Harriet Rossetto
Harriet Rossetto, Trailblazing Founder, Unveils Raw and Inspiring Memoir
“Lost Founder Finds Herself”
Palm Desert, CA – September, 2025 – Harriet Rossetto, the visionary founder who dedicated four decades to building Beit T’Shuvah into a nationally recognized recovery center, is set to release her deeply personal and profoundly honest memoir, “Lost Founder Finds Herself.” (ISBN 979-8823051606, paperback $16.99/kindle $3.99, 154 pages). This powerful narrative chronicles Rossetto’s journey of reinvention and self-discovery after stepping away from the organization that was her life’s passion, at an age when most people would simply retire.
For forty years, Harriet Rossetto, also known as The Jewish Jail Lady, poured her heart and soul into Beit T’Shuvah, initially creating a haven for Jewish addicts and eventually expanding its embrace to offer hope and healing to all who sought it. Her tireless dedication transformed countless lives, making her a beacon of recovery and spiritual guidance. But what happens when the very foundation of your identity, built over decades of relentless service, shifts?
“Lost Founder Finds Herself” is a testament to the enduring human spirit, a courageous exploration of what it means to let go, embrace the unknown, and forge a new path. It’s a story for anyone who has faced unexpected transitions, felt the sting of loss, or grappled with the question of “what’s next?”
In the foreword, Rabbi Mark Borovitz, Harriet’s husband and partner of over 35 years, offers an intimate glimpse into the woman behind the legend. He describes a relationship built on “rigorous honesty,” highlighting Harriet’s “pain, heartache, joy and ecstasy,” as well as her journey from “the girl who was never picked” to “the spiritual warrior and missionary who has saved thousands of souls.” Borovitz promises a book that is “not always pretty,” filled with “deep pathos, deep hurt, abundant joy, and plenty of laughter.”
This memoir is more than a chronological account; it’s an invitation to witness a life lived fully, imperfectly, and with unwavering resilience. Readers will connect with Harriet as she “wrestles with her demons much like Jacob in the Bible and she has faced her own personal Goliaths and thrived.” It’s a call to embrace our own imperfections, strengthen our rebellious spirits, and listen to the prophetic voices within.
“Lost Founder Finds Herself” is a must-read for anyone seeking inspiration to navigate life’s inevitable changes, find humor in their own foibles, and ultimately, discover the power of reinvention at any age. Prepare to be moved, to laugh, to cry, and to fall in love with Harriet Rossetto – the Jewish Jail Lady, the Queen of the Misfits, and now, the Lost Founder who found herself anew.
About the Author:
Harriet Rossetto, MSW, answered her “call” to aid incarcerated Jewish offenders, challenging the denial of addiction and crime within the community. Frustrated by recidivism, she envisioned and built Beit T’Shuvah, a world-renowned recovery center. Rossetto’s work has earned recognition, including participation in White House roundtables and an award from President Obama. After 40 years, she was forced to step down from the organization she founded.
Harriet received a Master’s degree in Social Work from the University of Minnesota.
She is married to Rabbi Mark Borovitz, former inmate turned Rabbi and co-founder of Beit T’Shuvah. They are the subject of a documentary called “The Jewish Jail Lady and the Holy Thief.” She is also the author of “Sacred Housekeeping and a sought-after speaker. She continues to inspire countless people with her wisdom, humor, and unwavering commitment to personal growth.
Harriet Rossetto Bio
Harriet received a Master’s degree in Social Work from the University of Minnesota. After working in that field for 15 years, she finally answered her “call” in the form of an ad looking for a “person of Jewish background and culture to help incarcerated Jewish offenders”. From 1984 -2021, Harriet embraced the challenge of an unpopular cause, fighting the widespread denial that “nice Jewish men and women” could be addicts and criminals of every kind and description. She knew that jailing these broken people neither “fixed” them nor protected society. Harriet’s frustration with the lack of community resources to release these incarcerated people from the cycle of recidivism prompted her to envision and create Beit T’Shuvah, the House of Returns. She built Beit T’Shuvah into a world recognized Recovery Center.
Harriet has been recognized for her work by numerous awards including being part of the George W. Bush roundtables on Faith and Recovery as well as receiving the Advocates for Action award from President Barack Obama. Harriet has supervised 100’s of students in on-site training for their FT and MSW degrees.
A documentary film, called “The Jewish Jail Lady and the Holy Thief,” tells the story of she and her rabbi, ex-thief husband’s unlikely union and the religious homeless shelter and rehabilitation facility that they established in Los Angeles to help Jewish drug addicts and convicts. The film has been screened in dozens of film festivals around the world, including the United States, Canada, Italy, Ukraine, and India.
SHORT BIO FOR JBC
Harriet Rossetto, MSW, answered her “call” to aid incarcerated Jewish offenders, challenging the denial of addiction and crime within the community. Frustrated by recidivism, she envisioned and built Beit T’Shuvah, a world-renowned recovery center. Rossetto’s work has earned recognition, including participation in White House roundtables and an award from President Obama. After 40 years, she was forced to step down from the organization she founded. Harriet received a Master’s degree in Social Work from the University of Minnesota. She is married to Rabbi Mark Bovoritz, former inmate turned Rabbi and co-founder of Beit T’Shuvah. They are the subject of a documentary called “The Jewish Jail Lady and the Holy Thief.”
She decided to create a place for them, Beittshuvah (Home of Repentance and Return.)
Beittshuvah, with its grass roots SYNOPSIS FOR
LOST FOUNDER FINDS HERSELF
LOST FOUNDER tells the story of how Ms. Rossetto single-handedly founds a recovery center and home for Jewish ex-felons once they are let out of prison. Ms. Rosetto begins her career as a social worker, nicknamed “The Jewish Jail Lady,” sent into prisons to help rehabilitate Jewish felons, good people who went awry due to addiction. She saw that these people had nowhere to go once they were let out. Beginning in a barrio of LA, grew to become the talk of the town since the principles it is built on – honesty, community, laughter – happened to work and their success stories were legion. The recovery program she devised was part AA, part Jewish theology and part psychology. This tri-part treatment resulted in some changes to sentencing modalities, was written about in recovery literature and in social studies, and ended up raising lots of money and became the place to go for prominent LA people sending their addicted children there, as well as not so young people.
At Beit T’shuvah, she worked with a recovering ex-felon as intellectually driven and as much of a missionary as herself, who became the recovery center’s rabbi, and they fall in love. They marry and create a marriage of mind and heart. They are both rebels, both iconoclasts and both visionaries. As Beit T’Shuvah grows, so does the corporate and board member influence and, like many successful enterprises, the founders are asked unceremoniously to go and let the “business people” take over.
This comes about in a humiliating and unfair way and is a terrible source of pain for her. She has lost her child. She is now in her 80s, a young 80s, and it is COVID. She and her husband go to their place in Palm Desert, a retirement community, Del Webb, and she is simultaneously angry, confused, and wondering, “Who am I now? Here I am, without a title, reputation, and daily purpose.” She did not identify with pickle ball or crocheting.
At DelWebb, as she explores the reality of what happened at Beit T’Shuvah, and how that affected her personal life, she learns to let go of her disappointment and walk slowly into the less glamorous, more internal, creative life of “the elder,” even though she does not identify as such. Part of her journey includes discovering what is her purpose and message now.
And what she discovers is a message for the “normies,” not addicts, once again teaching what Jewish theology has for those of us who find the services boring, the identity cloying at times. She shows us that we live in an either/or culture, good or bad that makes addicts of us in our striving, but in reality the Torah shows we are both/and, good and bad, and we learn from the integration of both sides of ourselves. There is nothing wrong with us.
Ms. Rosetto takes us through much everyday wisdom in the Torah and how we can all use that wisdom whether we are running a hospital, or a bank or simply interacting with our spouse or children.
Written with humor, unfailing honesty, insight about where she herself made mistakes from which from she had to grow, then and now, Ms. Rossetto takes us on a marvelous journey into the soul of loss when we encounter a forced transition, loss for who we once were to the awkwardness and promising discovery of what William Carlos Williams once called “beginning to begin again.”
This is not chicken soup for the soul, but the entire meal.
Harriet Rossetto Bio
Harriet received a Master’s degree in Social Work from the University of Minnesota. After working in that field for 15 years, she finally answered her “call” in the form of an ad looking for a “person of Jewish background and culture to help incarcerated Jewish offenders”. From 1984 -2021, Harriet embraced the challenge of an unpopular cause, fighting the widespread denial that “nice Jewish men and women” could be addicts and criminals of every kind and description. She knew that jailing these broken people neither “fixed” them not protected society. Harriet’s frustration with the lack of community resources to release these incarcerated people from the cycle of recidivism prompted her to envision and create Beit T’Shuvah, the House of Returns. She built Beit T’Shuvah into a world recognized Recovery Center.
Harriet has been recognized for her work by numerous awards including being part of the George W. Bush roundtables on Faith and Recovery as well as receiving the Advocates for Action award from President Barack Obama. Harriet has supervised 100’s of students in on-site training for their MFT and MSW degrees.
A documentary film, called “The Jewish Jail Lady and the Holy Thief,” tells the story of she and her rabbi, ex thief husband’s unlikely union and the religious homeless shelter and rehabilitation facility that they established in Los Angeles to help Jewish drug addicts and convicts. The film has been screened in dozens of film festivals around the world, including the United States, Canada, Italy, Ukraine, and India.
TARGET MARKET
- People who are going through a change in life (ie losing their business, or moving to a retirement community, or anything new)
- People in recovery
- People interested in spirituality
- People dealing with forced change in their life that they were not ready for and want to use spiritual principles to handle them
- Those interested in how society has been complicit in much of our institutional breakdowns
- How founders are often replaced by bureaucracy
- People interested in social justice issues
OUTLINE of LOST FOUNDER FINDS HERSELF:
Chapter One: The narrator finds herself in a Del Webb retirement community after 35 years of founding and running a leading Jewish recovery center for Jewish ex-felons. It went from a tiny recovery community in the barrio to a famous LA recovery place, integrating AA, Jewish principles and psychology. It had a very high recovery rate and now she found herself “an old lady” who is supposed to be interested in mah jong. What to do?
Chapter Two: This chapter tells the story of how she was lost in Laguna Beach after working for a trickster and sees an ad for a Jewish Jail Lady psychologist, someone to go into prisons and help Jewish offenders. It is made for her since she loves and identifies with bad boys and needs a mission.
Chapter Three: Back to Del Webb where she is looking for something meaningful to do. She investigates some spiritual communities but they do not feel quite right. She feels she needs an ickigui – a purpose. She is looking. Meanwhile she attends screening of the movie made about herself and her rabbi ex-con husband and how they built this amazing place.
Chapter Four: She meets a Jewnitarian who does not accord with Jewish life and the narrator, even being a rebbetzin, relates. She tells the story of going to a Passover in prison where she first understood the whole concept of an internal Pharoah and an internal prison. This reconnected her to Judaism. She also met her husband to be (not knowing it) who spoke eloquently at the Passover. A con man who found religion and became a rabbi.
