The Prospect’s Jerusalem correspondent Gershom Gorenberg sent me a note in response to my recidivism and unemployment post earlier:
Reminded me of attending a Jewish student convention in 1975 and meeting the guy who was there to raise consciousness of the situation of Jews who couldn’t keep their religion in American prisons. He’d gotten religion after being convicted of 2nd degree murder in a California bar, or so my memory of the distant conversation tells me. I think he’d been a longshoreman, but maybe that’s just because he was burly enough to be one. Anyway, when he got out, he started studying for rabbinic ordination at a Chabad yeshivah. He wasn’t a Chabadnik, but no other yeshivah would take a convicted murderer who wanted to start a new life and be a decent person. I always wondered what happened to him afterward, and hoped that he managed to get a job.
Me too.
