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Grantees in the News

Candles of Hope: Helping Israelis affected by pregnancy, infant loss

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Elysa Rapoport gave birth to a stillborn daughter in August 2016.

In her native Australia, she would have found grief support and information through Red Nose. In the UK, she could have turned to Sands. In the US, organizations such as NechamaComfort, which supports Jewish families and communities through pregnancy loss, infant loss and miscarriage, would have been ready to help.

In Tel Aviv, there was nothing.

“It was terribly traumatic. I couldn’t find what I needed, neither through the hospital nor my health fund. I received one-on-one counseling, but I was looking for a support group,” she says.

Nine months later, her health fund informed her about a support group in Rishon Lezion. Although she found the meetings helpful, Rapoport felt this service should have been available immediately and closer to home.

THE NONPROFIT’S name refers to the healing power of hope (Illustrative). (credit: Anton Darius/Unsplash)

So she and her mother, Sydney-based early childhood teacher Rebecca Dreyfus, spent the next year-and-a-half working to establish Candles of Hope (candlesofhope.org.il/), a national nonprofit group offering support, information and education to Israelis affected by pregnancy and infant loss.

Their efforts were assisted by Joey Gelpe of Jerusalem, whose second daughter arrived stillborn in 2017.

“We really felt the lack of support and understanding from many parts of society, including the medical establishment,” Gelpe says.

“I felt I wanted to change that as much as I could. The main groups available were for women and I wanted something more holistic. When I heard Candles of Hope was being established, I asked to join the board. At the time I didn’t realize how important it would be.”

Candles of Hope was officially registered in 2019 as a kind of one-stop-shop where bereaved families and healthcare professionals can find existing resources, and where gaps are filled by providing new services.

Its name refers to memorial candles and to the healing power of hope.

“Candles of Hope is an information resource in Hebrew and English – and we want to add Arabic, French, Amharic and Russian to cater to all sectors of Israeli society, because we’ve had approaches from all different communities,” says Rapoport, now the 38-year-old mother of two preschoolers.

“We have a database on our website that lists professional services and support [including English-speaking therapists and counselors], centralizing the information for the first time. There are support groups for men, women and couples, available online, in person or one-on-one,” she adds.

“We are in touch with all the hospitals and health funds, and we lobby the Knesset and Ministry of Health to improve professional training and care at every point along the medical journey of pregnancy loss.”

Despite her limited Hebrew, Dreyfus recruited board members such as Prof. Danny Horesh of Bar-Ilan University’s psychology department, whose research in 2018 found that pregnancy loss can trigger post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and major depressive disorder (MDD).

Although PTSD research in Israel has tended to focus on combat soldiers, Horesh studies how it affects parents of stillborn infants, who account for approximately six of every 1,000 deliveries.

Horesh was among the speakers at Candles of Hope’s first half-day conference in May 2021, which drew 120 online participants. Sadly, Dreyfus passed away shortly before this event she had worked so hard to actualize.

“My mum and I started this together and I continue this work in her honor and memory,” Rapoport says.

The second annual conference, also online to be as accessible as possible, is planned for May 26. The presentations, mostly in Hebrew, will address aspects such as the complex process in the hospital for both the family experiencing the loss and the medical staff; different forms of grief therapy including writing and visual arts; and learning from the work of international support organizations.

“They have a wealth of knowledge we can benefit from, models we can adopt. We have much to learn from them,” says Rapoport.

“We also collaborate with organizations here in Israel that touch on this topic. We do not want to double up on things already happening, but rather bring them together so that people know about them and can access them.”

Before the formal establishment of Candles of Hope, its board was involved in developing a policy that was approved by the Health Ministry and the Knesset, calling for each hospital to appoint someone to deal with stillbirths.

However, says Rapoport, “Nobody is accountable to make sure it’s happening, and in reality it varies from hospital to hospital. We continue to hear stories about unsatisfactory experiences. We are actively lobbying the Knesset for more accountability.”

SHE GAVE a few examples of situations that need improvement.

One issue is that the mother often is placed in the maternity ward with other moms and newborns. The gynecology department would be a more considerate choice, says Rapoport.

Another issue is that before discharge, the woman is required to register the baby’s birth with National Insurance and get a certificate documenting the stillbirth. Rapoport says this hospital procedure is insensitive to women who suffered a stillbirth.

After discharge, these women have no reason to go to the Tipat Chalav baby health clinics, which is where new mothers are routinely screened for postpartum depression.

“A woman who’s gone through a stillbirth falls into a black hole because she’s not in that system. There is no formal mental health follow-up,” says Rapoport. “We are recommending that a screening survey be given to women through their health fund.”

Perhaps the most serious problem is how parents are presented with their rights in terms of the infant’s burial. They receive a form in Hebrew that explains their options: letting the Chevra Kaddisha (burial society) take care of the whole procedure; being notified and included in the burial; being notified only where the baby is buried; or taking the entire responsibility into their own hands, which is preferred by Muslim and Christian families, says Rapoport.