Chapter Five: We learn how the people kept coming to Beit T’Shuvah, once she began it, and how soon she was standing in court suggesting alternative sentencing to Beit T’Shuvah. The narrator discussed the criminal justice system. Also she writes of astonishing life changes in many of the so-called “criminals,” all through using spiritual teachings in tandem with AA and psychology.
Chapter Six: The rabbi at Beit T’Shuvah was a former inmate and he comes to work at Beit T’Shuvah. This chapter tells the story of their falling in love and her resistances and their strengths as a couple. How they make a true union with the purpose of helping others.
Chapter Seven: Here the author goes into the actual principles of Judaism they were teaching the residents and how they resonated.
Chapter Eight: Here the author discusses how addiction is a family disease which is particularly difficult to Jewish families, who see their offspring as “doctors and lawyers” not addicts or criminals. Here Ms. Rossetto writes of teaching the parents how they are complicit and need their own recovery which many of the parents embraced.
Chapter Nine: This chapter goes into the Rabbi and Ms. Rossetto getting married and the vows they made to each other and to the community. A new kind of marriage.
Chapter Ten: Now that Beit T’Shuvah was so successful, they had to fund raise to get a bigger location and take on more people. This chapter goes into how they fund raised and how the community came forward for them.
Chapter Eleven: This chapter tells more of the heroes who came to help Beit T’Shuvah and brought their own methodologies to help the residents.
Chapter Twelve: This chapter shows how integrity needs integration and how they taught the residents how to integrate principles, integrate the person inside themselves who wanted to act out, and how to accept themselves, both their inner “good” and inner “bad.” How the bad could help them to do good, if turned around.
Chapter Thirteen: The residents were family to each other and often when they graduated, they worked there. This chapter talks about a family covenant and how community is so important to accomplishing anything.
Chapter Fourteen:
This chapter goes into the irony and sadness of how Ms. Rossetto’s own daughter, a highly accomplished doctor, divorced her own mother. The author has to look at where she failed her daughter and the tremendous sadness of her daughter not being willing to work it out. The author also looks at a lot of the current literature about people who perhaps lack the maternal gene as it has been traditionally described. And her grief about no repair, which is a Jewish principle (repair.)
Chapter Fifteen:
We go back to Del Webb where Ms. Rossetto is now ready to be a “joiner.” She begins with yoga, meeting people walking her dog, and other ways, and this is all new for her. She finds that her contemporaries all have enormous back stories too.
Chapter Sixteen: Part of the reason she was thrown out of Beit T’Shuvah was she wanted to accept people who did not have means. The bean counters, now that they were bigger, did not agree with this. She tells of lost people who came who did very well.
Chapter Seventeen: This chapter goes into the story of how she and her husband, who ran Beit T’Shuvah for 35 years, were eventually “thrown out.” A minor error the Rabbi made losing his temper when they were insulted resulted in a huge blow out and they were sent packing. She had lost her child and home.
Chapter Eighteen: At Del Webb, Ms. Rossetto begins to look into many cases of things gone awry at institutions and how she would have to use Jewish teachings to help found her new self.
Chapter Nineteen: She realizes she can bring these teachings to anyone, “the normies,” as they say, to help us all live more integrated, happier lives of purpose and meaning. She itemizes the teachings for all of us.
Chapter Twenty: She begins speaking at Unitarian churches and people want to listen. She begins a new life where she is teaching through her writing. She runs “grief” groups and “transition” groups.
Chapter Twenty One: She takes up new activities, meets new people, has forgiven the past and keeps growing. She sees “old age” as a new adventure and one she will mine and realized she has “found herself.”
FIRST THREE CHAPTERS
LOST FOUNDER FINDS HERSELF
Chapter One:
For a person like me, diagnosed in Social Work School with unresolved adolescent authority conflicts, whose psychological survival is dependent on a sense of terminal uniqueness, Del Webb Sun City, when I first moved here, was hell.
The houses and their inhabitants all look the same. The rules are strictly enforced with citations: no driving over 35 miles per hour, no leaving your car on the street overnight, take your trash cans in on time, do not let your bougainvillea bushes grow too high, no chimes that might annoy your neighbor.
Del Webb used to be an” over my dead body” laugh line; well, the jokes on me. We used to refer to this leisure world as seizure world. It took me almost half my life to find myself and now I felt lost again, wandering in the desert.
How did I become a cliché? Living in an over fifty-five community. A member of old age anonymous.
Some days I found the unlikeliness of ending up here funny. Some days I wanted to die. Nobody knew who I was here. Not even me. I was invisible, irrelevant, a has been. I had established an identity in Los Angeles, Harriet Rossetto, the Jewish Jail Lady, Founder of Beit T’shuvah, a nationally recognized recovery community. If I had any identity here, it was as Sweet Pea’s mother at the dog park. We knew the dogs’ names, not one another’s. I was in LA recently and was surprised to see babies in strollers. Here in Sun City, we push our pets in strollers.
How did I land here separated from all that I had been and done, mourning two major losses? I didn’t believe in retirement; everyone I knew thought I would die at my desk and have to be carried out. I sneered at the people who claimed to love their retired lives. “We are doing everything we had never had time before, traveling, enjoying our grandchildren.” I had loved what I was doing, wanted to do it forever. My retirement was reluctant, not my choice.
The Board of Directors at Beit T’shuvah, the place I had created, retired me. They diagnosed me with Founders Syndrome, a fatal disease particular to non-profit organizations and their founders. Like Alzheimer’s, it is a slow decline, early onset, barely noticeable for several years, until the final blow. “You and Rabbi Mark (my husband) have built a wonderful place. It is grown up now, no longer ‘a mom and pop’ shop. We need a corporate structure and professional image to ensure financial sustainability. The scores of the people you have rescued are your legacy and Beit T’shuvah will survive without you. “
Maybe it would survive without me, but would I survive without it? I am ashamed to admit at times I don’t want it to survive without me. My mother had told me I was a missionary child. She was right. Beit T’shuvah was my mission, the fulfillment of my adolescent dream to love my work and work with my love. Through my work as the “Jewish Jail Lady,” where I went into prisons counseling Jewish cons, I found my own Jewish bad boy. He became a rabbi and we built Beit T’shuvah together. It was our love child. My identity was inextricably linked to Beit T’shuvah, my connection to life and love for 35 years. It was my purpose, my relevance. Without it, I felt like another invisible old lady, a phantom limb, a vestigial organ, a ghost of Christmas past.
The coalescence of losing my position, my husband’s growing interest in golf and the pandemic moved us out of LA to Sun City, Del Webb. It came about because Mark originally signed up for a weekend golf school at the Hyatt Hotel in Palm Desert and I came along hoping to meet with an old friend who had moved to Sun City. She was a retired therapist and realtor. She invited us to lunch and sold us this house. A few months later, I was suddenly transplanted, unprepared, to old age.
The ex-cons and dope fiends at Beit T’shuvah and their daily dramas had kept me young. I had been called Queen of the Misfits and was proud of the title. I was not proud to be an old lady. I never intended to become one. My mother never became one even at 103. I was shocked when I was offered the senior discount at Soup Plantation. Who did that girl see? Not the me I see. A boy’s witness statement, regarding an accident I was in, told the police, “The old lady got out of the car,” describing me. The older you are the greater discrepancy between how you see yourself and how the young see you.
Until now, I had been the wise one, teaching lost souls how to find themselves. Now I was the lost one, looking to find myself. Like any other addict, I was detoxing from Beit T’shuvah, my drug of choice for 40 years. I was besieged by euphoric thoughts and dreams of the past. Unfortunately, there is no 12-step program for my particular addiction. I would have to craft my own spiritual/emotional steps to recovery, mourn and let go of what was and learn to accept what is.
The recovery prayer is, God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
I cannot change my age. I cannot change the loss of my place and position at Beit T’shuvah. I cannot change that I was a fat lonely only kid who wet the bed, was a klutz, the last one picked for any team, not invited to pledge at a sorority. I cannot change my father died when I was 14 leaving my soul orphaned, searching reunion with my lost soul, looking in all the wrong places. I cannot change that I never belonged to any club that would have me as a member, my best friends were books, that I was half Shirley Morgenstern to please my mother, the other half Marjorie Morningstar to honor my father, the rebel.
I also cannot change I was not the mother my daughter wanted me to be. Just as I was losing Beit T’shuvah, she decided to divorce me too. By email. “Some relationships have an expiration date and ours has expired.” It was my second great loss.
Reinhold Niebuhr, the theologian, in the original serenity prayer wrote, “to change the things I should.”
What are the things I need to change to recover my identity, my relevance, my purpose and meaning? In the Japanese culture your “ickigai” is finding what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs and what compensates you. Once you find it, it’s forever. There is no Japanese word for retirement, incidentally. I need to discover the things I need to change to tolerate my withdrawal symptoms and recover myself. The self that wants to be what it was born to be (Thomas Merton.)
First, I had to learn to reframe my narrative: who I am is not what I do. Redefine my ickigai. I have to find the courage to risk forming new relationships and the willingness to do things I am not good at like meditation, Pilates and chair yoga. I must limit the amount of time I stay stuck in self-pity. In other words, go the gym when I prefer to take to my bed. I have learned to zoom, read Mychart and design documents. My biggest hurdle is letting go of Mark as my bulwark. My time alone is often spent waiting for the sound of the garage door lifting, willing myself not to call him to make sure he is still alive. Not surprisingly, Mark has adjusted more easily to our new life. He wakes up happy, grateful to be alive; he rejoices in the rising sun painting the mountains pink. He plays golf by himself or with others, joined the Jewish Men’s Club of the Desert, goes to a few AA meetings, finds friends, talks daily to his brother, sister and daughter. He joined the ceramics club, excited to have his own locker and apron.
My misery haunts him, and I am unable to hide it. I feel as sorry for him as I do for myself. He expands and I contract, often I wake up disappointed to be alive. My interest and skills are limited. I don’t play mahjong, bridge, canasta, don’t paint, play golf, pickle ball or bocci ball or tennis. I don’t knit or crochet or garden or make jewelry or throw pots. I don’t talk sports or weather or book club or brag about my daughter or grandchildren who don’t talk to me. I can talk politics, philosophy and psychology, too serious and snobbish for small talk.
Connection is my fix. It doesn’t happen often or easily and, when it does, I am sure it is forever. Much of my life I found one bestie, as in a you and me against the rest of them, a folie a deux bond of terminal uniqueness. I am an INFP on Meyers Briggs – irreverent, caustic, oppositional and judgmental. We represent 5% of the population, are shy, deep abstract thinkers. I am an inspirer, as defined by Maggie Craddock’s book, POWER GENES. Inspirers don’t think outside the box, they frequently ignore the box altogether, more attuned to soul to soul, not role to role relationships.
My father liked to sing “Just Molly and me and baby makes three. “Molly was Molly Katz, an imperious, unsentimental woman who put on a girdle before breakfast, girdling her emotions. She was proud of her slim ankles, ashamed her daughter had to shop in the chubby department. She was proper and practical. She didn’t believe in surprises, wrapped presents or God. She expressed disapproval with what her brother called her “I smell shit” look. Pursed lips and flaring nostrils. My father was emotional, and a lover of music. He also bowled, played softball, with the boys and played golf on a public course. He worshipped Jackie Robinson, wept for the Rosenberg’s, and earned a law degree and never practiced.
