by Sarah Levy
* * *
The list came in with the morning
intake report, as it did every week – a page of names from the county facility,
flagging the inmates who had defined themselves as Jewish on their booking
forms. Most weeks, Rabbi Sholom scanned it quickly. Most of the men weren’t
looking for a rabbi. They were looking for the kosher tray because someone told
them it’s the better meal. He doesn’t mind. He goes anyway. But one week, a
name near the bottom made him stop: Samuel Cohen.* Unmistakably Jewish.
“Tell the rabbi I said no thanks,”
Samuel told the guard. It took three more attempts before Samuel finally agreed
to see Rabbi Reindorp. He sat down across the plexiglass with his arms crossed,
jaw tight, eyes daring the rabbi to say something he could roll his eyes at. But
Rabbi Sholom didn’t ask about what he’d done or why he was there. He asked how
he was sleeping.
Samuel blinked. Nobody had asked
him that.
It came out slowly, over time: a
bar mitzvah decades ago that meant nothing to him at the time, a Jewish
grandmother he barely remembered, a life that had drifted far from anything
Jewish. “I’m not really one of yours anymore,” he said. Rabbi Sholom didn’t
argue. He just kept coming.
It happened to be the week before
Purim, so he brought a small, worn Megillah and read him the story – not as
ancient history but as a story where G-d’s name never once appears, where
everything that happens seems, on the surface, to be coincidence, politics, and
palace intrigue. Yet Hashem is there the entire time, simply hidden, the way He
so often is, inside the ordinary texture of a life that feels, from the inside,
like nothing but bad luck.
“That’s you,” Rabbi Sholom told
him. “You just can’t see the Hand yet.”
Something in Samuel’s face changed
– not all at once and not in a single conversation – and something loosened. By
the time he was granted his freedom, he’d learned to say the Shema every
night before he fell asleep.
The Pintele Yid
This is the premise beneath
everything Neshama does: that every Jew carries within them a neshama – a
soul – that is, by its nature, indestructible. It is not diminished by a
criminal record, a psychiatric diagnosis, a relapse, or a lifetime of
disconnection. Sometimes it is hidden, buried under years of pain or shame or
simple unfamiliarity, but never actually broken. Never unreachable. The pintele
Yid – that irreducible Jewish spark – cannot be extinguished, no matter how
far its bearer has wandered, no matter what walls now stand between him and the
community he came from. But someone has to go looking for it. That is what
Neshama has spent the last several years doing across the state of Maryland.
The Quiet Epidemic in Our Midst
We don’t like to talk about addiction,
incarceration, serious mental illness, and homelessness. These topics aren’t mentioned
in a typical simcha speech or a Shabbos table conversation. They feel
like things that happen to other families, in other communities –
certainly not the warm, tight-knit, chesed-saturated Baltimore or Silver
Spring communities that so many of us call home.
But the truth is it happens here,
too. It happens in frum homes and less-affiliated ones alike. A father
spirals into opioid dependence after a back injury. A teenager’s undiagnosed
mental health crisis lands him, one terrible night, in a juvenile facility
instead of a hospital. A young man makes one catastrophic decision and finds
himself, seemingly overnight, on the wrong side of a courtroom. A mother,
exhausted and unsupported, quietly loses her footing. None of it announces
itself in advance. None of it asks permission to happen to “good families.”
And when it does happen, the very
community structures that exist to catch people in crisis often can’t reach the
people who need them most because those people have, by then, often stopped
showing up. They’ve stopped coming to shul. They’ve stopped answering calls.
Shame is an efficient wall builder, and by the time someone is sitting in a
detention center or a psychiatric unit, they have frequently convinced themselves
that they were permanently outside the community’s concern.
This is the void Neshama exists to
fill. It’s not a program someone chooses by walking through the right doors but
a presence that goes looking for people who’ve stopped believing anyone would
come looking for them. It isn’t about caseloads or intake forms, although
plenty of those exist; it’s about a rabbi sitting across from a stranger and
treating him like family – because, in the deepest sense, that’s exactly what
he is. “You don’t have to earn your way back to caring about your neshama,”
Rabbi Sholom tells the men and women he visits. “It never left you in the first
place.”
Architects of Hope
Rabbi Sholom grew up in London, in
a traditionally observant but not especially religious household – the kind
where meat from a kosher butcher was non-negotiable but Shabbos observance was
more custom than commitment. It was a typical “traditional” Jewish upbringing,
made possible in part by a British school system that funds Jewish day schools,
giving him a basic Jewish education almost by default.
Everything shifted for him in high
school. Every Friday, two Chabad boys from the local Lubavitcher yeshiva would
show up at his school during the lunch break, asking anyone they passed if they
wanted to put on tefillin. Most of his schoolmates weren’t interested. Still,
week after week, they kept showing up. Sholom watched them from a distance,
transfixed by the pride, the warmth, the total lack of self-consciousness, and the
stubbornness of their commitment. Without saying a word about it, they were
communicating that every Jew matters. Every soul is worth searching for.
