DRUGS CRAZE SHOCKS HASIDIC FAMILIES

Friday night at a cramped bar in Greenwich Village: a punk band called Sick
are grinding into high-voltage, cacophonous action. The pills are popping
in the lavatories.

But Sick and their sweat-drenched fans are not the regular East
Village extra-terrestrials, and the parents of this lot would be
especially mortified to know that this is how they are spending
Shabbat eve. They are Orthodox Jews, from the doctrinaire - usually
straight-living and invariably private - Hasidic community.

But the Orthodox community is riven by menacing, new and strange
tribulations. It has been buffeted by a series of scandals involving
drugs and wild youth.

'This is,' says Rabbi Joel Dinnerstein - one of the few community
leaders even to acknowledge the scale of the hidden crisis - 'a
problem that the Jewish community has never had to deal with before,
and they're shaking in their boots.'

In a trial due to open in Brooklyn this month, Hasidic teenagers have
emerged as the carefully-selected couriers in a massive drug-smuggling
operation. The importers chose well, for Hasidic youths - with their
side locks, yarmulkas, prayer scrolls and long coats - rarely receive
more than a respectful but curious nod as they pass through customs at
JFK airport.

The arrests follow the conviction in July of two rabbis - one of them
Bernard Grunfeld, a prominent figure in Brooklyn's Bobover Hasidic
community - for their role in laundering millions of dollars for
Colombian cocaine dealers. In a bizarre twist, the judge put another
defendant, Abraham Reiss, under house arrest when it emerged that his
brother was serving a prison sentence for the same offence, and that
to have both their sons in jail would be 'a double hardship' for their
parents.

Meanwhile, The Observer has learned that at a series of closed
meetings, parents and leaders of the Hasidic community have implored
the authorities in Brooklyn to help them clamp down on a hard drug
craze spreading fast among their teenagers.

The effects of these revelations are far-reaching - detonating
bewildered panic and shame. Psychologist Benzion Twerski, an expert on
addiction, says that 'there are segments of the community that
literally do not believe it is happening. But, he says, 'I am opening
wounds that need to be opened.'

Parents, he says, are delaying treatment or standing by as their
children get hooked on ecstasy, amphetamines and other drugs, simply
because they refuse to accept what is happening, or have no idea what
to do. The director of one project for addicts, Maxine Yuttal, says:
'The treatment is often thought to be as bad as the disease.'

In defiance of such fears, Rabbi Dinnerstein runs a club called the
Ohr Ki Tov Growth and Transformation Centre in Brooklyn, which
combines a 12-step addiction recovery programme with intense study of
the Torah scriptures.

Among those attending is 'Jonah', a computer programming student who
had developed cocaine and amphetamine habits so severe that, he
admits, 'I'd lost all sense of time and place like, even my own
identity. I'd forgotten that I had any role to play in life. The drugs
were dominating everything.' He had fled home to live in a derelict
building in Queens 'sooner than have my parents or the Rabbi find out'.

One of the workers at Ohr Ki Tov, known simply as 'David', himself
went into drug rehab 14 years ago - now he is 44 and a stockbroker.
But, he says, he was utterly ostracised in the Crown Heights
neighbourhood where he lived once word leaked about his habit. 'I
don't think there was one single person in my neighbourhood who called
me,' he recalls.

Earlier this year, Mask was formed (Mothers Allied Saving Kids),
offering support meetings and mediating between Orthodox families with
youngsters on drugs and the health authorities.

The group's founder wants to be known only as 'Ruth'. 'People just did
not know what to do,' she says, 'but now we do not and cannot sweep it
under the carpet any more.'

After one Mask meeting recently, the office of District Attorney
Charles Hynes was besieged by parents asking for the police in
Brooklyn to end a customary practice of handing Hasidic youths found
with drugs over to their parents for disciplining by the family and
religious authorities.

The policy is similar to that practised until recently in Pennsylvania
among the tight-knit Amish communities - but abandoned as drug use
expanded. Many Hasidic parents now want the children to be arrested
and tried, since the damage done to the name of the community is
thought to be outweighed by the advantages of mandatory rehab.

In an upcoming trial in Brooklyn, seven people - from New York, Miami,
Amsterdam and Israel - are charged with importing more than a million
tabs of pure MDMA (Ecstasy) into the US, and laundering millions of
dollars in profits.

Court papers filed at Eastern District Court of New York reveal how
the six Jewish men and one woman allegedly trawled around the Hasidic
community of Williamsburg in search of young men who would bring in
their drugs for resale at vastly marked-up prices - and would not get
caught.

They are said to have found their quarry among Hasidic youths already
familiar with the drug scene, who were offered $1,500 and a free trip
to Europe in return for bringing back 'contraband'. The indictments
say that some were offered a further $200 if they could recruit a new
courier, and that each courier could bring in up to 45,000 tablets
during their illicit careers.

In the Village, Sick have finished their set, and a group of four boys
- - one wearing ringlets, the others in skull caps - are sitting like
zombies on a step beside a fenced-in basketball court at the end of
Bleecker Street, blending in by bombing out on a mix of cheap wine in
a brown paper bag and (they say) 'pot and whizz'.

'It's a whole lot of fussing,' says one of them - Benjamin - in a
reedy Brooklyn drawl, rolling his eyes. 'There ain't no addiction problem.'

'We are people living in the same society as any other people,' says
his friend who declines to give a name. 'Why shouldn't it fuck us over
more than anyone else?' It seems a fair argument - and that is the
nightmare of his community.