Baby was me split down the middle. Which one was me? We were more a passion play than a family. I felt like an orphan. Beit T’shuvah became my first family. The one where both of me belonged and came together.
So here I am alive at 85 without a biological family; my family of choice is Mark and me and Sweet Pea makes three. I am now a dues-paying member of the yoga and Pilates club. I show up for tai chi a few mornings a week, join the ladies for lunch from time to time, read the New York Times and LA Times every morning with my coffee, read The New Yorker weekly and the Atlantic Monthly. I distract myself with MSNBC and fall asleep to Dateline. I am discovering myself as a writer, a new identity. I used to say I was a reader, not talented enough to call myself a writer. I think it was Twyla Tharp who said, “If you want to be a writer just sit down and write every day.”
I have been doing that, writing long hand on lined legal pads, reading my pages weekly to my coach and editor. I have been writing my way out of despair into repair, discovering and recovering my “ickigai.” This book is my story of how I became a founder, what propelled me to do the work I did, how I became a lost founder and how I eventually found myself.
Chapter Two:
I hit bottom at Laguna Niguel in 1983. I was facing 50, a former social worker, unable to find my place in the world or find my Mr. Right. My only child had just left for college, taking with her my raison d’etre, the reason I hadn’t killed myself, the only unforgivable thing a parent can do to a child.
I had followed a pied piper who promised me the California dream. I had met him in New York, when I’d lost my job due to city cuts, and he’d said, “You’re too old to be a hippy, Harriet,” and suggested I come work for him. He had seduced me with flattery convincing me to apply my skills to help “Dreamies and Hopies” by enrolling them in a Get Rich quick seminar. I applauded him as a Robin Hood, not seeing its chicanery, until he tricked me, too, leaving me jobless, penniless, and about to be homeless. I hadn’t even been sleeping with this one. Thus, I learned a major life lesson: Whatever someone does to someone else they will eventually do to you.
This was not my first go-round at trusting the wrong types. Was I always defying the bone- crushing practicality of my mother? Very young, I’d married the nice Jewish Harvard Law School graduate to make my mother happy and cheated on him with my humanities professor. We divorced the summer I graduated from college. No one came to my graduation. “You unmade your bed, Harriet, now you lie in it,” my mother said. I was split in half: nice Jewish girl suburban housewife, the other half a bohemian, hippy, beatnik who liked bad boys. I found comfort in food and escape in true crime. My missionary zeal to make a difference in the world was squelched by my inner sloth monster. I was a divorcee at 19, got put in the psych ward after an abusive love affair and was sent off to Europe to find myself. What I found was Italian men. I married one named Michelangelo whom I met on a bus in New York and we had a child. I was split again. Part of me was uber mom, all about Dr. Spock, Summerhill, Dr Seuss, PTA. The other one hated the responsibility of motherhood, smoked dope while the baby napped and carried on an affair with the elevator man in our West Side apartment building. When I tired of him, he extorted my mother and stepfather threatening to kidnap my daughter if they didn’t hand over $5K and Don’t Tell Harriet. My mother had to testify in an open court. She never said, “I told you so,” just looked at me and seethed. “Where were your instincts, Harriet?”
When he got out of prison he found me, chased me up 72nd with a broken beer bottle, shouting, “I’ll run you out of New York, bitch.” I swallowed the pills, had my stomach pumped at St. Vincent’s ER and came to in a wheelchair marked “Transfer to Bellevue,” the county nut house. I ran home barefoot in a nightgown, packed up and followed the wrong employer to Los Angeles with the kid and the dog.
In AA, they call it “a geographic.” You change locations but you bring yourself with you. Now the California dream had turned into a nightmare. I considered offing myself. Suicide was in my DNA, my grandmother had “weak nerves.” Her husband, my grandfather, killed himself in his car when he lost his money. Tante Sadie was always sticking her head in the oven, my grandmother stopped eating and became catatonic between husbands, four of whom she outlived. I was not a silent secret suicide type, however.
I announced my intention to a close friend.
“Before you kill yourself, I would like you to make an appointment with this woman.” She handed me a business card.
I looked at it. “Janet Levy, Science of Mind Practitioner. Expect a miracle.” I rolled my eyes. Miracles!
“You’ll like her. She’s Jewish. What do you have to lose?” my friend asked.
Janet Levy turned out to be small, warm and round like a good roll. “What do you want, my dear?” she asked me.
“That’s my problem. I don’t know what I want.”
“Do you pray?”
“Fuck no I don’t pray. I am a Jewish intellectual.”
“Well, I am going to pray for you. Father of the universe, take this woman by the hand and guide her to her rightful work. She knows she wants to make a difference.”
I also knew I needed to earn money in case I did live. I opened the Sunday classified ads in the LA Times and a still small voice whispered, “See what social work has to offer.” And there it was. The smallest ad on the page: “Person of Jewish background and culture to work with Jewish criminal offenders. MSW required.”
The hair stood up on my arms. Are you kidding me? Jewish bad boys, who knew? My dream come true. If you are a nice Jewish girl who likes bad boys and you read this ad and the miracle lady told you to pay attention, you knew a miracle just occurred.
I made a rational, conscious intellectual decision not to call it a coincidence. That decision shifted my consciousness from a random meaningless universe to peek at the possibility of a higher intelligence.
I applied for and got the job.
I became a field worker for a Jewish Committee for Personal Service; I was called a Jewish Jail Lady. Our mission was to serve Jews who were serving time. I was always a true crime junkie, and I was hooked day one by going to jail. I connected to the people behind bars. Good people who did really bad things. They had bitten the hands of those who fed them, they broke the hearts of those who loved them, and betrayed the souls of those who trusted them. If their lips were moving, they were lying. But to me they were more honest than the allegedly good people. I saw myself in them. I too had a split self, good on the outside covering up my inner outlaw.
I met Jane the first week when visiting a Sybil Brand County Jail for Women who turned out to be also an English Lit grad from Hunter College. We sat across from one another, separated by our uniforms and a glass partition. She was wearing an orange jumpsuit; I, the uniform of professional social worker: slacks, blazer and briefcase. She had been arrested for dealing drugs, a felony. She was my age and had a daughter the same age as mine. She was me. Jane’s husband had returned from Vietnam a heroin addict. When she couldn’t get him straight, she joined him, eventually dealing in order to support their growing habits. But for the grace of God or good luck, that could have been my story.
The elevator man I moved into my apartment after I moved my husband out dealt drugs and carried a gun. I smoked his weed and snorted his cocaine. I never thought of myself as a criminal; I was “a free spirit” leading a double life, mother, social worker, nice Jewish girl on the outside hiding my secret life, both pleased and ashamed by my duplicity. It never crossed my mind I could wind up in jail.
Now here I was the Jewish Jail Lady meeting people just like me who committed crimes but weren’t criminals. They were broken people, trapped in a self-destructive cycle of substances and behavioral addictions. They lived in either/or black and white thinking, alternating between extremes, unable to integrate their outside with their insides, their intentions with their actions. They were split 51-49 down the middle, no spiritual corpus collosum to bring the halves of them into a whole. They were imprisoned in a broken system that dehumanized and degraded them, reminding them they would be back as they walked out the revolving door. Everyone I spoke to said they would never go back to prison, but back they came 30, 60, 90 days after they were released. My mission had found me, I was sent to set them free from their inner and outer prisons. Everyone I met was a mirror reflecting my own split self. The message was clear: in order to reflect wholeness to the broken souls behind the glass, I would have to heal my own fractured self. I would heal me while healing them.
Friends and families laughed as I told them I was visiting Jews in jail. That is not part of the Jewish narrative. Jews are doctors, lawyers and accountants who love their mothers and provide for their families and play golf at the country club. Their children go to Harvard, not to prison. The founder of our organization explained to me that we existed to fulfill the mitzvah of Jews helping their own, while allowing the Jewish community to perpetuate the narrative that Jews are perfect. Those Jews clung to their denial ferociously, but I was just as ferociously driven to barrel through their denial of the truth. “They are us,” I told everyone, “We are them; they are our children, brothers, sisters, and mothers.”
I knew I needed a platform.
We were housed in the basement of Gateway Hospital and Mental Health Center; five field workers led by an octogenarian whom the inmates called “Bubbe Teresa.” She had been an attorney who couldn’t practice law because she felt it was immoral to charge people who were in trouble. She was the woman I wanted to be my spirit guide.
One morning Reuben was waiting outside my office. It was a chilly morning, and he was wearing a tank top and shorts. I looked up, surprised.
“You told me to come see you when I got out. I just got out and I got no place to go. You said you’d help me start over.” Reuben was one of my favorites. He was 22, the son of prominent psychiatrists in New York who wanted nothing to do with him. He was smart, poetic and wounded. A bright light with a dark shadow. My type.
“Okay how can I help?” I asked.
“I need a bed for tonight.”
I called the Jewish Federation, homeless shelters, the mission. “I need a bed for tonight for a young man who was just released from custody.”
“What is your long-term treatment plan?” I heard in response.
“Long term treatment plan? He’s wearing sandals, he’s got no clothes, and he needs a bed for the night.”
Reuben sat there patiently controlling his smirk. He knew I wouldn’t be able to help him. He had promised me he would give it a try and he’d shown up and now he was free to get loaded.
I knew I shouldn’t, but I had to. “Reuben, you will come home with me tonight and we’ll try again tomorrow. We’ll stop by the thrift shop on the way and get you some warm clothes.”
They kept coming like they said they would, and I had nowhere to put them. No more vouchers, all the beds were full.
“Fuck it,” I said, “I’ll start my own place.”
It was 1985. Homelessness was the big buzz then and, sadly, it still is forty years later. At the time, money was flowing into LA from FEMA for homeless shelters. I sent in a grant application for a homeless shelter for Jewish women and men coming out of jail and prisons. I was sent $140K dollars for a one-time purchase of a shelter to house 35 people.
I found it in a drug and crime infested neighborhood, adjacent to a barrio. I called it Beit T’shuvah, House of Return and Repentance. I moved in, the warden den mother, Mother Teresa the second.
Chapter Three:
When I was first lamenting losing Beit T’shuvah at Del Webb, I began looking around, and I thought maybe I had found my next place of inspiration. It seemed perfect, too good to be true. A chance encounter had directed me to the Spiritual Center of the Desert, a new Thought Science of Mind church. Janet Levy, the miracle worker who directed me to the ad for a Jewish Jail Lady, had been a Science of Mind practitioner herself. This would be full circle. I would become a Reverend Rebbetzin Science of Mind Practitioner, practicing miracles for others.
I rushed to the service, introduced myself to Reverend Dale, a Jewish girl minister from Brooklyn. I made an appointment to meet with her, brought her a copy of my first book, signed up for the classes, bought all her books. I was giddy for a week, manic a little, about the neat bow tying it all together, coming back to where it all began.
