you’re back where you were before. If you’re in recovery and you find yourself under a great deal of stress, or you’ve come to a crisis, increase your meetings.”  He also says that twelve step meetings are not just good for addicts.  “I’ve never been addicted to alcohol or drugs, but I have attended many meetings of twelve steps, and I use them for my own strength.”