Jewish Inmates See Passover Freedom in a Lonely Light

c. 2007 Religion News Service (UNDATED) They are the forgotten among the forgotten. As Jews celebrate Passover this week (ending at sundown on Sunday, April 10) with friends, family and neighbors over Seder meals, Jewish inmates will commemorate the ancient journey from bondage to freedom inside prison walls. Without friends. Without family. Without, at times, […]

c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) They are the forgotten among the forgotten.

As Jews celebrate Passover this week (ending at sundown on Sunday, April 10) with friends, family and neighbors over Seder meals, Jewish inmates will commemorate the ancient journey from bondage to freedom inside prison walls.


Without friends. Without family. Without, at times, a connection to the larger Jewish community.

“We’re from a community that would prefer to believe its people don’t get in trouble,” said Gary Friedman, chairman of the Seattle-based Jewish Prisoner Services International. “We’re the least popular cause in Judaism.”

But for a small yet growing number of Jewish leaders involved in prison ministry, caring for inmates is more than an imperative of their faith. It is a contemporary window into an ancient promise that God has the power to transcend temporal prisons.

After a year of weekly visits to 10 inmates at Albion State Prison in western Pennsylvania, Rabbi A. Leib Scheinbaum said he will never look at Passover the same way.

“This year, I can relate to being a slave, to being in bondage,” said Scheinbaum of the Hebrew Academy of Cleveland in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

Those who hear the Passover story, and who understand the suffering of the Jewish people under slavery in Egypt, need to stand by Jews in prison today, chaplains said.

“The premise we operate on is every Jew is entitled to the opportunity for redemption,” Friedman said.

Life as a prison chaplain is not easy. During one visit, a young man spit on the ground as Scheinbaum, a slightly built older rabbi, walked by.

Scheinbaum turned around, looked him in the eye and said, “Clean it up.” The young man wiped his shoe over the spit.


Rabbis like Scheinbaum and Rabbi Yossi Marozov of The Friendship Circle in Beachwood must not only push fear out of their minds but also travel a great distance at little or no pay to visit Jewish prisoners.

And all to serve relatively few inmates, a major reason prison ministry is such a low priority.

Nationally, Friedman estimates that 12,000 to 15,000 Jews are incarcerated. Actual numbers are difficult to come by, in part because some prisoners won’t identify themselves for fear of discrimination, persecution or of being labeled different.

Marozov and Scheinbaum, both Orthodox rabbis, are committed to helping Jews in prison.

Marozov travels to two Ohio prisons to meet with six inmates. He has been doing it nearly once a month for six years.

“When you get to the heart of it all, we’re supposed to look at each other as family,” Marozov said. “It’s a deep appreciation that we’re one people.”

Scheinbaum meets with prisoners weekly.

“For the most part, I’m their family,” Scheinbaum said. “No one else cares about them. No one else visits them.”


One prisoner originally from Israel has been in jail for 27 years. In 2001, his mother came from Israel to visit him. She was killed Sept. 11 when she took United Flight 93 to visit her sister on the West Coast.

The man’s life changed when Scheinbaum gave him a set of Tefillin. The black boxes with straps are wound around the arms on weekday mornings as a sign of faith and remembrance of the Exodus from Egpyt.

“Today, I became an official Jew,” the inmate told him.

Now, the prisoner holds on to the Tefillin “as if they were his life. That is his key to eternity,” Scheinbaum said.

The prisoner has vowed that when he is released, he will board the first plane to Israel and enter a yeshiva, or Jewish school. “I couldn’t live as a Jew,” Scheinbaum said the prisoner told him. “I want to die as an observant Jew.”

For Scheinbaum, prison ministry has given him a deeper understanding of the Jewish teaching that whoever saves one life, it’s as if one saves the whole world.

“I’ve given him something to live for,” Scheinbaum said. “I have saved his life. And that makes everything I do worth it.”


Once, Marozov was telling prisoners at a prison in Grafton, Ohio, about the miracle of lights in the Hanukkah story, and the need to be joyous.

All of a sudden, the three men broke out in dance. The rabbi joined them.

“There is no situation that needs to be devoid of joy,” Marozov learned from the experience.

In recent weeks, Marozov and Scheinbaum have prepared the Jewish inmates for Passover, getting together packages of kosher food and helping them understand and perform the rituals of the meal.

The eight-day festival, which celebrates the story of the ancient Israelites being led out of bondage in Egypt to begin another journey that would lead them to the Promised Land, “is generally the highlight of the year for most inmates,” Friedman said.

Their ability to understand the enslavement of the ancient Israelites and to remain faithful and hopeful in the midst of a dark reality is a gift to all who celebrate the holiday, the chaplains said.


“Once you’ve been to a Seder in prison, a Seder on the outside will never be the same,” Friedman of Seattle said. “We take our freedom for granted.”

(David Briggs writes for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland.)

KRE/CM END BRIGGS

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