Young Sholom eventually found his
way to a local Chabad House to learn more. Over the following years of yeshiva
study across Israel, England, New York, and South America, that early spark
deepened into a calling.
He met Mushki through a shidduch
suggestion from a mutual friend, and the two of them began looking, as young
Chabad couples often do, for the right place to build a life of service. They
had heard about Rabbi and Mrs. Scheiman’s decades of work in Chicago with
Jewish prisoners across Illinois’s state and federal system, and they realized that
if Jewish lives could go completely unattended in a city with Chicago’s
infrastructure, what did that mean for Maryland, where no equivalent presence
existed? They took on this mission and chose Baltimore for its combination of a
warm, established Jewish community and genuine, underserved need.
Ever Expanding and Meaningful Work
People in crisis, they understood,
aren’t just able to hear a message of meaning and connection – they’re often
desperate for one. And if no one Jewish shows up to offer it, somebody else
eventually will. A soul that could have come home instead drifts somewhere else
entirely, sometimes for good.
In the summer of 2019, Rabbi
Sholom began visiting the Baltimore County Detention Center once a week,
offering a Torah-based class, an opportunity for Jewish inmates to put on tefillin,
and simply the sight of another Jewish face. By that winter, he was quietly
mapping an expansion across the state’s other facilities. Then Covid shut every
door in the country, and Neshama, like everyone else, had to reinvent itself
overnight. Phone calls and virtual learning replaced visits for nearly two
years, at a moment when isolated, incarcerated individuals needed a human voice
more urgently than ever. When facilities began to reopen, Neshama didn’t just
resume, it expanded, moving into addiction and recovery centers, rehabs, and
mental health facilities. By 2025, roots were being planted for a full
community hub back home in Pikesville.
Today, that work rests on four
pillars:
·
Prison outreach and reintegration:
weekly visits, classes, and one-on-one learning across the state’s correctional
facilities, paired with hands-on support for housing, employment, and dignity
after release.
·
Addiction recovery and crisis
response: walking alongside individuals through rehab placement, relapses,
late-night emergencies, and the long, nonlinear road to stability.
·
Emergency relief and homelessness
support: food, clothing, temporary shelter, and human warmth for anyone who
has run out of anywhere else to turn.
·
Spiritual healing and community
belonging: a warm Shabbos table, a non-judgmental welcome, and the slow
work of helping someone rediscover their own worth.
Rabbi Sholom is essentially the
only rabbi in the state doing this work across these many facilities:
·
One federal prison
·
Sixteen Maryland Department
of Correction sites
·
Three mental health
facilities under the Department of Health
·
Five Department of Juvenile
Services centers
·
Numerous county detention
centers
·
A network of private rehabs
and halfway houses
·
Baltimore’s ICE detention
center.
It is by nature lonely work. There
is no colleague down the hall to hand off a hard case to. No one else in the
room understands what it’s like to leave a psychiatric unit at ten at night
still carrying someone else’s crisis or to be the single phone number a
frightened family calls at 2 a.m. “There were times,” he reflects, “where I
thought, if I don’t show up for this person, no one will. That’s not a
comfortable feeling. But it’s also, I’ve come to understand, exactly the point.
Someone has to be willing to be that person.”
There’s a second layer to that
solitude that rarely makes it into conversation: the financial strain. Neshama
runs with no institutional safety net beneath it – no regional office writing a
check when a month comes in short, no budget line that wasn’t raised, person by
person, from the ground up. Rabbi Sholom is candid, if understated, about what
that means in practice: some months the numbers squeeze together; other months
they don’t, and he finds himself doing the same quiet math at his desk on a
Sunday night that he was doing on the phone with a family in crisis that
morning – figuring out, calmly, how the pieces can fit together this time. It
isn’t a complaint, and he’s careful not to let it sound like one. It’s simply
the reality of building something from nothing, one commitment at a time, and
trusting that the effort is never wasted.
What sustains him, he says, isn’t
a single dramatic breakthrough but the accumulation of small ones – a man
putting on tefillin for the first time without being asked, a family
reunited at a Shabbos table, a phone call that ends in relief instead of
tragedy. And Mushki, his partner in every sense, runs the homebase that makes
the road work possible: the Shabbos and Yom Tov meals prepared for guests who
have nowhere else to go; the relationships built with the families left behind
while a loved one is “inside”; and managing their household of children, who
grow up packing care packages and mishloach manos as a matter of course,
learning early that hospitality to a stranger is simply what their family does.
The work exists only because
people choose to make it exist and can continue only because people choose to
sustain it.
Faces of Return
Yosef’s Second Chance: Yosef*
had been in prison for the better part of a decade and had long since stopped
expecting anything good to come from a knock on the visitation door. His family
had drifted away years earlier, worn down by disappointment. When Rabbi Sholom
introduced himself, Yosef‘s first response was simply, “Why are you here?
Nobody comes for guys like me.”