“People are not always given the form, or they’re given it at the wrong time when they’re too overwhelmed to deal with it. And even if they do choose an option, they don’t necessarily get what they request,” says Rapoport. “To this day I don’t know where my baby is buried although I requested that option.”

She notes that the ITIM Jewish Life Advocacy Center is helping bereaved parents get information from the burial societies, but there is no standardization of procedures.

Gelpe says the improvements “can start from small things, like a bit more sensitivity and understanding at the hospitals’ maternity wards. A child who was stillborn is still someone who died.”

He handles many of the administrative tasks for Candles of Hope, aiming to help bereaved families get connected with existing organizations or find someone to talk to who had a similar experience.

And, he says, “we are helping raise awareness about infant loss and pregnancy loss in a society that encourages having lots of children.”

While many services focus only on bereaved mothers, “the men’s experience is on our agenda,” adds Rapoport. Her own partner, she says, “felt sidelined, invisible to the system.”

Candles of Hope cosponsored a men’s retreat and is in touch with another organization that will be providing a hotline for men until its own hotline is set up.

“We have men reach out to us and we provide them with support services. As an organization, we recognize that men experience the loss too. One of our board members, Nurit Glazer Chodick, did her PhD on the fathers’ experiences,” Rapoport adds.

Candles of Hope has never done formal fundraising; it receives support from private donors and from the US-based Good People Fund.

“The fact that Elysa and her family chose to embrace a subject that brought them loss and deep pain, and turn that into a positive force that is changing society is extraordinary,” says Naomi Eisenberger, founder of the Good People Fund, which supports those engaged in tikkun olam (repairing the world) in Israel and the US.

“For far too long, the needs of women who have experienced the loss of an infant or pregnancy were either ignored or treated with little sensitivity. Candles of Hope is changing that reality,” Eisenberger says.

The War With Russia Is Reviving Past Traumas for Ukraine’s Vulnerable Holocaust Survivors

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In late February, four days after Russia invaded Ukraine, Inna Vdovichenko, a staffer in the Odessa office of the Jewish humanitarian organization JDC, was sitting in Natalia Berezhnaya’s home when an air raid alert began. Sirens blared. For Vdovichenko, who had come over to keep Berezhnaya company and to see if she needed food or medications, it was the second time she’d heard such sirens; the noise brought with it a wave of fear. But for Berezhnaya, 88, a Holocaust survivor, there was also a feeling of déjà vu.

“She said, ‘I was a little girl when I had to go to the basement and hide from the bombings over Odessa in 1941, and I can’t imagine going there again,’” Vdovichenko, recalls by Zoom.

Berezhnaya had a home care worker, provided by JDC’s network, by her side, and the two made tea and served chocolates and sang to pass the time and lift the mood until Vdovichenko felt safe to leave.

“These people have to go through the war for the second time in their lives,” Vdovichenko says of the Holocaust survivors she has been monitoring as Ukraine has been rocked by war over the last few weeks. “They are afraid of being left without food, without electricity, without water and [of being] alone, that’s what they fear.”

When Nazi Germans invaded Ukraine in June 1941, the country then boasted Europe’s largest Jewish population, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Scholars estimate that about 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews were killed, by Nazis as well as by collaborators, during the Holocaust. When Nazis shot to death more than 33,000 Jews at a ravine called Babyn Yar in Kyiv on Sept. 29-30, 1941, it was one of the largest mass shootings of World War II. (Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish; his family lost relatives in the Holocaust, and his grandfather served in the Soviet Army, fighting the Nazis.)

Berezhnaya is one of Ukraine’s 10,000 Holocaust survivors. Check-ins like the one provided by Vdovichenko have become a vital lifeline for some of the country’s most vulnerable citizens: Among that group, 6,500 are receiving home care and 588 are in the “most disabled” category, according to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference), which provides compensation to Holocaust survivors and funds humanitarian relief organizations in Ukraine. Already there have been casualties as well. On March 18, Borys Romanchenko, a 96-year-old survivor of Buchenwald concentration camp, was killed when Russians bombed his apartment building in Kharkiv. “Survived Hitler, murdered by Putin,” Ukraine’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba tweeted.

Greg Schneider, executive vice president of the Claims Conference, says the imminent danger facing those thousands is forcing his organization to revisit what it means to provide aid to Holocaust survivors.

“Generally, survivors are living in the United States and Israel, in Canada and Australia, in places that are stable,” he says. “[The war in Ukraine] has forced us to do things that we’ve never done in our past, like sourcing pallets of wholesale food, renting trucks, bringing them in across borders. That’s not something we normally do; we’re normally funders.”

The Claims Conference has helped coordinate advances for concentration-camp survivors in Ukraine on the payments they receive as indemnification from Germany, and has so far assisted with hundreds of evacuations for Holocaust survivors to Israel, Poland, Moldova, and Germany. Meanwhile, the JDC set up two emergency hotlines staffed by Israelis who speak Russian and Ukrainian to facilitate evacuation inquiries and coordinate household-supply deliveries.

