SYDNEY - Benjamin Rosenfeld is an Israeli man in
his mid-fifties living in Australia.
But instead of enjoying life in the “lucky country,” he’s
languishing behind bars. And he’s only five years into a 21-year jail sentence
for smuggling almost $50 million of MDMA, the prime ingredient in ecstasy, from
Haifa to Australia.
In sentencing the Israeli to a minimum of 13 years without
parole in 2008, Judge Anthony Puckeridge said the court had to create
deterrence.
But the deterrent may not have worked, according to Timmy
Rubin, Australia’s only Jewish female prison chaplain, who has visited too many
Israeli inmates over the last two decades.
“Most Israelis who get into trouble, it’s drug-related,”
said Rubin, whose sister and her family live in Haifa.
“It’s crazy, nobody is warning them that Australia has one
of the strictest drug laws,” the Melbourne-born Rubin told
this week.
“When they come here, often the Israelis think it’s easy − and I think they
think we’re stupid.”
“They want to stay here, so they’ll do risky things to stay.
I’m trying my darnedest to warn them. It’s not worth it.”
Australia spends an estimated $2 billion a year to enforce
its drug laws and had almost 30,000 people in jail in 2012, according to the
Bureau of Statistics. While there is no exact data on Israelis, Rubin believes
that over the last 20 years, up to 50 Israelis have been imprisoned in
Australia, perhaps more, and some 500 Jews.
To get bail and pay for a top lawyer can cost up to
$200,000, warned Rubin, a hippie-turned-Lubavitcher who also runs the
community’s ritual bathhouse. “And if you can’t get bail, you can be in prison
for one or two years before your case comes up.”
While today she dresses modestly and sports a wig, Rubin
used to flirt with danger as a “wild child.”
The daughter of a Kindertransport survivor from Germany, she
was “a typical Jewish baby boomer” in Melbourne who lived on Kibbutz Rosh
Hanikra with a Habonim group for a year in the mid-1970s.
Sex, drugs, rock’n’roll?
“100 percent,” she said. “100 percent. It wasn’t just me who
was a wild child. We all were.”
About a decade later, she was at a full moon party on the
beach at Goa in India when she had a realization. Her spiritual quest took her
to New York, where she got mugged on the day she landed. She “kicked him you
know where” and made her way to a Chabad seminary in Brooklyn, stayed for a
year, became suffused with religion and married an American psychologist from
Ohio.
It was the Rebbe who inspired her to help prisoners.
“He gave me incredibly special attention,” she said. “I
guess I was green and I talked back.
“He said every Jewish soul, no matter who they are or what
they’ve done, they need to be visited by somebody from the Jewish community.”
And so each week for the last 19 years she’s visited Jews in
Australian prisons, including many Israelis, often bringing them healthy doses
of festive foods.
“I’ve had some very interesting experiences,” she said. “One
Israeli ended up becoming very religious and now lives in Mea She’arim and his
wife has no idea he was in prison. I organized bail for one Israeli who became
like my kids. I have the most incredibly close connection with people in Israel
who I’ve helped.”
Just recently, an Israeli man avoided a jail term after he
was accused of importing kilograms of cocaine, she recalled. “He had the best
representation, he had a business here, he could afford top lawyers. But the
jury was really on the edge. It was nothing short of a miracle.”
An Israeli couple from Rehovot was busted and jailed in 2011
on charges of importing eight kilos of a substance they claim was an aromatic
product. But Australian authorities claimed the substance was an analog for a
narcotic, a chemical compound similar to a banned substance.
They are now out on bail, thanks to Rubin, but their case
has been adjourned until next year, and if they are found guilty they face 10
years behind bars. Meantime, their lives are in limbo.
“We don’t have any family or friends, Timmy saved us,” said
the Israeli woman, who declined to be named.
“She is an angel, a god for us, she’s amazing,” her husband
added, noting that they go to Rubin’s house for Shabbat and festivals. “I don’t
know how we’d get through it without her. They are like a family for us, our
only family.”
The husband warned Israelis not to mess with the Australian
authorities. “I’m saying to Israelis who are trying to establish any business
in Australia: Be careful, don’t try to be clever. Australia is not the right
place to mess around.”
When Rubin isn’t helping prisoners, she can be found running
the Chaya Mushka Schneerson Mikveh in Melbourne, better known to insiders as
“Timmy’s Mikvah.”
But she still keeps one foot in the secular world.
“The secular world wasn’t enough, the spiritual world is
amazing,” she said. “But I need both.”
Perhaps her role as a prison chaplain allows her to walk on
the wild side, but her motivation is to warn Israelis.
“They don’t realize how strict we are here,” she said. “They
[the Australian authorities] are looking out for Israelis. Just because we’re
laid back, they’re very strict. Israelis shouldn’t take us for idiots.”
No comments:
Post a Comment