I got there early the next Sunday hoping to reconnect with Rev Dale, thinking she would be as excited to see me as I was to see her. She looked at me like she didn’t know who I was. She managed a “Oh I remember you” smile and kept walking to meet her parishioners. She made no mention of my book or my future. The classes were on zoom, and I had already paid for them, so I stuck it out for the first semester. The other students were regulars, true believers in only positive thoughts. They manifested new cars and perfect relationships. I sulked silently. In their lingo, this was not mine to do. Sometimes God sends miracles and sometimes you get lessons.
What was my ickigui? What do I love and what was I good at and what does the world need, I asked myself. Fortunately, I didn’t have to worry about earning a living. I just needed to find a life worth living. I loved righting things I believed to be wrong when no one else saw them, finding a need and filling it.
When I worked at City University of New York Open Admissions in 1980, I was counseling a new crop of nursing students. These were usually middle-aged women working as nurses’ aides and LPNs who wanted to upgrade and become RNs. They were intelligent, experienced, and failing all their tests. I sat and talked with them, and I got it. The tests were in Standard English, a foreign language to them. They spoke black dialect. Those academics creating the tests were ignorant. They were forcing a foreign language on the black students instead of translating the tests into dialect English so they could pass their tests.
I was a lone voice pointing this out. The Black faculty wanted to teach Swahili, since Blacks had recently been declared African Americans. Did they really think Swahili would help them to pass tests in Standard English? I decided to become fluent in black dialect which I then translated into white language. The students understood as we studied together. Their grades improved with their self-esteem. I knew I was onto something. I wrote a few articles, stood up on my soap box making enemies everywhere. I was a white girl with no rank preaching a message no one wanted to hear. I loved learning the linguistics and understanding how the dual language system impacted systems, racism, recovery and unemployment.
Teaching Standard English should start in kindergarten as a second language instead of continually correcting the kids’ bad grammar, contributing to their sense of shame and exclusion. The research showed in the few experiments of teaching kids to be bilingual – black dialect and standard English – that they did better in school and at home. Only a handful of us paid attention and nothing changed. New York City went broke, Open Admissions closed, and I was let go without any tenure securing my future. I moved to California, as you know.
I did think like “a missionary child,” as my mother had said. One reason I had followed the California con was that he was allegedly training the unemployed to become energy auditors as part of a start-up non-profit to address the energy crisis. It was new territory and, again, I was making a difference, changing the world one person at a time. In truth, he was scamming banks and the real estate market with his get rich seminars.
Thank God, I did find a legitimate way to help the world by founding Beit T’shuvah. There is no better fix than helping those going through the revolving door in and out of prisons.
Suddenly, I had turned into a hero to the Jews in jail and their families, a gad fly to those who denied their existence and an annoyance to the prosecution when the judge preferred rehabilitation over incarceration. I was beating the system, justice, justice, shall you pursue.
I was on a high myself. God loved me and I was a savior getting lots of attention and recognition. So what do you do when you get everything you want and lived it for 35 years, seen the promised land and then lose it all? I guess it is biblical. Moses freed the Jews from enslavement, shlepped them round the desert for 40 years and never got into the promised land himself. Was there another miracle for me or only one per customer? Einstein said there are two ways to live your life, either you believe nothing is a miracle or you believe everything is a miracle. Miracles are rationed, I told myself. How do I bring myself out of the cycle of hope and disappointment?
I got excited when one of the local rabbis near Del Webb agreed to screen at his temple the documentary about Mark (the rabbi at Beit T’shuvah and my husband) and me. Our PR team successfully promoted it in the Desert Sun, wrote a story about us, praising,” The Jewish Jail Lady and the Holy Thief,” our story. Two hundred and fifty people showed up, we got a standing ovation. Eager people, wanting to be me, grabbed for my business card. This is it, the film will generate clients for Mark and me, people hungry for meaning, purpose, spiritual sustenance.
I was incredulous. No one called or emailed. Then I thought, why didn’t we pass around a sign-in sheet? Why didn’t we bring our books to sell? It was because I didn’t want to pursue them. I wanted them to pursue me. Self-promotion felt unsavory to me. Marketing is manipulative, I felt. If that is what it takes, I don’t want it. One of the blessings for me of helping desperate people whom no one else wanted to help was being needed and pursued; I always had more customers than I could handle. One woman who was there called Mark and asked him to be a speaker at her Unitarian church. “I am a Jewnitarian, a Jew at my core but, spiritually and philosophically, I am a Unitarian,” she said. This intrigued me and I wanted to understand what about Judaism turned her off philosophically. Why did Jewish seekers not find what they are looking for in Jewish literature? Ramdass, Jack Kornfield, all the gurus were Jews. I myself had looked everywhere and finally found what I was seeking philosophically and spiritually, found it in Judaism. What were they missing?
I called the woman and invited her to meet with me. She told me she had been turned off by the Hebrew, the “have tos,” the synagogue and the comparisons and competitions there. I got it. I had been turned off by that too.
The Jewnitarian lady said I was heroic; she would get me speaking engagements. Meanwhile while I was figuring out again how to change the world, I could start small starting conversations with dogwalkers and the yoga people we were seeing. I was beginning to see our similarities rather than our differences. We were all transplants from our other lives, retiring, rewiring, refiring. The metaphor “transplant,” as I was reading Delia Ephron’s book, said transplants are a renewal of life, they are risky, uncertain, painful and unfamiliar. They are physical, psychological existential shocks to the system. We were all in a type of shock then. Most of us came here from other places, where we knew who we were, and we knew others who knew us. We didn’t have to keep introducing ourselves everywhere we went. We knew the shortcuts to get where we had to go. We thought we knew what came next. We had an established routine of comings and goings.
Transplants take time. The physical blood has to adjust to new organs and new blood cells, and it doesn’t always take, fear of host versus graft disease. I had been impatient, not realizing it is a challenge to start over when the future is shorter than the past. The only way forward was “a day at a time, be here now, today is a gift” thinking. Maybe I would start Transplants Anonymous, a place to converse and connect with other women.
I read Chung TZU: “The whole world could praise Chung Tzu and it wouldn’t make him exert himself and the whole world could condemn him, and it wouldn’t make him mope.” Reading this brought me back to the aha moment when I read the story of a man who went to the rabbi and said, “Rabbi, I want to study the mysteries of the Kabbalah.” The Rabbi responded, “My son, I have two questions. When people praise you do you feel good? “Yes, my Rabbi.” “And when they criticize you, do you feel badly?” “Of course, my Rabbi.” ” Then go away my son. You are not yet ready to study the mystery of the Kabbalah.”
Was it really possible to disconnect from the opinions of other people? I remember someone wrote a book: What Other People Think of You is None of Your Business. Clever title but I didn’t believe it. If someone wanted something I had, I valued that something more. If they devalued it, so did I. I wanted to study the mysteries of the universe to become more of a God pleaser than a people pleaser. I remembered signing up years back to attend the first National Codependency Conference to listen to Ann Wilson Schaef, the queen of codependency. When she asked were we there for personal reasons, all raised our hands. When asked if there for professional reasons, we all raised our hands. Therapists are codependent by profession. Helping others is our drug.
I left and made an urgent session with Rabbi Jonathan Omerman, my spiritual advisor, and told him her theory that everything I was doing was codependent, such as helping others feel good about themselves which made me feel good about me. He chuckled and said, “Who is this pernicious woman?”
Back when I was building Beit T’shuvah, I also discovered Rabbi Dr. Abraham Twerski, a Hasidic psychiatrist who ran an alcohol treatment center. He had written an article called Judaism and the Twelve Steps. A revolutionary idea for Jews who refused to go to AA meetings because they were held in church basements and talked about God, maybe even Jesus. I was relieved to discover the 12 steps were kosher for Jews, not just kosher but they were the Vitamin C for the scurvy of the hole in the soul of addiction. I also learned Carl Jung had helped Bill Wilson understand the steps from a psychological perspective so the twelve steps were also congruent with psychology. I now became open to learning about Judaism as a spiritual path to wholeness, not a rigid meaningless set of rituals and restrictions.
I, like the Jewnitarian, had struggled with being Jewish. My mother was a devout atheist, disdainful of superstitions. She was a first generation American, desperate to assimilate. A tough task when your name is Molly Katz. None the less when she visited me in girls scout camp and saw me enthusiastically singing “Jesus Loves Me,” she enrolled me in Jewish Sunday school. I loved the singing there, was confirmed in a white robe and that was the end of my Jewish education.
I had many conversations in college about whether being Jewish was ethnicity or a gastronomic choice. My Judaism became a philosophy, not a practice, the lens of seeing the wisdom of Jewish thought as a path to wholeness. Wholeness is holiness. Our split, our dual nature by divine design, is not pathological. We are part animal, part angel (not either/or), endowed with free will to choose our actions no matter what we feel. I had been plagued all my life by trying to find out which one was the real me. Then I got it, they were all the real me, the nice Jewish girl, the one who liked bad boys, the intellectual true crime junkie, the long hair who loved classical music and Billie Holiday.
The shift from either/or thinking and letting go of comparing myself to others began to change my narrative about myself. I got that the psyche, the spirit and the mind are one. My Beit T’shuvah model of recovery could blend psychological Judaism and the twelve steps. It would be an integrated model of change in a community setting.
Thus, I needed to find a clinical rabbi. I only had a salary for one position. I posted an ad, “Looking for a needle in a haystack.” I got an immediate response, “Madame, I am your needle.”
He showed up for the interview exactly as I had imagined him, short paunchy, wearing a Greek fisherman cap. Tevya himself. In a manic state, I hired him on the spot knowing he came straight from God.
Strange things began happening. A few residents noticed the disappearance of their toothpaste, toothbrushes and soap. One of the women came into her room, surprised he was going through her underwear drawer. Pop went my magic bubble. The rabbi I just hired was stealing from the thieves he was supposed to be saving. Was it all a mirage? Should I pack up and quit now? It took me a few days. Okay God, I guess you sent him to teach me when it’s too good to be true, it’s too good to be true. Check references. Another lesson.
Okay now that I had a message, I still had to spread it. Not to mention, I also knew I needed a romantic partner of my own.
About the Authors
Rabbi Mark Borovitz
RABBI MARK BOROVITZ
THIEF. CON MAN. RABBI
Officially ordained in 2000 at the University of Judaism with a Master’s in Rabbinic Literature, Rabbi Mark Borovitz combined his knowledge of Torah and street smarts to shape his calling: helping recovering addicts find their way in the world. Spiritual Leader, Author, Senior Rabbi, CEO, ex-con, recovering alcoholic, and overall anomaly, he can reach both the addict and the congregant, and de-stigmatize this life- threatening disease.
As the former CEO and Senior Rabbi of Beit T’Shuvah, a nonprofit, non-sectarian, Jewish addiction treatment center and synagogue community he is living proof that change is possible; when speaking to the congregant, he stands for the hope that every man has a higher purpose. Over the past almost four decades, he has helped co-create one of the most exceptional approaches to addiction treatment and criminal rehabilitation and reintegration in the world.