“Most of them do not want to leave, they’re not requesting evacuation,” says Deborah Joselow, chief planning officer for UJA, another organization that funds social services for survivors. “They said they lived through a war, and they would rather die in their own beds.”

Survivor Mitzvah Project, a nonprofit that has been working with Eastern European survivors since 2001, has helped 348 survivors across Ukraine, helping to coordinate deliveries of food, medical supplies, and firewood. Volunteers have reported Holocaust survivors taking refuge in bomb shelters and living in areas where pharmacies are closed and where they don’t feel safe going out to get food.

“We call them all of the time, and we call new ones every day to check on them and see how they’re doing,” says Zane Buzby, founder of the Los Angeles-based Survivor Mitzvah Project. “That’s a very important thing for them, to know they’re not alone and forgotten.”

In the U.S., social-services organizations have found that Holocaust survivors in their communities need special attention at this time as well. Staffers report that Holocaust survivors in general—especially those born in Ukraine—are finding news coverage of the war traumatizing.

“Survivors are reporting to us that they cannot sleep at night as the current war is bringing up severe trauma and triggering PTSD from their wartime experiences,” says Masha Pearl, executive director of The Blue Card, which provides food and financial assistance to Holocaust survivors on or below the poverty line. “They are terrified as they watch the news and are reminded of being sheltered from bombings. They are hounded by the painful memories of cold and starvation.”

In the Chicago suburb of Buffalo Grove, Khana Stolyar, 85, who lived in the Mogilev Podolskiy ghetto in western Ukraine during World War II, worries about relatives who have been living in Ukraine; her brother fled to Moldova after his house was bombed, and she talks to cousins on the phone who tell her they don’t have enough to eat. “When I hear of friends and family that are hungry,” Stolyar tells TIME through Maya Gumirov, who translated and works at CJE SeniorLife, which serves Holocaust survivors in the Chicago area, “it reminds me of being hungry during the war, and I’m heartbroken. It’s very scary.”

In Manhattan, Sami Steigmann, 82, who was born in what’s now the southwestern Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi and survived a labor camp, fears that World War III has already begun. He is afraid of “how far Putin is willing to go,” he says. “That really scares me.”

‘His gift is holy persistence’

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On October 29, 2006, the New York Times published a heartbreaking story about enslaved children in in Africa.

It focused on Mark Kwadwo, an indentured 6-year-old — yes, you read that right — whose life on a fishing boat on Lake Volta in Ghana included work, beatings, the ever-present possibility of a deforming accident or even death, and absolutely nothing that had anything to do with childhood, except the benefits of having such a small, uncherished body to shove into small spaces.

Mark was one of many such children, sold into indenture or outright slavery by their parents, who could afford nothing else, or otherwise forced into labor.

Most people who read that story felt terrible. They — we — counted our blessings, felt pity, sympathized deeply, raged at injustice — and then we went on with our lives. There didn’t seem to be much else to do, anyway. Don’t we read stories of inhumanity all the time? Doesn’t madness lie in futile efforts to make a difference?

That’s not how Evan Robbins of Verona reacted. He helped free enslaved children, educate them, give them structure and love — and he also helped his students, back home in New Jersey, grow not only as students — that, after all, is a basic part of his job — but also as leaders and as people.

He’s straightforward, even matter-of-fact, when he tells his story.

“My younger child, Maya, was the same age as the boy in the story — she’s a senior in college now — and the differences between their lives just bothered me,” he said.

Evan Robbins with young men
Mr. Robbins, center, stands with young men at their boarding school in Ghana. From left, they’re Might, Freedom, Shepard, Promise, and Robert, as well as staff member Seth.

Mr. Robbins teaches AP government and U.S. history at Metuchen High school. “I brought the story to my students,” he said. He brought a speaker, Simon Deng, a human-rights advocate who had been enslaved as a child in Sudan, to his senior history class. “My students were moved,” he said. “We decided to do a walk in Metuchen to raise money. And that was the start of it.”

That first walk brought in $6,000.

The next year, there were more fundraisers; he was able to send $20,000 to help free trafficked children.

“And then, in 2010, I went to Ghana on a rescue mission” with the International Organization for Migration, a group that works with human trafficking, refugees, and internally displaced people, he said. He’d traveled widely before he met his wife, Lisa, and the two of them continued to explore the world together until his older daughter, Arianna, was born; “I’d been to Egypt, but this was my first time in sub-Saharan Africa.

“It was eye-opening.”

He landed in Accra, Ghana’s capital, and after a 13-hour drive the group — five people — arrived in Kete Krachi. They spent time on Lake Volta, talking to people they met, and then they went to a durbar — a traditional meeting. It’s a formal gathering, with rules. “You go around the circle the right way — I think it’s clockwise — and you shake everybody’s hand, and then you sit down, and then people make speeches, and then there is dancing, then a break, and then the meeting continues.” He wasn’t able to follow the discussion; it was in Ewe, the local language.

