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Rabbi's mission is to keep troubled teens off streets
Wednesday, November 03, 1999 By Ervin Dyer, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Rabbi Yehudah Fine's hardscrabble apple and pear orchard in New York's Catskill Mountains is a personal paradise.
Compare it to the places his counseling ministry took him as recently as five years ago.
Beginning in the mid-1980s, Fine spent a decade on -- or rather under -- the streets of New York City.
"I hung out in the dark places," he said.
The subway system was the kingdom of the night, a place populated with pimps, drug dealers, teen-age prostitutes and predators. But for Fine, it became his congregation. He went there to counsel, spiritually guide and nurture the mix of inner-city, wealthy, homeless, black, white, Jewish and Christian youths living in the underworld.
He did everything from offering hot chocolate to handing out peanut butter sandwiches as a way to nudge teens toward education and new lives.
Fine, now 50, took his ubiquitous Yankees baseball cap and friendly manner and left the streets behind five years ago. He wanted to spend more time with his family. He has a daughter and a son in college and a son in high school.
He now crisscrosses the country, sharing his experiences and bringing to light the lessons he learned from the subway dwellers. One of his stops will be in Pittsburgh tomorrow, at the Jewish Community Center in Squirrel Hill.
Fine's aim, he said, is to connect young people with caring adults and stop children from turning to the streets.
He says his talks are meant to empower parents, and remind them that it's a myth when people say adolescence is a time for hands-off parenting.
Rock 'n' roll and wardrobes don't cause teen violence, Fine said, but rather a lack of parental attention.
Adolescence is "when children most need support and encouragement," he said. "That's when they need to know someone is there to share and care."
Fine's tales are all chronicled in his latest book, "Times Square Rabbi: Finding the Hope in Lost Kids' Lives."
When Fine was growing up in Seattle, as the son of a physician, caring and giving were No. 1 priorities in his household.
"We always operated out of an ethic that said the health of society was related to spirit and emotion and depended on how we treat people on every single level," the rabbi said.
With that philosophy, Fine began the journey that would take him to New York City's underbelly.
It wasn't exactly an express train, though.
Along the way, he stopped to pick up degrees in biology, agriculture, education and school administration. Fine started an award-winning alternative high school for migrant teens in California, then left that to become a rabbi.
Fine then went to New York City and began work as a family therapist. He stumbled into his outreach with the subway "throwaway kids" when Covenant House, a New York based charity that assists troubled youths, asked him to tag along with its Off the Streets program. What he saw was an eye-opener.
"When I went into that world, there were hundreds of kids sleeping in the tunnels," he said. "It ain't the movies, my friend. It's a violent world and tough situations."
Fine decided to lend a hand and, along the way, came to realize that the hurt he saw went beyond the children in the subway burrows.
"It doesn't matter where I speak," he said. "Inner-city school or private or parochial school, adolescents have the same problems. The kids I talk with are really grappling with critical issues that may happen in their lives."
Some of their worries, he said, include thoughts of suicide, depression, drugs, sexuality and, most recently, school violence.
Many young people and parents are just waking up to the magnitude of peer influence, Fine said.
Some studies show that parents spend an average of only eight minutes a day talking with their adolescents, and he feels it shouldn't be that way.
"What we know is that kids, cut off from their parents, learn from their peers," he said. "It's parents' responsibility to open the house to kids' friends."
Even if parents don't like the friends, Fine said, they should make room for them and observe how their children are relating emotionally to their peers.
The whole point, he said, is for caring adults to teach children how to bring values into their lives. It requires boldness, because adults will have to tackle the big topics of drugs and sex, and honesty, because parents may have to share the secrets of how they responded to these issues.
"Kids want to know what [parents] know," Fine said. "The same holds true with sex. They don't necessarily want you to tell them about birth control and condoms. They want to know about the relationship part. The other stuff they get in health class."
In the effort to heal parent-child relationships, Fine said, the best thing is for parents not to let poverty or overwork prevent them from building relationships.
"What [kids have] is what life dealt them, and [so parents must] deal with it," he said. Whether you're single, divorced or married, "give your love through the reality of your life."
Rabbi Yehudah Fine will speak at 7:30 p.m. tomorrow at the Jewish Community Center, 5738 Forbes Ave., Squirrel Hill. Admission is free.
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