Rabbi Mark has been featured in articles in the Los Angeles Times, Moment Magazine, The Jewish Journal, The Wall Street Journal and newspapers across the world, including Israel’s largest publication, Haaretz Daily Newspaper, along with his wife, Harriet Rossetto. The are both featured in a documentary “The Jewish Jail Lady and the Holy Thief.”
He is also the author of The Holy Thief: A Conman’s Journey from Darkness to Light( Harper Collins) and Daily Live Lessons of Rabbi Heschel , (June 2025).
WHY IS THIS BOOK A GOOD FIT FOR A JEWISH LITERARY PROGRAM
The author is a rabbi who has lived in the real world — lost his father as a young boy, spent time in prison, disappointed his daughter, lost self-respect, then found himself inspired by a Jewish Jail Lady who challenged him to become a rabbi–which he did.
He has led a congregation at Beit T’Shuvah and is intimately familiar with healing and finding self-worth, purpose and the meaning of life. His teachings reflect his favorite Rabbi –Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.
The book is perfect for:
• People looking to find their higher consciousness/their soul
• People in recovery
• People not in recovery needing to see routes to how to deal with challenges using spiritual principles
• People interested in being spiritually on point
Harriet Rossetto
Harriet Rossetto, Trailblazing Founder, Unveils Raw and Inspiring Memoir
“Lost Founder Finds Herself”
Palm Desert, CA – September, 2025 – Harriet Rossetto, the visionary founder who dedicated four decades to building Beit T’Shuvah into a nationally recognized recovery center, is set to release her deeply personal and profoundly honest memoir, “Lost Founder Finds Herself.” (ISBN 979-8823051606, paperback $16.99/kindle $3.99, 154 pages). This powerful narrative chronicles Rossetto’s journey of reinvention and self-discovery after stepping away from the organization that was her life’s passion, at an age when most people would simply retire.
For forty years, Harriet Rossetto, also known as The Jewish Jail Lady, poured her heart and soul into Beit T’Shuvah, initially creating a haven for Jewish addicts and eventually expanding its embrace to offer hope and healing to all who sought it. Her tireless dedication transformed countless lives, making her a beacon of recovery and spiritual guidance. But what happens when the very foundation of your identity, built over decades of relentless service, shifts?
“Lost Founder Finds Herself” is a testament to the enduring human spirit, a courageous exploration of what it means to let go, embrace the unknown, and forge a new path. It’s a story for anyone who has faced unexpected transitions, felt the sting of loss, or grappled with the question of “what’s next?”
In the foreword, Rabbi Mark Borovitz, Harriet’s husband and partner of over 35 years, offers an intimate glimpse into the woman behind the legend. He describes a relationship built on “rigorous honesty,” highlighting Harriet’s “pain, heartache, joy and ecstasy,” as well as her journey from “the girl who was never picked” to “the spiritual warrior and missionary who has saved thousands of souls.” Borovitz promises a book that is “not always pretty,” filled with “deep pathos, deep hurt, abundant joy, and plenty of laughter.”
This memoir is more than a chronological account; it’s an invitation to witness a life lived fully, imperfectly, and with unwavering resilience. Readers will connect with Harriet as she “wrestles with her demons much like Jacob in the Bible and she has faced her own personal Goliaths and thrived.” It’s a call to embrace our own imperfections, strengthen our rebellious spirits, and listen to the prophetic voices within.
“Lost Founder Finds Herself” is a must-read for anyone seeking inspiration to navigate life’s inevitable changes, find humor in their own foibles, and ultimately, discover the power of reinvention at any age. Prepare to be moved, to laugh, to cry, and to fall in love with Harriet Rossetto – the Jewish Jail Lady, the Queen of the Misfits, and now, the Lost Founder who found herself anew.
About the Author:
Harriet Rossetto, MSW, answered her “call” to aid incarcerated Jewish offenders, challenging the denial of addiction and crime within the community. Frustrated by recidivism, she envisioned and built Beit T’Shuvah, a world-renowned recovery center. Rossetto’s work has earned recognition, including participation in White House roundtables and an award from President Obama. After 40 years, she was forced to step down from the organization she founded.
Harriet received a Master’s degree in Social Work from the University of Minnesota.
She is married to Rabbi Mark Borovitz, former inmate turned Rabbi and co-founder of Beit T’Shuvah. They are the subject of a documentary called “The Jewish Jail Lady and the Holy Thief.” She is also the author of “Sacred Housekeeping and a sought-after speaker. She continues to inspire countless people with her wisdom, humor, and unwavering commitment to personal growth.
Harriet Rossetto Bio
Harriet received a Master’s degree in Social Work from the University of Minnesota. After working in that field for 15 years, she finally answered her “call” in the form of an ad looking for a “person of Jewish background and culture to help incarcerated Jewish offenders”. From 1984 -2021, Harriet embraced the challenge of an unpopular cause, fighting the widespread denial that “nice Jewish men and women” could be addicts and criminals of every kind and description. She knew that jailing these broken people neither “fixed” them nor protected society. Harriet’s frustration with the lack of community resources to release these incarcerated people from the cycle of recidivism prompted her to envision and create Beit T’Shuvah, the House of Returns. She built Beit T’Shuvah into a world recognized Recovery Center.
Harriet has been recognized for her work by numerous awards including being part of the George W. Bush roundtables on Faith and Recovery as well as receiving the Advocates for Action award from President Barack Obama. Harriet has supervised 100’s of students in on-site training for their FT and MSW degrees.
A documentary film, called “The Jewish Jail Lady and the Holy Thief,” tells the story of she and her rabbi, ex-thief husband’s unlikely union and the religious homeless shelter and rehabilitation facility that they established in Los Angeles to help Jewish drug addicts and convicts. The film has been screened in dozens of film festivals around the world, including the United States, Canada, Italy, Ukraine, and India.
SHORT BIO FOR JBC
Harriet Rossetto, MSW, answered her “call” to aid incarcerated Jewish offenders, challenging the denial of addiction and crime within the community. Frustrated by recidivism, she envisioned and built Beit T’Shuvah, a world-renowned recovery center. Rossetto’s work has earned recognition, including participation in White House roundtables and an award from President Obama. After 40 years, she was forced to step down from the organization she founded. Harriet received a Master’s degree in Social Work from the University of Minnesota. She is married to Rabbi Mark Bovoritz, former inmate turned Rabbi and co-founder of Beit T’Shuvah. They are the subject of a documentary called “The Jewish Jail Lady and the Holy Thief.”
She decided to create a place for them, Beittshuvah (Home of Repentance and Return.)
Beittshuvah, with its grass roots SYNOPSIS FOR
LOST FOUNDER FINDS HERSELF
LOST FOUNDER tells the story of how Ms. Rossetto single-handedly founds a recovery center and home for Jewish ex-felons once they are let out of prison. Ms. Rosetto begins her career as a social worker, nicknamed “The Jewish Jail Lady,” sent into prisons to help rehabilitate Jewish felons, good people who went awry due to addiction. She saw that these people had nowhere to go once they were let out. Beginning in a barrio of LA, grew to become the talk of the town since the principles it is built on – honesty, community, laughter – happened to work and their success stories were legion. The recovery program she devised was part AA, part Jewish theology and part psychology. This tri-part treatment resulted in some changes to sentencing modalities, was written about in recovery literature and in social studies, and ended up raising lots of money and became the place to go for prominent LA people sending their addicted children there, as well as not so young people.
At Beit T’shuvah, she worked with a recovering ex-felon as intellectually driven and as much of a missionary as herself, who became the recovery center’s rabbi, and they fall in love. They marry and create a marriage of mind and heart. They are both rebels, both iconoclasts and both visionaries. As Beit T’Shuvah grows, so does the corporate and board member influence and, like many successful enterprises, the founders are asked unceremoniously to go and let the “business people” take over.
This comes about in a humiliating and unfair way and is a terrible source of pain for her. She has lost her child. She is now in her 80s, a young 80s, and it is COVID. She and her husband go to their place in Palm Desert, a retirement community, Del Webb, and she is simultaneously angry, confused, and wondering, “Who am I now? Here I am, without a title, reputation, and daily purpose.” She did not identify with pickle ball or crocheting.
At DelWebb, as she explores the reality of what happened at Beit T’Shuvah, and how that affected her personal life, she learns to let go of her disappointment and walk slowly into the less glamorous, more internal, creative life of “the elder,” even though she does not identify as such. Part of her journey includes discovering what is her purpose and message now.
And what she discovers is a message for the “normies,” not addicts, once again teaching what Jewish theology has for those of us who find the services boring, the identity cloying at times. She shows us that we live in an either/or culture, good or bad that makes addicts of us in our striving, but in reality the Torah shows we are both/and, good and bad, and we learn from the integration of both sides of ourselves. There is nothing wrong with us.
Ms. Rosetto takes us through much everyday wisdom in the Torah and how we can all use that wisdom whether we are running a hospital, or a bank or simply interacting with our spouse or children.
Written with humor, unfailing honesty, insight about where she herself made mistakes from which from she had to grow, then and now, Ms. Rossetto takes us on a marvelous journey into the soul of loss when we encounter a forced transition, loss for who we once were to the awkwardness and promising discovery of what William Carlos Williams once called “beginning to begin again.”
This is not chicken soup for the soul, but the entire meal.
Harriet Rossetto Bio
Harriet received a Master’s degree in Social Work from the University of Minnesota. After working in that field for 15 years, she finally answered her “call” in the form of an ad looking for a “person of Jewish background and culture to help incarcerated Jewish offenders”. From 1984 -2021, Harriet embraced the challenge of an unpopular cause, fighting the widespread denial that “nice Jewish men and women” could be addicts and criminals of every kind and description. She knew that jailing these broken people neither “fixed” them not protected society. Harriet’s frustration with the lack of community resources to release these incarcerated people from the cycle of recidivism prompted her to envision and create Beit T’Shuvah, the House of Returns. She built Beit T’Shuvah into a world recognized Recovery Center.
Harriet has been recognized for her work by numerous awards including being part of the George W. Bush roundtables on Faith and Recovery as well as receiving the Advocates for Action award from President Barack Obama. Harriet has supervised 100’s of students in on-site training for their MFT and MSW degrees.
A documentary film, called “The Jewish Jail Lady and the Holy Thief,” tells the story of she and her rabbi, ex thief husband’s unlikely union and the religious homeless shelter and rehabilitation facility that they established in Los Angeles to help Jewish drug addicts and convicts. The film has been screened in dozens of film festivals around the world, including the United States, Canada, Italy, Ukraine, and India.
TARGET MARKET
OUTLINE of LOST FOUNDER FINDS HERSELF:
Chapter One: The narrator finds herself in a Del Webb retirement community after 35 years of founding and running a leading Jewish recovery center for Jewish ex-felons. It went from a tiny recovery community in the barrio to a famous LA recovery place, integrating AA, Jewish principles and psychology. It had a very high recovery rate and now she found herself “an old lady” who is supposed to be interested in mah jong. What to do?