Children were being trafficked in this region, as they are in so many others around the world. The visitors wanted to talk about how it’s wrong, but that’s hard. “The roots of trafficking are poverty,” Mr. Robbins said. “People have too many children, and they have no money. There’s a history in Africa of sending a child you can’t take care of to a relative. This is a perversion of that.” Now, often, children are sold outright.

Evan Robbins with Roberta
Evan Robbins stands with Roberta at her boarding school last July. Roberta’s heading off to college; she wants to be a nurse/midwife.

He recalled being in Ghana this summer. “We got together with the kids; we all had dinner in the office,” he said. “They all got up and talked. I said that I wanted them to be like a family to each other, to be there for each other. Their families had let them down, but they were there for each other.”

He told some success stories. “We set Bernice’s mother up in business, but it went under,” Mr. Robbins said. “And she made horrible decisions for her daughter. When Bernice was 16, her mother decided that she should live with a 34-year-old man, who impregnated her. Once we got her out of there, we put her up in her own house, and took care of her and her son.

“Now she’s about to start an apprenticeship as a beautician, and her son is 5, and in school; he’s the cutest kid you’ve ever seen. She made a speech about how appreciative she is.

“I’ve known her for 10 years. I saw her go through ups and downs, and now I’ve seen her coming into her own. It is so special.

“There’s Joshua, who kept getting kicked out of school, and now he’s going to be an electrician. So many of them have so much to overcome, and we let them figure it out. We stayed with them. Samson too will be an electrician; in May, they’ll both get their commercial licenses. To see them struggle, to be kids, and then to grow up and become mature people, who you’d be proud to call your son — that’s wonderful to see.

“We’ve stayed with them. It’s not always easy. But we tell the kids that if they’re not even trying to move forward, that we can’t take care of them anymore. But if they fix their act, they can come back.

“You have a part to play in it, too, we tell them. You have to work hard.”

BTCTE - Brooke Margolin

Evie Litwok went to prison for two years. Now she’s helping other formerly incarcerated people chart better futures.

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Evie Litwok in New York’s Central Park with her Maltese, Ali. Photo by Jeff Eason for LGBTQ NationEvie Litwok in New York’s Central Park with her Maltese, Ali. Photo by Jeff Eason for LGBTQ Nation

 

At first glance Evie Litwok is an unlikely crusader for the formerly incarcerated.

Petite, with brown hair, a comfortable sweater and slacks, and an air of optimism that belies her 70 years, Litwok is very much the quintessential New Yorker.

The lesbian daughter of Holocaust survivors, she’s quick with a story about  her traditional Jewish upbringing or an insightful bon mot.

But Litwok is a former prisoner herself: Incarcerated at age 60 for mail fraud and tax evasion, she spent nearly two years in two federal women’s penitentiaries.

By the time she left prison, she was destitute, homeless, and disconnected from her family. She spent time living in shelters and on the street.

“I had nothing — except for a 30-year resume in the nonprofit world and on Wall Street,” Litwok said.

Yet by the standards of those who are released into communities with little or no support, Litwok was privileged as a white cisgender woman with access to a social network of friends and colleagues. She was able to find permanent housing, regain control of her life, and return to the activist work that had always fueled her.

And Litwok is not asking for sympathy for her troubles. Instead, she hopes to help other formerly incarcerated people return to society as productive citizens, living their best lives not just for themselves but to the benefit of the communities and families they eventually rejoin — and to avoid re-entanglement with a legal system that is not set up to deal with poverty, mental health issues, and drug addiction.

“I was lucky,” she said. “But for most people it is almost impossible to recreate the life you had after prison. That’s why the recidivism rate is so high. It does no one any good to release people without any support, and only to relapse in drug use and criminal behavior and come back into contact with police and the legal system.

Today, Litwok lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in a modest apartment that’s become the headquarters for increasingly urgent advocacy work on behalf of the formerly incarcerated — particularly women, LGBTQ individuals and people of color.

According to the Williams Institute’s National Inmate Survey, conducted in 2011 and 2012, sexual minorities (those who self-identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual or report a same-sex sexual experience before arrival at the facility) are disproportionately incarcerated: 9.3% of men in prison, 6.2% of men in jail, 42.1% of women in prison, and 35.7% of women in jail belonged to sexual minority communities.

“Black, brown and queer people are still seen as disposible in some situations,” she said. “This is why we are overcriminalized and overrepresented in prisons and this is central to the work we are doing. Of course, there are people who should be confined. There are people who should not be in society, but I feel that is the minority. Most people can be rehabilitated and lead normal lives again. I want people who need help [after incarceration] to call me so that we can help out.”

Armed with her experience in finance and nonprofits, and aided by a team of devoted interns, she’s made the organization she founded in 2016, Witness to Mass Incarceration, a leader in the movement to improve the lives for former prisoners — and, by extension, their communities and families — through direct outreach, mental health care, economic empowerment and the canny use of technology.

