In City's Opioid Scourge, Orthodox Jewish Communities Not Immune

JAMAICA ESTATES, QUEENS – As Sabrina tasted freedom for the first time after six months in jail, she thought to herself, "This is it." This time, she was finally going to kick the heroin addiction that had controlled her for years.

A day later, she overdosed.

The near-death experience isn't an uncommon narrative as the nation struggles with a deadly opioid epidemic which killed more than 2,200 people last year in New York state alone, figures show.

But Sabrina's story stands out because of where she comes from. In the tight-knit Orthodox Jewish community to which she belongs, drug addiction is taboo and barely talked about – but that doesn't mean it's been spared from the deadly scourge.

If anything, her community's silence on the problem made it more difficult to ask for help.

"No one was really reaching out to help me," said Sabrina, who asked her last name not be published. "It was hard. People don't talk about it."

The predicament is far from Sabrina's alone, but rather a common side effect of pretending tight-knit Orthodox Jewish communities like hers are immune to the nation's deadly opioid epidemic, said Barbara Silverstein, clinical director for Journeys, a drug rehab center in Brooklyn that caters to the city's Orthodox Jewish community.

"The biggest struggle we have is getting people to come in, because the stigma is definitely real," Silverstein said. "People are hiding the fact that their mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters are struggling from addiction instead of saying, 'Let's get them help.'"

Suffering In Silence

Sabrina got a rare chance to tell her story to a roomful of her peers at a recent forum put on by a Queens-based Jewish nonprofit group who hoped to have an honest conversation about addiction and the extent it had affected their tight-knit community.

The Bukharian Jewish Union, a group that aims to be a hub for young Bukharian Jewish people in their 20s and 30s, has been working to get members of its community to open up about the problem since October. The union said there have been at least 22 overdose deaths just in their Queens community in the past two years.

And although she's not Bukharian, Sabrina said pretending the problem doesn't exist is an issue that affects members of the Orthodox Jewish community as a whole. She spoke at the union's meeting to give members insight into a battle with an addiction that has haunted the 27-year-old for nearly half her life.

"If I had to guess, I'd say I've had between 10 and 20 overdoses, easily," Sabrina said. "There's no reason why I should be alive right now."

It wasn't that Sabrina, who started using drugs in her early teens, hadn't tried to get clean. Her years-long heroin addiction was littered with glimmers of hope that came after stints in jail, rehab, treatment programs, detox and even time in the army. Each time she told herself, and her family, this would be the one that stuck. But it never was.

"I’m in all these things, just trying to get clean, and I just don’t know why I can’t do it," Sabrina said. "I don’t want to lose the relationships, I don’t want to lose my family’s trust – I don’t want these consequences, but I don’t know why I can’t stop."

Her friends and family didn't understand it either. Growing up, addiction was stigmatized and help was hard to find, Sabrina told Patch.

"I lost a lot of friends – I lost my best friend," she said.

"The Jewish community just wants to sweep it under the rug. They're too afraid to talk about it and, if someone finds something out, you can't hang out with that person anymore. [The addict is] not a good influence."

The Bukharian Jewish Union is insisting those tough conversations be had. The local nonprofit hosted its second Drug Abuse Education Forum on Jan. 23 at the Bukharian Jewish Community Center in Jamaica Estates.

Betty Yusupov, president of BJU, said the 22 overdose deaths were just those "that we know of." Advocates fear that number may be much higher because of the stigma surrounding addiction in the Jewish community.

"This is a very tight-knit, conservative community," David Aronov, BJU's director of community engagement, told Patch. "When addiction came up in the Bukharian Jewish community, people really tried to bury it."

The same can be said for other Orthodox Jewish communities throughout the city, said Silverstein, who joined Journeys when it opened in August but has worked in various facets of addiction recovery for seven years. Parents whose children died of an overdose often tried to cover it up, she said.

"A lot of the drug-related deaths were renamed to different things like aneurysms or heart attacks," she said.

Since Jewish tradition requires a person be buried within 24 hours of their death, autopsies often aren't performed unless cases involve police, Aronov said.

But even with the potential for coverups, unofficial tallies of overdose deaths within the city's Orthodox Jewish communities still show cause for concern. Zvi Gluck, whose NYC-based group, Amudim, works with drug-addicted Jewish youth, told the New York Post in July that he'd personally counted 60 opioid-related deaths among Orthodox Jews in the city in 2017. Gluck did not immediately return Patch's requests for comment.

"There’s no outreach for help," Aranov said. "The community doesn't know who to reach out to."