Chapter Two: This chapter tells the story of how she was lost in Laguna Beach after working for a trickster and sees an ad for a Jewish Jail Lady psychologist, someone to go into prisons and help Jewish offenders. It is made for her since she loves and identifies with bad boys and needs a mission.
Chapter Three: Back to Del Webb where she is looking for something meaningful to do. She investigates some spiritual communities but they do not feel quite right. She feels she needs an ickigui – a purpose. She is looking. Meanwhile she attends screening of the movie made about herself and her rabbi ex-con husband and how they built this amazing place.
Chapter Four: She meets a Jewnitarian who does not accord with Jewish life and the narrator, even being a rebbetzin, relates. She tells the story of going to a Passover in prison where she first understood the whole concept of an internal Pharoah and an internal prison. This reconnected her to Judaism. She also met her husband to be (not knowing it) who spoke eloquently at the Passover. A con man who found religion and became a rabbi.
Chapter Five: We learn how the people kept coming to Beit T’Shuvah, once she began it, and how soon she was standing in court suggesting alternative sentencing to Beit T’Shuvah. The narrator discussed the criminal justice system. Also she writes of astonishing life changes in many of the so-called “criminals,” all through using spiritual teachings in tandem with AA and psychology.
Chapter Six: The rabbi at Beit T’Shuvah was a former inmate and he comes to work at Beit T’Shuvah. This chapter tells the story of their falling in love and her resistances and their strengths as a couple. How they make a true union with the purpose of helping others.
Chapter Seven: Here the author goes into the actual principles of Judaism they were teaching the residents and how they resonated.
Chapter Eight: Here the author discusses how addiction is a family disease which is particularly difficult to Jewish families, who see their offspring as “doctors and lawyers” not addicts or criminals. Here Ms. Rossetto writes of teaching the parents how they are complicit and need their own recovery which many of the parents embraced.
Chapter Nine: This chapter goes into the Rabbi and Ms. Rossetto getting married and the vows they made to each other and to the community. A new kind of marriage.
Chapter Ten: Now that Beit T’Shuvah was so successful, they had to fund raise to get a bigger location and take on more people. This chapter goes into how they fund raised and how the community came forward for them.
Chapter Eleven: This chapter tells more of the heroes who came to help Beit T’Shuvah and brought their own methodologies to help the residents.
Chapter Twelve: This chapter shows how integrity needs integration and how they taught the residents how to integrate principles, integrate the person inside themselves who wanted to act out, and how to accept themselves, both their inner “good” and inner “bad.” How the bad could help them to do good, if turned around.
Chapter Thirteen: The residents were family to each other and often when they graduated, they worked there. This chapter talks about a family covenant and how community is so important to accomplishing anything.
Chapter Fourteen:
This chapter goes into the irony and sadness of how Ms. Rossetto’s own daughter, a highly accomplished doctor, divorced her own mother. The author has to look at where she failed her daughter and the tremendous sadness of her daughter not being willing to work it out. The author also looks at a lot of the current literature about people who perhaps lack the maternal gene as it has been traditionally described. And her grief about no repair, which is a Jewish principle (repair.)
Chapter Fifteen:
We go back to Del Webb where Ms. Rossetto is now ready to be a “joiner.” She begins with yoga, meeting people walking her dog, and other ways, and this is all new for her. She finds that her contemporaries all have enormous back stories too.
Chapter Sixteen: Part of the reason she was thrown out of Beit T’Shuvah was she wanted to accept people who did not have means. The bean counters, now that they were bigger, did not agree with this. She tells of lost people who came who did very well.
Chapter Seventeen: This chapter goes into the story of how she and her husband, who ran Beit T’Shuvah for 35 years, were eventually “thrown out.” A minor error the Rabbi made losing his temper when they were insulted resulted in a huge blow out and they were sent packing. She had lost her child and home.
Chapter Eighteen: At Del Webb, Ms. Rossetto begins to look into many cases of things gone awry at institutions and how she would have to use Jewish teachings to help found her new self.
Chapter Nineteen: She realizes she can bring these teachings to anyone, “the normies,” as they say, to help us all live more integrated, happier lives of purpose and meaning. She itemizes the teachings for all of us.
Chapter Twenty: She begins speaking at Unitarian churches and people want to listen. She begins a new life where she is teaching through her writing. She runs “grief” groups and “transition” groups.
Chapter Twenty One: She takes up new activities, meets new people, has forgiven the past and keeps growing. She sees “old age” as a new adventure and one she will mine and realized she has “found herself.”
FIRST THREE CHAPTERS
LOST FOUNDER FINDS HERSELF
Chapter One:
For a person like me, diagnosed in Social Work School with unresolved adolescent authority conflicts, whose psychological survival is dependent on a sense of terminal uniqueness, Del Webb Sun City, when I first moved here, was hell.
The houses and their inhabitants all look the same. The rules are strictly enforced with citations: no driving over 35 miles per hour, no leaving your car on the street overnight, take your trash cans in on time, do not let your bougainvillea bushes grow too high, no chimes that might annoy your neighbor.
Del Webb used to be an” over my dead body” laugh line; well, the jokes on me. We used to refer to this leisure world as seizure world. It took me almost half my life to find myself and now I felt lost again, wandering in the desert.
How did I become a cliché? Living in an over fifty-five community. A member of old age anonymous.
Some days I found the unlikeliness of ending up here funny. Some days I wanted to die. Nobody knew who I was here. Not even me. I was invisible, irrelevant, a has been. I had established an identity in Los Angeles, Harriet Rossetto, the Jewish Jail Lady, Founder of Beit T’shuvah, a nationally recognized recovery community. If I had any identity here, it was as Sweet Pea’s mother at the dog park. We knew the dogs’ names, not one another’s. I was in LA recently and was surprised to see babies in strollers. Here in Sun City, we push our pets in strollers.
How did I land here separated from all that I had been and done, mourning two major losses? I didn’t believe in retirement; everyone I knew thought I would die at my desk and have to be carried out. I sneered at the people who claimed to love their retired lives. “We are doing everything we had never had time before, traveling, enjoying our grandchildren.” I had loved what I was doing, wanted to do it forever. My retirement was reluctant, not my choice.
The Board of Directors at Beit T’shuvah, the place I had created, retired me. They diagnosed me with Founders Syndrome, a fatal disease particular to non-profit organizations and their founders. Like Alzheimer’s, it is a slow decline, early onset, barely noticeable for several years, until the final blow. “You and Rabbi Mark (my husband) have built a wonderful place. It is grown up now, no longer ‘a mom and pop’ shop. We need a corporate structure and professional image to ensure financial sustainability. The scores of the people you have rescued are your legacy and Beit T’shuvah will survive without you. “
Maybe it would survive without me, but would I survive without it? I am ashamed to admit at times I don’t want it to survive without me. My mother had told me I was a missionary child. She was right. Beit T’shuvah was my mission, the fulfillment of my adolescent dream to love my work and work with my love. Through my work as the “Jewish Jail Lady,” where I went into prisons counseling Jewish cons, I found my own Jewish bad boy. He became a rabbi and we built Beit T’shuvah together. It was our love child. My identity was inextricably linked to Beit T’shuvah, my connection to life and love for 35 years. It was my purpose, my relevance. Without it, I felt like another invisible old lady, a phantom limb, a vestigial organ, a ghost of Christmas past.
The coalescence of losing my position, my husband’s growing interest in golf and the pandemic moved us out of LA to Sun City, Del Webb. It came about because Mark originally signed up for a weekend golf school at the Hyatt Hotel in Palm Desert and I came along hoping to meet with an old friend who had moved to Sun City. She was a retired therapist and realtor. She invited us to lunch and sold us this house. A few months later, I was suddenly transplanted, unprepared, to old age.
The ex-cons and dope fiends at Beit T’shuvah and their daily dramas had kept me young. I had been called Queen of the Misfits and was proud of the title. I was not proud to be an old lady. I never intended to become one. My mother never became one even at 103. I was shocked when I was offered the senior discount at Soup Plantation. Who did that girl see? Not the me I see. A boy’s witness statement, regarding an accident I was in, told the police, “The old lady got out of the car,” describing me. The older you are the greater discrepancy between how you see yourself and how the young see you.
Until now, I had been the wise one, teaching lost souls how to find themselves. Now I was the lost one, looking to find myself. Like any other addict, I was detoxing from Beit T’shuvah, my drug of choice for 40 years. I was besieged by euphoric thoughts and dreams of the past. Unfortunately, there is no 12-step program for my particular addiction. I would have to craft my own spiritual/emotional steps to recovery, mourn and let go of what was and learn to accept what is.
The recovery prayer is, God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
I cannot change my age. I cannot change the loss of my place and position at Beit T’shuvah. I cannot change that I was a fat lonely only kid who wet the bed, was a klutz, the last one picked for any team, not invited to pledge at a sorority. I cannot change my father died when I was 14 leaving my soul orphaned, searching reunion with my lost soul, looking in all the wrong places. I cannot change that I never belonged to any club that would have me as a member, my best friends were books, that I was half Shirley Morgenstern to please my mother, the other half Marjorie Morningstar to honor my father, the rebel.
I also cannot change I was not the mother my daughter wanted me to be. Just as I was losing Beit T’shuvah, she decided to divorce me too. By email. “Some relationships have an expiration date and ours has expired.” It was my second great loss.
Reinhold Niebuhr, the theologian, in the original serenity prayer wrote, “to change the things I should.”
What are the things I need to change to recover my identity, my relevance, my purpose and meaning? In the Japanese culture your “ickigai” is finding what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs and what compensates you. Once you find it, it’s forever. There is no Japanese word for retirement, incidentally. I need to discover the things I need to change to tolerate my withdrawal symptoms and recover myself. The self that wants to be what it was born to be (Thomas Merton.)
First, I had to learn to reframe my narrative: who I am is not what I do. Redefine my ickigai. I have to find the courage to risk forming new relationships and the willingness to do things I am not good at like meditation, Pilates and chair yoga. I must limit the amount of time I stay stuck in self-pity. In other words, go the gym when I prefer to take to my bed. I have learned to zoom, read Mychart and design documents. My biggest hurdle is letting go of Mark as my bulwark. My time alone is often spent waiting for the sound of the garage door lifting, willing myself not to call him to make sure he is still alive. Not surprisingly, Mark has adjusted more easily to our new life. He wakes up happy, grateful to be alive; he rejoices in the rising sun painting the mountains pink. He plays golf by himself or with others, joined the Jewish Men’s Club of the Desert, goes to a few AA meetings, finds friends, talks daily to his brother, sister and daughter. He joined the ceramics club, excited to have his own locker and apron.
My misery haunts him, and I am unable to hide it. I feel as sorry for him as I do for myself. He expands and I contract, often I wake up disappointed to be alive. My interest and skills are limited. I don’t play mahjong, bridge, canasta, don’t paint, play golf, pickle ball or bocci ball or tennis. I don’t knit or crochet or garden or make jewelry or throw pots. I don’t talk sports or weather or book club or brag about my daughter or grandchildren who don’t talk to me. I can talk politics, philosophy and psychology, too serious and snobbish for small talk.