Litwok’s organization tries to zero in on the moments when the formerly incarcerated are most vulnerable to recidivism and most need support. For instance, the organization’s Suitcase Project provides newly released prisoners with tools to find a job and connect with their communities, while the Map Project creates a record of businesses owned and operated by formerly incarcerated people so that they can more easily find support in their communities and from social service organizations. And Witness to Mass Incarceration’s digital library records the experiences of the formerly incarcerated to educate policymakers about the vital need for a grand reimagining of correctional institutions.

“The Suitcase Project started as me wanting to give a suitcase with a computer and phone worth about $2,000 to every recently released prisoner,” Litwok explained. “I love to take people out to dinner personally and give them the suitcase. These are the kinds of things you need not just to network and find a place to live and find a job. It is also your sense of companionship as you transition back into communities. I talked to a woman who was in a hotel looking for work but needed the computer desperately just to watch movies and have that distraction. That made all the difference in the world to her.”

Relying on grants and private donations, Litwok’s work takes place against a backdrop of increasingly bipartisan calls for prison reform. She’s committed to centering the conversation on the experiences of former LGBTQ prisoners and their need for economic self-sufficiency.

“Her resources not only benefit those she directly serves, but also make a difference in the lives of families and communities at-large,” said Salmah Y. Rizvi, former president of the American Muslim Bar Association, which has supported various Litwok fund-raising and grant-writing efforts.

“Litwok creates fresh policy proposals, informed by her network of formerly incarcerated women, to advance law, litigation and academia,” Rizvi said.

Much of this work relies on the intersections of Litwok’s identity — Jewish, lesbian, activist, former prisoner — which she uses to develop programs that enable those released from incarceration to not just survive, but thrive.

“The most important thing we can help the formerly incarcerated do is find a way to earn a living so that we don’t have to rely on anyone else,” Litwok said.

LGBTQ Nation spoke with Litwok about her work, her time in the justice system — including solitary confinement — and what she thinks people who have been incarcerated need most to thrive and give back in the real world.

 

Who is Evie Litwok?

Evie Litwok and her mother, Genia, strolling down Broadway and 151st Street in New York City a few years after Genia escaped the Holocaust and arrived in the city. Photo courtesy Evie LitwokEvie Litwok and her mother, Genia, strolling down Broadway and 151st Street in New York City, a few years after Genia escaped the Holocaust and arrived in the city. Photo courtesy Evie Litwok.

I am a formerly incarcerated Jewish lesbian and the daughter of two Holocaust survivors. These are the intersections that impacted me while I was in prison — and this story gives me a powerful voice for the work I do.

What was being incarcerated like for you?

I was told early on that if I wanted my time in prison to be easy, I should remain invisible. But on my first day there, everyone kept on asking me if I was married, if I had kids.

After the fourth person I thought, “This is stupid, I’ve been out for 40 years,” and I told them I was a lesbian. Then a woman screamed to everyone, “This old white woman is a lesbian!” and within an hour I was on everyone’s radar.

Why not just keep a low profile until you got out?

Because I saw the racism in prison. And I also saw my privilege as a white woman amid all of that racism. From the moment you walk in, you understand who is there and for what. And while I may have thought of myself as radical before prison, I saw things very differently once I was inside.

How is Witness to Mass Incarceration different from other prison reform groups?

There’s a big difference between the large organizations that get the most amount of money to help versus those of us on the ground who are actually formerly incarcerated. We’ve personally experienced prison; it’s folks like us who really know what we need — and we are not getting it.

And what do you need? What do people who have been through the justice system need to re-establish themselves in society?

No. 1, you need to earn a living — because the most important thing to contend with is the poverty associated with former incarceration. When I walked out of prison in 2014, I was 63 years old. They gave me $30 and a Greyhound ticket and that was it. And that is no way to start your life over.

So the lack of resources is key.

Yes, poverty is the main cause of recidivism. Because if you can’t afford to eat, you’re gonna steal. The big nonprofits may train thousands of former prisoners per year, but how many of them have housing two years later? How many of them can earn a living?

Again, this is why you need organizations led by the formerly incarcerated to truly do this work.

Your Suitcase Project was a direct result of this experience? 

Definitely. The project provides folks coming out of prison with the tools they need most: a cell phone so they can communicate with people, a laptop so they can look for a job, a food card, MetroCard, and a gift card from Target so they can buy clothes.

You’ve also said the project is connected to your coming out as a lesbian many years ago. How so? 

But this meant I lost part of my connection with my family. So I knew what it was like to come out into the world and be alone.

How crucial is serving the LGBTQ community?

It’s the backbone of everything we do. The first activists’ meetings I went to right after I got out of prison were for LGBT groups — and most of the work I do and have done is with this population. I choose primarily to work with women and LGBTs — by choice!

Why do you worry so much about them?