Behind The Times

Silverstein suspects the lack of addiction outreach available in Orthodox Jewish communities could, at least in part, be because many of its members still haven't been educated on what exactly the problem is.

She and others who practice Orthodox Judaism believe drug addiction took longer to infiltrate their tight-knit communities who, in turn, didn't get the education they needed to break down the stigma that the rest of the country has been exposed to for years.

"When addiction started bearing its ugly head as a disease back in the '60s and '70s, people used to refer to people battling addiction as junkies and the way they were treated was very stigmatized," Silverstein said.

While education has helped change the way mainstream America views addiction – as a disease rather than an issue of poor choices or lack of willpower – a lot of Orthodox Jewish communities are just now starting to get that education and, therefore, still share those misconceptions decades later, she said.

And while Silverstein noted that Journeys doesn't exclusively treat Jewish patients – and misconceptions about addiction still exist in every culture, background and religion – she's found, "it's more common in Jewish communities than it is anywhere else."

"In our communities, we need to start from rock bottom," she said. "We're at ground zero here."

Whether that's because addiction actually took longer to infiltrate Orthodox Jewish communities or those communities simply took longer to talk about it is impossible to say, Silverstein admitted.

"Anything is possible," she said. "I only like to talk about what I know."

Opening Up The Conversation

Whatever kept addiction education and outreach at bay in the past, more and more members of the Orthodox Jewish community are determined to have the tough conversations that will make them available now.

That's the purpose of forums like the one BJU hosted that aim to get rid of the community's stigma around addiction, said Manashe Khaimov, vice president of community relations for the nonprofit.

"Our goal here is to get some sort of education about this topic," Khaimov said at the forum. "We gathered here tonight because we care. We want to create awareness so we can fight this epidemic."

That meant walking from business to business, handing out flyers, contacting newspapers and posting on social media to get the word out in the months leading up to the panels. It also included handing out a list of resources for help and free kits of naloxone – a lifesaving drug that can reverse the effects of an opioid overdose – to anyone at the forum who wanted them.

The NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene provides the free naloxone kits as part of a $38 million harm reduction model to lower opioid deaths in the city. A representatives from the department gave the audience a tutorial on how to administer the naloxone – just in case. The drug can be a lifesaving tool to families who feel powerless over their child's addiction, she explained.

It was among a handful of gentle reminders to members of the Jewish community in the room that drug addiction isn't a choice and even the most well-intentioned prevention doesn't always work.

"People in recovery really do want to stop, and when they say they want to stop, they really mean it," said Alberto Barreto, a program consultant for the Health Department's mental hygiene bureau.

Barreto also noted that addiction can happen to anyone, regardless of their upbringing, social class or ethnicity. And while parents often shoulder the blame for their child's addiction, they shouldn't, he said.

"You could be the best parent in the world, but if a tree wants to grow crooked, it’s going to grow that way," he said. "Sometimes it's just biological and not necessarily a social issue."

It's the kind of thing Sabrina wishes more people in her Jewish community had understood while she was fighting her own battle with drugs.

"Everyone blames the addict – like it's their fault, like they chose this," she said.

Sabrina herself said there was no particular reason for why she started doing drugs. She comes from a loving family who supported her even through the worst of her addiction. For her, it started at 13 when she tried marijuana and then cocaine. One drug led to another, until there was nothing left to try but heroin, she said.

She hopes conversations like the one at the Bukharian Jewish Community Center will break down the stigma that so often keeps parents in the Jewish community from reaching out for help.

"Talking about it more and having parents come forward and say, 'We might have this issue in my house,' that's the first step," Sabrina said. "It's very hard for an addict to admit they have a problem without a family member pointing it out first."

Ironically, it was both her family and spirituality that saved Sabrina, who said a Jewish recovery program her parents found was what finally got her clean. She said the program gave her a new outlook on life and put meaning behind the Jewish traditions she'd been raised on that, before, had always felt near robotic.

"They asked me questions that I'd never been asked before and made me look at my life, which wasn't fun," Sabrina said.

But the program did the trick, and Sabrina said she's been sober for the past 13 months. Admittedly, though, it was a hard program to find in a community where it felt like people ignored her addiction rather than reaching out to help her, she said.

She hopes being honest and open about her past with the Jewish community will change that. Sabrina now teaches third grade at a Jewish school, where she said her Rabbi knows about her addiction-laced background.

"I’m building relationships, I have a job and I’m doing pretty well for myself," Sabrina said, after baring her story to a roomful of her peers. "I don’t think about using now. That’s not an option for me."

Lead photo by Danielle Woodward/Patch