Abraham Twerski, a Hassiatic rabbi and psychiatrist, dies at the age of 90

Twerski died Sunday in Jerusalem after suffering from COVID-19, his family said.

Twerski was a scholar with legs firmly planted in two worlds – the rabid world of Torah and Talmud studies, and an approved medical doctor and psychologist. It was a rare pair that won respect both in the ultra-rectangular Jewish world and in American society at large.

Known as friends and colleagues like Abe and to close a family like Shea, he was an expert on slavery and a scion of a long line of prominent rabbits who came from the founder of the 18th century Hassidic Jewish founder, the Baal Shem Tov.

Twerski was a prolific writer. He has written dozens of books on a wide range of topics: from slavery and mental health to religious law for medical professionals and reports on Jewish texts. Twerski also collaborated with the late “Peanuts” comic strip creator Charles Schulz on a series of popular self-help books by Charlie Brown and Snoopy.

Born in Milwaukee in 1930, he was the first American-born child of Rabbi Jacob Twerski, who entered the U.S. from Russia in 1927 and was a major rabbit in a Jewish community. the area for decades.

Twerski and his four brothers were all ordered as rabbits and received a university education. His brother Aaron is a professor at Brooklyn Law School, and his brother Michel is a Hassidic rabbi in Milwaukee.

As a young rabbi’s helper in the 1950s, Abraham discovered that congregations did not turn to him for counseling as they did his eldest venerable father.

“I haven’t seen my life as a ceremonial performer, and I felt that if my father does what my father used to do, well, it does. that’s where I’ll go, ”Twerski recalled in a 1988 interview with the National Council of Jewish Women. “So I went to medical school to become a psychologist for what I wanted to do as a rabbit.”

After graduating from Marquette University medical school, Twerski worked as a director of psychiatry at St. Louis. Francis Hospital in Pittsburgh founded the Pittsburgh Gateway Rehabilitation Center in 1972 and was associate professor of psychiatric emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh.

But through his work in mental health, he also broke down barriers and taboos about psychiatry and abuse within the Orthodox Jewish world. His 1996 book, for example, “The Shame Borne in Silence: Spouse Abuse in the Jewish Community,” was considered an innovative work.

“This was something he started and put his neck on the line for him because he felt he could help a lot of people,” his grandson, Chaim Twerski, told The Associated Press.

For the past several years, Twerski has divided his time between Israel and the United States. Last month, he contracted COVID-19 and, after a few weeks of fighting the disease, died Sunday at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center, his family said.

There are two brothers, Michel and Aaron, his wife Dr. Gail Bessler-Twerski, four children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren. His first wife, Golda, died in 1995.

Twerski was buried at Eretz Hachaim Cemetery near Beit Shemesh, west of Jerusalem, late Sunday night. A close family was attending his limited funeral, but nearly 14,000 people watched the meal live, the family said.

Twerski’s specifies that mourners will not report eulogies. Instead, he asked them to sing a popular tune he had composed decades ago for the words of Psalm 28: 9 – “Deliver and bless your own people; susceptible to them and maintained forever. “