Because these are my people; these are the folks I worry most about — LGBTs and the formerly incarcerated are the communities I most identify with. Because they face such horrific conditions when they are inside and they are often released home, where they have even fewer resources than everyone else. This is something I know from personal experience. We are constant targets — especially transgender women and especially Black transgender women. We are targeted before we go into prison, we are targeted inside, and we are targeted once we are out.

What kind of advocacy work are you currently doing for LGBTs in prison?

We are working to eliminate sexual violence in confinement. We are targets of sexual violence, again especially Black transgender women, more than anyone else. There’s the humiliation of strip searches and gender-appropriate showers.

How else are you aiding LGBT people?

I am currently working with a trans woman who was released and is now back in jail. She came with me to my synagogue and expressed interest in converting to Judaism. We send her books every week, our rabbi has met with her, and we are doing whatever she needs to help get her re-released. But the most important thing is that when — if — she is ever re-released we will be there to help her from the moment she leaves Rikers.

The Map Project seems to be about economically empowering people who have been through the justice system, much like how attention is finally being given to black-owned businesses.

Absolutely. We are building a digital map of businesses across the nation owned by former inmates, business by business, inmate by inmate. Who knows a barber? Who knows a beauty salon? Who’s familiar with Detroit? This is a necessary step for creating a much-needed ecosystem toward economic empowerment for the formerly incarcerated.

What is the end goal of the Map Project? 

We want to be able to employ and mutually hire our own people, and we hope to eventually reach 2,000 entries on the map. The next step is to network all of these folks on the ground and eventually create an incubator fund or an accelerator fund offering loans to people who need it.

We want to become an economic powerhouse, and along the way, change the narrative so that folks see us as businesspeople and entrepreneurs rather than just simply former prisoners.

This is not necessarily a radically new idea.

Not at all. Back in the early 1980s, government funding was reduced for battered women’s shelters and rape crisis centers. Which meant they needed to become self-sufficient.

I worked with a group that met with over 300 organizations to help them shift from being 100 percent government funded to having a source of income on their own. It always returns to economic self-sufficiency.

What are some myths about being incarcerated?

Prison is not like a factory where you’re learning crime — it’s a place you want to get out of. No one comes out of a prison saying, “I think I’ll rob a bank today.”

What keeps the cycle of incarceration going is not what happens inside prison, but the poverty you face when you get out.

What was the impact of that?

I was punished. I was placed in a cell with a woman who hated LGBT people. Who warned me, “Never go to bed, Mama. Never fall asleep.” And so I did not sleep, and all of the guards knew this.

They would come ask me if I was alright, ask me if I “feared for my life.” But if I had said, “Yes,” that would have been it. They would have taken me to solitary, and it would have meant an entirely different kind of punishment.

You did experience solitary confinement, though. What was that like?

The trauma associated with solitary never goes away. They intentionally use fluorescent lighting, which can trigger vertigo. There is very little in terms of medical care or medical tests, or even medication. People come out of it as ticking time bombs. One day in solitary is a day too long.

But prison itself creates a kind of PTSD that comes from living with the constant stress of physical danger; the stress of worrying about someone saying or doing something to you. Someone hurting you. It could be the guards, it could be other people incarcerated along with you. And it can happen at any time, you just never know.

Why are LGBT people so easily targeted in prison?

Because incarceration is fundamentally about punishment. About being punished for your identity, punished for who you are. If you are LGBT, they will find a way for you to be punished for being LGBT.

There are plenty of lesbians in prison, but you never hung out together. It’s way too dangerous. The guards — who are mostly men — don’t like lesbians. They don’t want you to come out. They bring in preachers who speak badly about homosexuaity, calling it a sin. So there are a lot of women in prison having relationships, but they’re very conflicted about it.

Have you always felt a passion for social justice?

I heard Bobby Kennedy speak when I was 13 years old and have worked on political campaigns for all of my life. There was no question in my mind that this spirit would carry on into prison while I was there.

How did you work as an activist while you served your time?

I spent as much time as I could in the library, working with a group of people who were trying to get their cases overturned. I wasn’t one of those jailhouse lawyers, but I would read over cases and hand it over to their attorneys. I did what I could.

Even though you could have kept to yourself?

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer extolled the virtues of Witness to Mass Incarceration and Evie Litwok at a MAP event in July.

I had to. From the moment I was strip-searched — cold and naked and bent over in front of strangers — I knew I never wanted to return to a place like this. I knew that whether you’re black or white or brown, no one wants to ever be in a place like that.

How do we dismantle the stigma around incarceration?

It’s time for society to demystify incarceration. There are some 70 million people in the U.S. who’ve been convicted of a crime. We represent nearly a fifth of the nation and if all of us came out as criminals, then the public would know us as people, know me as Evie, and not just as someone who went to prison.

It took 40 years for people to be comfortable around LGBT people. We can do the same for the formerly incarcerated.

Should the formerly incarcerated be part of the conversation around diversity and inclusion?