Connection is my fix. It doesn’t happen often or easily and, when it does, I am sure it is forever. Much of my life I found one bestie, as in a you and me against the rest of them, a folie a deux bond of terminal uniqueness. I am an INFP on Meyers Briggs – irreverent, caustic, oppositional and judgmental. We represent 5% of the population, are shy, deep abstract thinkers. I am an inspirer, as defined by Maggie Craddock’s book, POWER GENES. Inspirers don’t think outside the box, they frequently ignore the box altogether, more attuned to soul to soul, not role to role relationships.
My father liked to sing “Just Molly and me and baby makes three. “Molly was Molly Katz, an imperious, unsentimental woman who put on a girdle before breakfast, girdling her emotions. She was proud of her slim ankles, ashamed her daughter had to shop in the chubby department. She was proper and practical. She didn’t believe in surprises, wrapped presents or God. She expressed disapproval with what her brother called her “I smell shit” look. Pursed lips and flaring nostrils. My father was emotional, and a lover of music. He also bowled, played softball, with the boys and played golf on a public course. He worshipped Jackie Robinson, wept for the Rosenberg’s, and earned a law degree and never practiced.
Baby was me split down the middle. Which one was me? We were more a passion play than a family. I felt like an orphan. Beit T’shuvah became my first family. The one where both of me belonged and came together.
So here I am alive at 85 without a biological family; my family of choice is Mark and me and Sweet Pea makes three. I am now a dues-paying member of the yoga and Pilates club. I show up for tai chi a few mornings a week, join the ladies for lunch from time to time, read the New York Times and LA Times every morning with my coffee, read The New Yorker weekly and the Atlantic Monthly. I distract myself with MSNBC and fall asleep to Dateline. I am discovering myself as a writer, a new identity. I used to say I was a reader, not talented enough to call myself a writer. I think it was Twyla Tharp who said, “If you want to be a writer just sit down and write every day.”
I have been doing that, writing long hand on lined legal pads, reading my pages weekly to my coach and editor. I have been writing my way out of despair into repair, discovering and recovering my “ickigai.” This book is my story of how I became a founder, what propelled me to do the work I did, how I became a lost founder and how I eventually found myself.
Chapter Two:
I hit bottom at Laguna Niguel in 1983. I was facing 50, a former social worker, unable to find my place in the world or find my Mr. Right. My only child had just left for college, taking with her my raison d’etre, the reason I hadn’t killed myself, the only unforgivable thing a parent can do to a child.
I had followed a pied piper who promised me the California dream. I had met him in New York, when I’d lost my job due to city cuts, and he’d said, “You’re too old to be a hippy, Harriet,” and suggested I come work for him. He had seduced me with flattery convincing me to apply my skills to help “Dreamies and Hopies” by enrolling them in a Get Rich quick seminar. I applauded him as a Robin Hood, not seeing its chicanery, until he tricked me, too, leaving me jobless, penniless, and about to be homeless. I hadn’t even been sleeping with this one. Thus, I learned a major life lesson: Whatever someone does to someone else they will eventually do to you.
This was not my first go-round at trusting the wrong types. Was I always defying the bone- crushing practicality of my mother? Very young, I’d married the nice Jewish Harvard Law School graduate to make my mother happy and cheated on him with my humanities professor. We divorced the summer I graduated from college. No one came to my graduation. “You unmade your bed, Harriet, now you lie in it,” my mother said. I was split in half: nice Jewish girl suburban housewife, the other half a bohemian, hippy, beatnik who liked bad boys. I found comfort in food and escape in true crime. My missionary zeal to make a difference in the world was squelched by my inner sloth monster. I was a divorcee at 19, got put in the psych ward after an abusive love affair and was sent off to Europe to find myself. What I found was Italian men. I married one named Michelangelo whom I met on a bus in New York and we had a child. I was split again. Part of me was uber mom, all about Dr. Spock, Summerhill, Dr Seuss, PTA. The other one hated the responsibility of motherhood, smoked dope while the baby napped and carried on an affair with the elevator man in our West Side apartment building. When I tired of him, he extorted my mother and stepfather threatening to kidnap my daughter if they didn’t hand over $5K and Don’t Tell Harriet. My mother had to testify in an open court. She never said, “I told you so,” just looked at me and seethed. “Where were your instincts, Harriet?”
When he got out of prison he found me, chased me up 72nd with a broken beer bottle, shouting, “I’ll run you out of New York, bitch.” I swallowed the pills, had my stomach pumped at St. Vincent’s ER and came to in a wheelchair marked “Transfer to Bellevue,” the county nut house. I ran home barefoot in a nightgown, packed up and followed the wrong employer to Los Angeles with the kid and the dog.
In AA, they call it “a geographic.” You change locations but you bring yourself with you. Now the California dream had turned into a nightmare. I considered offing myself. Suicide was in my DNA, my grandmother had “weak nerves.” Her husband, my grandfather, killed himself in his car when he lost his money. Tante Sadie was always sticking her head in the oven, my grandmother stopped eating and became catatonic between husbands, four of whom she outlived. I was not a silent secret suicide type, however.
I announced my intention to a close friend.
“Before you kill yourself, I would like you to make an appointment with this woman.” She handed me a business card.
I looked at it. “Janet Levy, Science of Mind Practitioner. Expect a miracle.” I rolled my eyes. Miracles!
“You’ll like her. She’s Jewish. What do you have to lose?” my friend asked.
Janet Levy turned out to be small, warm and round like a good roll. “What do you want, my dear?” she asked me.
“That’s my problem. I don’t know what I want.”
“Do you pray?”
“Fuck no I don’t pray. I am a Jewish intellectual.”
“Well, I am going to pray for you. Father of the universe, take this woman by the hand and guide her to her rightful work. She knows she wants to make a difference.”
I also knew I needed to earn money in case I did live. I opened the Sunday classified ads in the LA Times and a still small voice whispered, “See what social work has to offer.” And there it was. The smallest ad on the page: “Person of Jewish background and culture to work with Jewish criminal offenders. MSW required.”
The hair stood up on my arms. Are you kidding me? Jewish bad boys, who knew? My dream come true. If you are a nice Jewish girl who likes bad boys and you read this ad and the miracle lady told you to pay attention, you knew a miracle just occurred.
I made a rational, conscious intellectual decision not to call it a coincidence. That decision shifted my consciousness from a random meaningless universe to peek at the possibility of a higher intelligence.
I applied for and got the job.
I became a field worker for a Jewish Committee for Personal Service; I was called a Jewish Jail Lady. Our mission was to serve Jews who were serving time. I was always a true crime junkie, and I was hooked day one by going to jail. I connected to the people behind bars. Good people who did really bad things. They had bitten the hands of those who fed them, they broke the hearts of those who loved them, and betrayed the souls of those who trusted them. If their lips were moving, they were lying. But to me they were more honest than the allegedly good people. I saw myself in them. I too had a split self, good on the outside covering up my inner outlaw.
I met Jane the first week when visiting a Sybil Brand County Jail for Women who turned out to be also an English Lit grad from Hunter College. We sat across from one another, separated by our uniforms and a glass partition. She was wearing an orange jumpsuit; I, the uniform of professional social worker: slacks, blazer and briefcase. She had been arrested for dealing drugs, a felony. She was my age and had a daughter the same age as mine. She was me. Jane’s husband had returned from Vietnam a heroin addict. When she couldn’t get him straight, she joined him, eventually dealing in order to support their growing habits. But for the grace of God or good luck, that could have been my story.
The elevator man I moved into my apartment after I moved my husband out dealt drugs and carried a gun. I smoked his weed and snorted his cocaine. I never thought of myself as a criminal; I was “a free spirit” leading a double life, mother, social worker, nice Jewish girl on the outside hiding my secret life, both pleased and ashamed by my duplicity. It never crossed my mind I could wind up in jail.
Now here I was the Jewish Jail Lady meeting people just like me who committed crimes but weren’t criminals. They were broken people, trapped in a self-destructive cycle of substances and behavioral addictions. They lived in either/or black and white thinking, alternating between extremes, unable to integrate their outside with their insides, their intentions with their actions. They were split 51-49 down the middle, no spiritual corpus collosum to bring the halves of them into a whole. They were imprisoned in a broken system that dehumanized and degraded them, reminding them they would be back as they walked out the revolving door. Everyone I spoke to said they would never go back to prison, but back they came 30, 60, 90 days after they were released. My mission had found me, I was sent to set them free from their inner and outer prisons. Everyone I met was a mirror reflecting my own split self. The message was clear: in order to reflect wholeness to the broken souls behind the glass, I would have to heal my own fractured self. I would heal me while healing them.
Friends and families laughed as I told them I was visiting Jews in jail. That is not part of the Jewish narrative. Jews are doctors, lawyers and accountants who love their mothers and provide for their families and play golf at the country club. Their children go to Harvard, not to prison. The founder of our organization explained to me that we existed to fulfill the mitzvah of Jews helping their own, while allowing the Jewish community to perpetuate the narrative that Jews are perfect. Those Jews clung to their denial ferociously, but I was just as ferociously driven to barrel through their denial of the truth. “They are us,” I told everyone, “We are them; they are our children, brothers, sisters, and mothers.”
I knew I needed a platform.
We were housed in the basement of Gateway Hospital and Mental Health Center; five field workers led by an octogenarian whom the inmates called “Bubbe Teresa.” She had been an attorney who couldn’t practice law because she felt it was immoral to charge people who were in trouble. She was the woman I wanted to be my spirit guide.
One morning Reuben was waiting outside my office. It was a chilly morning, and he was wearing a tank top and shorts. I looked up, surprised.
“You told me to come see you when I got out. I just got out and I got no place to go. You said you’d help me start over.” Reuben was one of my favorites. He was 22, the son of prominent psychiatrists in New York who wanted nothing to do with him. He was smart, poetic and wounded. A bright light with a dark shadow. My type.
“Okay how can I help?” I asked.
“I need a bed for tonight.”
I called the Jewish Federation, homeless shelters, the mission. “I need a bed for tonight for a young man who was just released from custody.”
“What is your long-term treatment plan?” I heard in response.
“Long term treatment plan? He’s wearing sandals, he’s got no clothes, and he needs a bed for the night.”
Reuben sat there patiently controlling his smirk. He knew I wouldn’t be able to help him. He had promised me he would give it a try and he’d shown up and now he was free to get loaded.
I knew I shouldn’t, but I had to. “Reuben, you will come home with me tonight and we’ll try again tomorrow. We’ll stop by the thrift shop on the way and get you some warm clothes.”
They kept coming like they said they would, and I had nowhere to put them. No more vouchers, all the beds were full.
“Fuck it,” I said, “I’ll start my own place.”
It was 1985. Homelessness was the big buzz then and, sadly, it still is forty years later. At the time, money was flowing into LA from FEMA for homeless shelters. I sent in a grant application for a homeless shelter for Jewish women and men coming out of jail and prisons. I was sent $140K dollars for a one-time purchase of a shelter to house 35 people.
