As the director of an organization that helps teens at high risk for self-destructive behavior, Caryn Green never has a stress-free day.
Still, some are harder than others, and Green is expecting the daylong holiday of Purim – which begins tonight in the U.S. and Sunday night here – to be one of them.
"Purim is a time when, according to Jewish tradition, it's OK to drink till you're oblivious," Green, a transplanted Texan, says of the religious mandate to drink "until you cannot distinguish between Haman and Mordechai" – the holiday's villain and hero, respectively.
"A lot of rabbis even tend to supply alcohol to their students or tell them to bring their own bottle. A kid told me last night that he thought it was OK to drink on Purim until you throw up because it's just one time a year."
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Green's counseling center in downtown Jerusalem works with nearly 1,000 troubled teens every year. She isn't the only one concerned with the general upsurge of drug and alcohol use among Orthodox Jews, a community that once saw itself as almost immune to these problems.
"There has always been the belief that Jews drink less than members of other communities, and although historically this may be true, we still have a problem," said Rabbi Tzvi Weinreb, executive vice president of the New York-based Orthodox Union).
Those who work with addicted Orthodox young people attribute the rise in substance abuse to several factors, including the community's increased affluence and exposure to the secular world through television and the Internet.
"The pull of the street is very strong; the atmosphere is very strong," says Rabbi Eitan Eckstein, founder of Retourno, an Israeli rehab center where 90 percent of the 80 in-house patients come from modern Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox homes.
Esther Ostroy, who facilitates the entry of overseas patients to Retourno, says foreign yeshiva (seminary) students with pre-existing problems find them exacerbated by an unfamiliar culture and newfound freedom in Israel.
"These kids are away from home for the first time. Their parents give them a cell phone and a credit card. But how many parents actually check the report to see exactly how their child is spending their money?" she says.
http://www.spokesmanreview.com/features/story.asp?ID=177139
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Posted By Chaptzem to Chaptzem Blog! at 3/03/2007 11:11:00 PM