Absolutely, inclusion is a very important part of this. Recognizing that someone who’s been behind bars for 20 years cannot just compete on equal footing with some 20-year-old you’re looking to hire.

The younger person may be more profitable, but being inclusive means not necessarily hiring the most profitable option.

You’ve created a digital library to record the experiences of people who’ve been incarcerated. Where did this idea come from?

My work is very much informed by the Holocaust, which both of my parents survived. In 1994, Steven Spielberg began the Shoah Foundation, to videotape the stories of Holocaust survivors before they passed away. So far they’ve completed nearly 60,000 interviews.

We’ve taken a similar approach, though on a far smaller scale — I’m no Steven Spielberg. We are really trying to do what he’s done, only for mass incarceration. So far we’ve recorded over 50 stories, and many of those interviewed have gone on to become public speakers.

Did being in prison strengthen your faith?

I had not been to synagogue for decades, but the moment I walked into prison I was looking for a prayer book. And I began to attend services and I’ve been going to them ever since. My father was religious and almost died during a beating in a Nazi labor camp for wearing tefillin.

This image of him, his strength, that is what kept me going when I was inside.

People speak a lot these days about prison reform. Can the system truly be reformed

I don’t believe the system can be reformed. You have to radically break the system for real change to happen. It’s just too lucrative for those who benefit from it.

Corporations benefit from the low-cost labor prisoners provide and then consumers are buying the products prisoners produce, often being paid just 15 cents an hour.

I don’t blame consumers, though, I blame the corporate culture and the greed that surrounds it.

So if we cannot fundamentally change the system, how can we at least improve it?

The answer to prison is education — early education — and prevention. So if you see a 5-year-old being bullied you fix it then and there, not when they’re 25 and ready to respond with violence.

We need educators in schools, psychologists in schools. What we don’t need are police in schools.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

A 14-Year-Old Bride, Wed to Her Rapist, Playing on a Jungle Gym

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For years, the United States has campaigned against child marriage around the world, from Guatemala to Zimbabwe. But we should listen to ourselves: Forty-five states here in America continue to allow girls and boys under 18 to wed.

Girls as young as 10 are occasionally married quite legally in the United States. Nine states have established no absolute minimum age for marriage.

A study this year found that nearly 300,000 children — meaning age 17 and under — were married in the United States from 2000 to 2018. An overwhelming majority were 16- or 17- year-old girls, on average marrying a man four years older. But more than 1,000 were 14 or younger, and five were only 10 years old. Some were wed to people far older.

“No one asked me for consent,” remembered Patricia Abatemarco, who as an eighth grader was married just after her 14th birthday to a man who was 27. “There was nothing romantic about it. I wasn’t in love with him. I didn’t have a crush on him. I was afraid of him.”

A judge in Florence, Ala., married the couple in the courthouse, and then the couple went to the park outside — where the new bride spotted a playground and left the groom to play on the jungle gym.

Abatemarco, now 55, said the path to this marriage began when she was 12 and living in a middle-class home. Her parents were secular, but she had become quite religious and during a personal crisis sought help from an evangelical Christian telephone hotline. A counselor, Mark, showed up and offered free counseling services; these became increasingly intense, she said, and he began to forcibly rape her repeatedly.

At 13, she became pregnant by these rapes. She didn’t know what to do, but Mark and her mother favored marriage. This solved their problems: For Abatemarco’s mother, it averted the stigma of an out-of-wedlock baby in the house, and for Mark, it allowed him to dodge rape charges. Abatemarco desperately wanted to keep the baby, in hopes of having someone to love and comfort her, and her mom told her this was the only way she could do so.

While this happened decades ago, similar reasoning leads to many youthful marriages today.

I’ve been writing about child marriages in the United States since 2017, when I came across the case of an 11-year-old girl, Sherry Johnson, who had been forced to marry her rapist in Florida. Child marriage was then allowed in some form in all 50 states.

Now, thanks in part to heroic work by an advocacy organization, Unchained at Last, five states have completely barred marriages by people under 18: Delaware, Minnesota, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and (just this month) Rhode Island. New York has passed a similar bill that is awaiting the governor’s signature.

The states that allow child marriages mostly do so in particular circumstances, such as with the permission of a parent and a judge. These safeguards don’t work very well. The marriages sometimes involve a girl, perhaps pregnant, marrying an older man who may be her rapist.

The new study found that 60,000 of the child marriages since 2000 involved couples with a large enough gap in ages that sex would typically be a crime. “The marriage license became a get-out-of-jail-free card in most of those states,” said Fraidy Reiss, a victim of forced marriage who founded Unchained at Last.

There are, of course, 17-year-olds who fall deeply in love and can handle a marriage. We can understand that if a girl becomes pregnant, the couple may prefer to marry right away. But it’s complicated: The legal system withholds many rights from people under 18, so a married 17-year-old can become trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare.

If the marriage sours, an underage girl will often not be accepted at a women’s shelter. She will have difficulty retaining a lawyer to get assistance. Astonishingly, she may even have trouble getting divorced, because children often cannot initiate a legal proceeding without going through a guardian. And if a minor flees a violent husband, the police may send her right back to her abuser.