Rabbi Sholom came anyway, week
after week, teaching, listening and, as release finally approached, doing
something no one had done for Yosef in years: planning for what came next.
Neshama helped secure him a room in a supportive transitional apartment,
connected him with a local employer willing to give a returning citizen a
chance, and made sure that on his first Friday night as a free man, there was a
seat waiting for him at a Shabbos table.
“I walked out of that building not
knowing where I’d sleep that night,” Yosef says, two years and a steady job
later. “I walked into a home instead. I didn’t know that was still possible for
someone like me.”
Devora’s Long Night: Devora’s*
son had been struggling for years with a severe mental illness, cycling in and
out of crisis with little support and less understanding from the world around
them. When he was hospitalized, isolated and afraid, Neshama began visiting –
bringing kosher food, books, and, as Devora puts it, “proof that we hadn’t been
forgotten by G-d, even though it often felt that way.”
What began as support for her son
became, gradually, support for the whole family. Devora, who had been carrying
the weight of her son’s illness in near-total isolation for years, found
herself, instead, welcomed into the community. She began joining Neshama’s
Shabbos table regularly. Her son, stabilized after two years of treatment and
support, was recently moved into a supervised group home, where he now leads a
weekly discussion with fellow residents about morals and values.
“I used to think we were the
family other people whispered about,” Devora says. “Now I know we’re just a
family. That distinction changed everything for me.”
Adam’s Long Road: Adam’s*
addiction cost him nearly everything: his marriage, his relationship with his
children, and, for a stretch of two years, his freedom, following an arrest
connected to his substance use. Rabbi Sholom met him during that incarceration
and stayed present through a difficult stint in rehab, a relapse that nearly
ended the relationship, and finally, a stability that has now held for three
years.
“There were nights I called him,
and I wasn’t in a good place – not a safe place,” Adam says quietly. “He never
once made me feel like I’d used up my chances with him. That‘s not nothing.
That kept me alive some nights, honestly.”
Today, Adam has partial custody of
his children again. His teenage daughter recently asked to come with him to one
of Neshama’s Friday night services. “She wanted to see the family that helped
bring her father back,” he says. “I still don’t have words for what that meant
to me.”
There are dozens of other stories like
these across Neshama’s caseload, and the pattern is unmistakable: Restoring one
soul rarely stays contained to one person. A father’s recovery reopens a door
for his children. A mother’s healing steadies an entire household. A young man’s
first tefillin becomes an entire family’s reconnection to a community.
A Table Long Enough for Everyone
In 2025, that ripple effect began
taking a more permanent shape back home in Pikesville, where Neshama has been
quietly building something new: a community hub specifically for formerly
incarcerated individuals, people navigating addiction and mental health
challenges, and the families who love them: monthly Friday night services,
Shabbos and Yom Tov meals, social events, and Torah classes, taught with
patience for people who may be encountering these ideas for the very first
time, or returning to them after decades away.
It is, in the truest sense, a
table built for the people who’ve quietly worried there wasn’t room for them at
anyone else’s. No one is asked to explain their past before they’re handed a
siddur or a plate. No one is measured against a standard of observance before
being welcomed in. The invitation is simple, and it is the same one extended to
Samuel, to Yosef, to Devora and her son, and to Adam and his daughter: Come
as you are and let’s discover together who you’re becoming.
Building that kind of community takes
more than one family’s devotion, however tireless. It takes a broader community
willing to see this work as its own responsibility, not someone else’s
specialty. Mentoring someone newly released matters. Sponsoring a Shabbos meal
matters. So does simply talking about addiction, incarceration, and mental
illness with less whispering and more compassion, so fewer families feel they
have to carry these struggles alone.
But what keeps the doors open,
month after month, is dependable financial partnership – and that is where this
community’s support is needed most directly. A monthly or annual commitment,
however modest, is what lets a visit to a detention center happen on a Tuesday,
whether or not that month has been an easy one to fundraise. A dedicated
sponsor can cover a family’s emergency placement, a Shabbos table for 20, or a
pair of tefillin and a Chumash for a man who owns nothing else Jewish. This
is Neshama, an affiliate of Chabad-Lubavitch of Maryland, asking you plainly to
become one of the people this lifesaving work depends on.
A teaching Rabbi Sholom returns to
often, in cell blocks and psychiatric wards and around his own Shabbos table,
is that every Jew, without exception, carries a spark of the Divine that cannot
be dimmed by circumstance, cannot be revoked by mistake, and cannot be
declared, by anyone, unreachable. Walls can separate a person from their
community. They cannot separate a person from their own soul.
Somebody simply has to go looking.
For nearly seven years now, in jails and hospitals and halfway houses across
Maryland, that is precisely what one family has been doing – one visit, one
Shabbos, one soul at a time.
To set up a monthly gift, sponsor a specific program, or
make a one-time donation, visit neshama.care. Volunteering and mentorship
inquiries are welcome there as well.
*Names changed to protect privacy.
