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March 19, 2009
Harry” is not his real first name; he wishes to remain anonymous. For many of his 23 years, he was addicted — first to alcohol, then to hard drugs.
He is the fourth of seven children — all boys — in an Orthodox family that moved from the United States to Ra’anana, Israel, when he was a small boy.
“Even today I am a very insecure person,” he told NJ Jewish News. But he said that growing up, “I desperately wanted friends, and I very much valued what other people thought of me. It was definitely not healthy.”
“If his story had taken place in the suburbs of New Jersey I don’t think it would have been much different,” said Lewis Abrams, a West Orange psychotherapist with offices in Montville and Manhattan, who was Harry’s counselor.
“I consider his story totally believable. He faced tremendous consequences at a very young age,” said Abrams, who made the connection between his former client and NJJN.
It started when Harry was just 11, a few years after his family’s move to Israel. “I was in shul, and these 14-year-old kids offered me alcohol, and I started drinking with them,” he said. “I absolutely hated the taste of alcohol. It was vile, disgusting, burning. But sometime between that first drink and coming home and throwing up, I felt unbelievable. Like, I had friends. It didn’t matter if I was a loser or didn’t have as much money or any of the qualities I thought made a good person.
“It was the first time I felt human.”
A few weeks later, during a Shabbat visit to one of his newfound “friends,” Harry smoked marijuana for the first time.
“I knew what I was doing was wrong, like it wouldn’t be approved of by my parents. They are religious and shomer Shabbat and they have all these rules.”
“It is the same scene in the United States as in Israel,” he said. “If a kid is truly religious, he would be a ‘goody-goody.’ I wasn’t religious. My family was, but I wasn’t. I am classified as the son of an Orthodox family.”
But, he said, “being Orthodox is a personal thing. There are people with payos I’ve seen smoke crack.”
Harry admitted stealing money from an older brother to buy marijuana so he could “get along with my new friends, who made me feel good about myself.”
By the time he reached seventh grade, Harry said, he was using “heavier drugs, like Ecstasy. Drugs promised to be my best friend, my lover, my mother, my father, my brothers, everything. I felt whole, which I didn’t feel since the first time I began to drink. I was willing to try any drug, do anything. I started dealing to support my habit.”
He was arrested for the first time at age 14 for breaking into a bomb shelter where he would hide and get high.
“I looked very, very young, and I played very, very young while the police interrogated me,” he said. They never found the 250 grams of pot he had hidden in his pants.
A year later Harry visited Amsterdam, where he traded the marijuana and mushrooms smuggled from Israel for a half-kilo of heroin.
“I mainly snorted it, because I thought shooting it was going to give me AIDS,” he said. “But whenever I had a box of clean needles I shot it. I became a junkie. I slowly faded away. I became paranoid. Nobody wanted to come near me. I lied. I stole. I didn’t care about anything.
“I did not want to live anymore.”
‘I got help’
After returning to Israel, he was arrested with “about 600 pounds, mainly bricks of hashish and a couple of thousand pills of Ecstasy. At the time, it was worth about $500,000. The cops beat the living crap out of me. They broke my face just to get information.”
He was incarcerated in Beersheva, “a major prison. It is very serious, very scary,” he said. “I was sentenced to 15 years.”
But while he was out of jail awaiting appeal of his conviction, Harry’s father gave him a one-way plane ticket to a rehab center in the United States.
“My dad said, ‘I don’t care if there are crosses on the wall and they make you eat pig all day.’” So Harry flew to Utah for five days of detox.
“I peed on myself, threw up, crapped on myself, and crawled around my room. I did not eat for three days. I hallucinated. I sweated. I got cold. It was nothing I would ever repeat again. All I thought was I would get out of rehab and go use again.”
That did not happen.
At age 17, Harry flew from Utah to rehab at the Jewish-run Yatzkan Center, then located in Amityville, Long Island. There he met Abrams.
“I got help. I learned who I was. It took me months, and then I started to accept who I was and accept the fear that I would never be able to use again.”
Six months later, he left rehab, but not before he attempted suicide by trying to hang himself on a flimsy shower curtain rod.
“A fellow patient told me, ‘Dude, there’s another way.’ He was smiling and whistling. I wanted to know why he was so freaking happy, so I started going to meetings.”
Harry received a GED high school diploma and is now finishing his senior year in college in the United States. He hopes to enter medical school in September, and some day specialize in cosmetic dermatology.
He said he has been clean for six and a half years. He married two years ago and described himself as “religious” and “shomer Shabbat.” He said his relationship with his family is “absolutely amazing. My mom, my father, my brothers — I talk to them every day. My parents never gave up on me.”
As he reflects on his teenage years as an addict and an alcoholic, he believes that “using drugs is universal. Anybody can use drugs. Anybody can get clean. But I believe Jews are special. The non-Jews are about just being good and moral and ethical, but the Jews I know who have been addicts want to go out and have a family and do something beautiful.”
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