I found it in a drug and crime infested neighborhood, adjacent to a barrio. I called it Beit T’shuvah, House of Return and Repentance. I moved in, the warden den mother, Mother Teresa the second.
Chapter Three:
When I was first lamenting losing Beit T’shuvah at Del Webb, I began looking around, and I thought maybe I had found my next place of inspiration. It seemed perfect, too good to be true. A chance encounter had directed me to the Spiritual Center of the Desert, a new Thought Science of Mind church. Janet Levy, the miracle worker who directed me to the ad for a Jewish Jail Lady, had been a Science of Mind practitioner herself. This would be full circle. I would become a Reverend Rebbetzin Science of Mind Practitioner, practicing miracles for others.
I rushed to the service, introduced myself to Reverend Dale, a Jewish girl minister from Brooklyn. I made an appointment to meet with her, brought her a copy of my first book, signed up for the classes, bought all her books. I was giddy for a week, manic a little, about the neat bow tying it all together, coming back to where it all began.
I got there early the next Sunday hoping to reconnect with Rev Dale, thinking she would be as excited to see me as I was to see her. She looked at me like she didn’t know who I was. She managed a “Oh I remember you” smile and kept walking to meet her parishioners. She made no mention of my book or my future. The classes were on zoom, and I had already paid for them, so I stuck it out for the first semester. The other students were regulars, true believers in only positive thoughts. They manifested new cars and perfect relationships. I sulked silently. In their lingo, this was not mine to do. Sometimes God sends miracles and sometimes you get lessons.
What was my ickigui? What do I love and what was I good at and what does the world need, I asked myself. Fortunately, I didn’t have to worry about earning a living. I just needed to find a life worth living. I loved righting things I believed to be wrong when no one else saw them, finding a need and filling it.
When I worked at City University of New York Open Admissions in 1980, I was counseling a new crop of nursing students. These were usually middle-aged women working as nurses’ aides and LPNs who wanted to upgrade and become RNs. They were intelligent, experienced, and failing all their tests. I sat and talked with them, and I got it. The tests were in Standard English, a foreign language to them. They spoke black dialect. Those academics creating the tests were ignorant. They were forcing a foreign language on the black students instead of translating the tests into dialect English so they could pass their tests.
I was a lone voice pointing this out. The Black faculty wanted to teach Swahili, since Blacks had recently been declared African Americans. Did they really think Swahili would help them to pass tests in Standard English? I decided to become fluent in black dialect which I then translated into white language. The students understood as we studied together. Their grades improved with their self-esteem. I knew I was onto something. I wrote a few articles, stood up on my soap box making enemies everywhere. I was a white girl with no rank preaching a message no one wanted to hear. I loved learning the linguistics and understanding how the dual language system impacted systems, racism, recovery and unemployment.
Teaching Standard English should start in kindergarten as a second language instead of continually correcting the kids’ bad grammar, contributing to their sense of shame and exclusion. The research showed in the few experiments of teaching kids to be bilingual – black dialect and standard English – that they did better in school and at home. Only a handful of us paid attention and nothing changed. New York City went broke, Open Admissions closed, and I was let go without any tenure securing my future. I moved to California, as you know.
I did think like “a missionary child,” as my mother had said. One reason I had followed the California con was that he was allegedly training the unemployed to become energy auditors as part of a start-up non-profit to address the energy crisis. It was new territory and, again, I was making a difference, changing the world one person at a time. In truth, he was scamming banks and the real estate market with his get rich seminars.
Thank God, I did find a legitimate way to help the world by founding Beit T’shuvah. There is no better fix than helping those going through the revolving door in and out of prisons.
Suddenly, I had turned into a hero to the Jews in jail and their families, a gad fly to those who denied their existence and an annoyance to the prosecution when the judge preferred rehabilitation over incarceration. I was beating the system, justice, justice, shall you pursue.
I was on a high myself. God loved me and I was a savior getting lots of attention and recognition. So what do you do when you get everything you want and lived it for 35 years, seen the promised land and then lose it all? I guess it is biblical. Moses freed the Jews from enslavement, shlepped them round the desert for 40 years and never got into the promised land himself. Was there another miracle for me or only one per customer? Einstein said there are two ways to live your life, either you believe nothing is a miracle or you believe everything is a miracle. Miracles are rationed, I told myself. How do I bring myself out of the cycle of hope and disappointment?
I got excited when one of the local rabbis near Del Webb agreed to screen at his temple the documentary about Mark (the rabbi at Beit T’shuvah and my husband) and me. Our PR team successfully promoted it in the Desert Sun, wrote a story about us, praising,” The Jewish Jail Lady and the Holy Thief,” our story. Two hundred and fifty people showed up, we got a standing ovation. Eager people, wanting to be me, grabbed for my business card. This is it, the film will generate clients for Mark and me, people hungry for meaning, purpose, spiritual sustenance.
I was incredulous. No one called or emailed. Then I thought, why didn’t we pass around a sign-in sheet? Why didn’t we bring our books to sell? It was because I didn’t want to pursue them. I wanted them to pursue me. Self-promotion felt unsavory to me. Marketing is manipulative, I felt. If that is what it takes, I don’t want it. One of the blessings for me of helping desperate people whom no one else wanted to help was being needed and pursued; I always had more customers than I could handle. One woman who was there called Mark and asked him to be a speaker at her Unitarian church. “I am a Jewnitarian, a Jew at my core but, spiritually and philosophically, I am a Unitarian,” she said. This intrigued me and I wanted to understand what about Judaism turned her off philosophically. Why did Jewish seekers not find what they are looking for in Jewish literature? Ramdass, Jack Kornfield, all the gurus were Jews. I myself had looked everywhere and finally found what I was seeking philosophically and spiritually, found it in Judaism. What were they missing?
I called the woman and invited her to meet with me. She told me she had been turned off by the Hebrew, the “have tos,” the synagogue and the comparisons and competitions there. I got it. I had been turned off by that too.
The Jewnitarian lady said I was heroic; she would get me speaking engagements. Meanwhile while I was figuring out again how to change the world, I could start small starting conversations with dogwalkers and the yoga people we were seeing. I was beginning to see our similarities rather than our differences. We were all transplants from our other lives, retiring, rewiring, refiring. The metaphor “transplant,” as I was reading Delia Ephron’s book, said transplants are a renewal of life, they are risky, uncertain, painful and unfamiliar. They are physical, psychological existential shocks to the system. We were all in a type of shock then. Most of us came here from other places, where we knew who we were, and we knew others who knew us. We didn’t have to keep introducing ourselves everywhere we went. We knew the shortcuts to get where we had to go. We thought we knew what came next. We had an established routine of comings and goings.
Transplants take time. The physical blood has to adjust to new organs and new blood cells, and it doesn’t always take, fear of host versus graft disease. I had been impatient, not realizing it is a challenge to start over when the future is shorter than the past. The only way forward was “a day at a time, be here now, today is a gift” thinking. Maybe I would start Transplants Anonymous, a place to converse and connect with other women.
I read Chung TZU: “The whole world could praise Chung Tzu and it wouldn’t make him exert himself and the whole world could condemn him, and it wouldn’t make him mope.” Reading this brought me back to the aha moment when I read the story of a man who went to the rabbi and said, “Rabbi, I want to study the mysteries of the Kabbalah.” The Rabbi responded, “My son, I have two questions. When people praise you do you feel good? “Yes, my Rabbi.” “And when they criticize you, do you feel badly?” “Of course, my Rabbi.” ” Then go away my son. You are not yet ready to study the mystery of the Kabbalah.”
Was it really possible to disconnect from the opinions of other people? I remember someone wrote a book: What Other People Think of You is None of Your Business. Clever title but I didn’t believe it. If someone wanted something I had, I valued that something more. If they devalued it, so did I. I wanted to study the mysteries of the universe to become more of a God pleaser than a people pleaser. I remembered signing up years back to attend the first National Codependency Conference to listen to Ann Wilson Schaef, the queen of codependency. When she asked were we there for personal reasons, all raised our hands. When asked if there for professional reasons, we all raised our hands. Therapists are codependent by profession. Helping others is our drug.
I left and made an urgent session with Rabbi Jonathan Omerman, my spiritual advisor, and told him her theory that everything I was doing was codependent, such as helping others feel good about themselves which made me feel good about me. He chuckled and said, “Who is this pernicious woman?”
Back when I was building Beit T’shuvah, I also discovered Rabbi Dr. Abraham Twerski, a Hasidic psychiatrist who ran an alcohol treatment center. He had written an article called Judaism and the Twelve Steps. A revolutionary idea for Jews who refused to go to AA meetings because they were held in church basements and talked about God, maybe even Jesus. I was relieved to discover the 12 steps were kosher for Jews, not just kosher but they were the Vitamin C for the scurvy of the hole in the soul of addiction. I also learned Carl Jung had helped Bill Wilson understand the steps from a psychological perspective so the twelve steps were also congruent with psychology. I now became open to learning about Judaism as a spiritual path to wholeness, not a rigid meaningless set of rituals and restrictions.
I, like the Jewnitarian, had struggled with being Jewish. My mother was a devout atheist, disdainful of superstitions. She was a first generation American, desperate to assimilate. A tough task when your name is Molly Katz. None the less when she visited me in girls scout camp and saw me enthusiastically singing “Jesus Loves Me,” she enrolled me in Jewish Sunday school. I loved the singing there, was confirmed in a white robe and that was the end of my Jewish education.
I had many conversations in college about whether being Jewish was ethnicity or a gastronomic choice. My Judaism became a philosophy, not a practice, the lens of seeing the wisdom of Jewish thought as a path to wholeness. Wholeness is holiness. Our split, our dual nature by divine design, is not pathological. We are part animal, part angel (not either/or), endowed with free will to choose our actions no matter what we feel. I had been plagued all my life by trying to find out which one was the real me. Then I got it, they were all the real me, the nice Jewish girl, the one who liked bad boys, the intellectual true crime junkie, the long hair who loved classical music and Billie Holiday.
The shift from either/or thinking and letting go of comparing myself to others began to change my narrative about myself. I got that the psyche, the spirit and the mind are one. My Beit T’shuvah model of recovery could blend psychological Judaism and the twelve steps. It would be an integrated model of change in a community setting.
Thus, I needed to find a clinical rabbi. I only had a salary for one position. I posted an ad, “Looking for a needle in a haystack.” I got an immediate response, “Madame, I am your needle.”
He showed up for the interview exactly as I had imagined him, short paunchy, wearing a Greek fisherman cap. Tevya himself. In a manic state, I hired him on the spot knowing he came straight from God.
Strange things began happening. A few residents noticed the disappearance of their toothpaste, toothbrushes and soap. One of the women came into her room, surprised he was going through her underwear drawer. Pop went my magic bubble. The rabbi I just hired was stealing from the thieves he was supposed to be saving. Was it all a mirage? Should I pack up and quit now? It took me a few days. Okay God, I guess you sent him to teach me when it’s too good to be true, it’s too good to be true. Check references. Another lesson.
Okay now that I had a message, I still had to spread it. Not to mention, I also knew I needed a romantic partner of my own.