Owings Mills Times

Owings

Mills Times

Street-smart rabbi strikes before crisis

03/10/05 Linda Strowbridge

A lecture hall full of fidgeting, chattering Owings Mills High

School students falls silent as "The Shadow Walker" describes what happens to a runaway girl emerging from the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City.

The youngster, he said, may walk just a block along Eighth Avenue before she is approached by the first "john."

"Within 24 hours, you are going to be locked up somewhere and you're going to be raped. Then you'll be trained and turned out on the street."

Nearly 250,000 children live on the streets of America, he said.

"They left their homes because being home was deadly. So they ran to a worse circumstance, and almost every last one of them die there."

He knows.

Shadow Walker - the street name for Rabbi Yahudah Fine - has spent 20 years roaming the back alleys of midtown Manhattan and major cities, trying to help get children off the streets.

But after watching too many children die, Fine said he got tired of being a "body catcher." Although he never gave up his back- alley work, Fine began giving presentations to average teens and parents across the country in hopes of preventing crises that drive children to street life.

Last week, The Associated: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore arranged for Fine to conduct several workshops in the region. A credentialed educator and family therapist, Fine became known as a pioneer in alternative education in the 1970s when he started a school for the children of migrant farm workers in California. While working in New York, he developed an expertise in treating teen desperation and family disfunction.

Joan Grayson Cohen, manager of child and adolescent outreach services for Jewish Family Services, said Fine has proven especially skilled in getting teenagers to talk about issues - sex, drugs, violence, abuse, depression and suicide - that they would never raise with parents and might not even mention to friends.

"I'm street," said Fine, when asked about how he connects with teenagers. "I live in a darker world that very few people see, a world with a lot of violence. I'm out of the netherworld and I am in my own private war."

Fine - a thin 57-year-old with a salt-and-pepper beard and a habit of dressing in jeans, black shirts and baseball caps - begins each session with teenagers by relating scenes from his battles to get children off the street.

He tells of the kids he has found - the girl who was raped by her father and brothers on her 10th birthday and repeatedly afterwards, the boy who still had the scars from the cigarettes a parent had extinguished on his chest. And there are scenes from Fine's own perils - instances when he has been beaten, shot at or stalked.

"A lot of studies have shown that adolescents do not decide things intellectually. All their major decisions, their ethical decisions happen emotionally," Fine said. "I come in (to workshops) with powerful, bouncing ethical tales from the street that make sense to them and grab their attention."

Then Fine begins extracting information from his audience. In the Owings Mills lecture hall, he runs students through his standard raft of questions: How many of you know someone who drinks, drinks and drives, does drugs? Nearly every hand rises after each question. How many know someone who has sex, anal sex, oral sex, unprotected sex? Again, almost every hand rises.

How many of you have friends who have considered suicide (half the hands rise) or live in a dangerous household? (A third of the hands rise).

Fine asks the students to anonymously write their biggest worries, their biggest questions on index cards, then begins to read the cards aloud.

Some are flippant or juvenile - "Are you single?" But others plunge the room back into silence: "I'm a former runaway, an habitual class-cutter and I've attempted suicide twice; My mother and stepfather are verbally combative and I'm afraid they're becoming violent; I was raped on a date and I don't know who to tell; my friend is a heavy heroin user and I don't know how to help."

"When he was reading out the cards, you were hearing things that sounded like horror stories, but then you look around the room and realize that these things are coming from people you know and see every day. No one speaks of these things," said Nick Corasanita, an Owings Mills junior, after one session.

"You don't know what's around you," said Dariyen Carter, a sophomore. "You want to look at your friends now and get a better connection with them because you won't be able to help unless you get that connection."

Fine urged the students to be good friends to each other, to support their friends through difficulties and to seek help from guidance counselors, addictions programs and other professional services.

"He talked about almost being shot and two men - two teenagers - saved his life," said Suzanne McLeod, a senior. "Later, he asked them, 'Why would you save my life?' because he didn't even know the kids. And they said that he stood for caring and they couldn't let caring die. That really struck home for me because I think we need more of that in the world. We need to have people who are willing to put themselves out there to show a little bit of kindness to someone who might not get kindness anywhere else."