That’s what happened to Abatemarco.

Her marriage at 14 didn’t work. Within months, Abatemarco said, Mark began beating her almost daily and sometimes the new baby as well. (Mark died in 2008, so I don’t know his version of events.)

One night, she said, she fled a beating and was walking on the road about midnight with her baby in a stroller. A police officer stopped her for violating curfew, drove her and the baby back home, gave a copy of the written warning to her husband and then drove off.

“My husband then beat me,” Abatemarco said.

Eventually, Abatemarco fled for good and put her baby daughter up for adoption. With the help of her parents, she was able to get a divorce — on a school day, with enough time to catch her 11th-grade English class.

The United States is quite right to campaign to end child marriage in Bangladesh and Yemen. Let’s do the same at home.

Special-needs adults find meaningful work on kibbutz farm

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Moringa and turmeric aren’t well-known crops in Israel. But when the ones being cultivated at Kibbutz Shluchot in the north of the country reach the market, you can rest assured that they grew in the most supportive and caring atmosphere.

For the past nine months, they’ve been grown by adults with special needs as part of their work at an NGO called Shai Asher that provides them with a meaningful employment experience, constituting a stepping stone toward a more independent and integrated life.

In Israel, people with special needs go to school until the age of 21, after which those who can begin working. The problem is that many graduates don’t find employment or struggle in inappropriate jobs.

“In Israel, 75 percent of people with special needs are unemployed, and then you have to look into what kind of employment the other 25 percent has,” explains Menachem Stolpner, founder and director of Shai Asher.

Born in the United States, social worker Stolpnerimmigrated to Israel with his family in 1996, settling in Shluchot, a member of the religious kibbutz movement.

Social worker Menachem Stolpner inspects the crops at Kibbutz Shluchot in the north of Israel. Photo courtesy of Shai Asher

“My motto is to try and find meaningful work experience for people with special needs,” he says. “I decided to create a therapeutic work environment. It’s a job; they get paid. They come in every day to a therapeutic setting that is a balance between teaching and having them become more independent but knowing there’s a safety net,” he explains.

There are currently eight people gardening at Shai Asher, some of whom have mental illness, some who are on the autism spectrum and others classified with developmental disabilities. The NGO has amassed around 60 alumni, some of whom have continued on to find employment elsewhere.

“The goal is that they can say to me,‘Menachem, I’m ready and I want a job outside,” Stolpner explains. “I try to help them help themselves become workers who, when they go for a job, the employer will say ‘Hey, this is a guy who can work.’”

All the little things

Stolpner works with the program’s participants on group interaction, following instructions, positive relations, coming in on time and making sure they get enough sleep the night before work.

“All those little things that you take for granted they have to learn, to be shown, take into themselves,” he says.

Turmeric plants prosper in the therapeutic setting at Shai Asher’s gardening program. Photo: courtesy Shai Asher

The NGO was founded eight years ago in memory of Stolpner’sfriend Milton (Asher) Marks III. It started out with a therapeutic petting zoo on the kibbutz before switching over to gardening.

The turmeric and moringa are new additions.

“We have a plant nursery and a building that we’ve created attached to it so we work inside, and we also have a vegetable garden,” Stolpner says. “Over the past year or so we started to concentrate on specific plants to grow in the hope that those things will be marketable.”

Turmeric and moringa, he says, were chosen for several reasons.

“They were things that we could learn about their growth because it takes a long time to grow and a process. In addition to that, they’re very healthful.And they’re not that commonly known here in Israel; people don’t know the uses and benefits,” he notes.

Turmeric growing at Kibbutz Shluhot. Photo courtesy of Shai Asher

Turmeric, the better-known of the two, is a plant whose rootstalk can be used either fresh or boiled in water, dried and ground into a yellow powder. Aside from being the base for curries, turmeric is also used in traditional medicine for its antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties.

Moringa is a plant whose leaves and seed pods are used in traditional medicine for their anti-inflammatory, antibacterial and anti-fungal properties. It is also consumed in powder form.

Menachem Stolpner and program participants tend to a moringa tree. Photo courtesy Shai Asher

Except for the first lockdown last spring, Stolpner and his fellow gardeners have been hard at work throughout the coronavirus crisis. This is possible because the work is done outside, in line with regulations.

Stolpneris even looking ahead. He was joined this year by a full-time volunteer, a local retiree, but otherwise remains the NGO’s sole employee.

“Oh, we have a lot of future plans,” he says.

“There are a number of things that we need in order to work more efficiently and better,” he adds. “We’re building a deck as a first step and putting up a pergola.”

As for Shai Asher’s exotic new crops, now is only the beginning.

“We’re just starting out; the turmeric won’t be ready for another month for harvest,” Stolpner says. “In the meantime, we’re growing and harvesting and processing and God willing we’ll be able to market.”