Nancy Mizrahi’s Jewish world vanished the day she was sentenced to prison for embezzlement.
Before her 1993 conviction, the stockbroker lived in a lovely suburban home on the Peninsula. Her two daughters were beginning preschool at the Jewish community center. And she was active in her synagogue community, she said.
“I was very involved in Jewish life. All my friends were Jewish. I used to be in a Jewish women’s group.”
But by 1991, her marriage and finances were failing. Both spiraled out of her grasp by the time she was sent to the Northern California Women’s Facility in Stockton. To make matters worse, family members as well as friends from her close-knit Jewish community cut relations with her, she said.
“My life was falling apart. I was a desperate person,” Mizrahi recalled in an emotional interview.
Though she’s been out of prison since 1995, the 44-year-old hasn’t seen her two young daughters since before she was incarcerated. They were 3 and 5 then.
Mizrahi would like to come back to the synagogue community. Her rabbi, Sheldon Lewis of Palo Alto’s Congregation Kol Emeth, has been supportive throughout the ordeal but, she said, she still feels like a pariah.
“I just don’t feel welcome.”
Few suburban congregations find themselves in the position of receiving a returning convict. And a certain amount of awkwardness is almost inevitable. But for the former inmate, the path back to the mainstream is a difficult one.
Mizrahi’s feelings of having fallen from grace in her community are typical, according to Isaac Jaroslawicz, director of the Jewish prisoners’ advocate Aleph Institute in Florida.
“It’s not easy going back,” Jaroslawicz said. “People still make judgments, failing to recognize the difference between bad people and good people who commit bad acts.
“[Former convicts] find themselves shunned. Spouses find their relationships changed. The children deal with sidelong glances [in the synagogue],” he said.
However, Jaroslawicz said he hasn’t heard of many communities that have banned a former inmate outright.
“Under Jewish law, after you’ve paid your debt, you are to be forgiven as if you are sinless. We have a long way to come in that regard.”
Last week, Mizrahi had lunch with an old friend from her former congregation. The meeting was bittersweet, reminding the troubled woman of happier days.
The friend urged her to return to shul. Mizrahi actually has visited the Conservative synagogue, Kol Emeth, a few times since returning from prison. But the visits were unsettling.
Mizrahi said she bowed her head with shame, thinking surely all eyes were upon her.
“Everybody talks and they look at me and don’t know what to say,” she said. “Everything is so moralistic in the Jewish community and we are supposed to be perfect and that’s just not reality.”
Kol Emeth’s Lewis said he didn’t think most of his congregants even know of Mizrahi, whom he described as marginally active before her imprisonment. However, he said he understood her feelings that congregants would not want her around.
“Nancy is a very sensitive woman. She may feel alienated, and that’s hard to get at. It’s just hard to re-enter after any such [ordeal]…But I think that she knows from her friends and certainly from me that she is welcome.”
While the Torah does not prescribe prison as an acceptable means of doing penance, Lewis said no congregation should turn away someone who has made tshuvah, or penance, for their transgressions.
Mizrahi, he added, “has paid dearly for her mistake.”
The former stockbroker said that mistake involved her embezzlement of about $200,000.
Lewis vouched for his congregant’s character during her resentencing hearing. At Passover while she was in prison, he held a seder for her and an interfaith group of inmates, Mizrahi recalled.
“He was always there for me.”
Thinking back on her incarceration, she says Judaism was her only support in prison.
The prison’s Jewish chaplain, Rabbi Samuel Graudenz, pushed her to brush up on Hebrew and study Jewish texts.
The inmate wore a Magen David despite the harassment it provoked from anti-Semitic individuals at the facility.
When she was feeling particularly down, she walked the prison yard with Debbie Friedman songs playing on her headset.
“My Judaism was a source of comfort and hope. It was the only thing that kept me from going crazy, knowing I had a heritage and was different from [other inmates].
“Learning Hebrew kept me mentally stimulated. When Rabbi Graudenz didn’t come [on his usual Monday], it was devastating.”
From her cell she wrote letters to friends, some of whom didn’t write back. No one but her rabbis ever showed up for holidays.
Mizrahi is slowly putting her life together again. She has remarried to a Jewish man, her childhood sweetheart, and works as an administrative assistant for a high-profile South Bay company.
She said she feels good about herself, but anguishes over her broken family.
Two sisters still won’t talk to her; neither will some old friends. She has obtained a number of court orders to visit her daughters, whom she said have been sequestered by her ex-husband. But the girls’ father has ignored all of the injunctions, she said, unable to hold back the tears.
“The little one doesn’t even know who I am.”
Despite painful memories, Mizrahi forces herself to return on a regular basis to Chowchilla, the federal prison near Fresno where she was first admitted. There, a Jewish woman, whom she once befriended, remains.
The woman is a former macher (mover and shaker) with Hadassah, Mizrahi said, but gets no attention from her former community in San Jose.
“When you meet her, she is like every other wonderful Jewish woman at the table next to you.”
Mizrahi has been trying to locate a rabbi to visit the woman, who battles illness and faces a life sentence for conspiracy to commit murder. Chowchilla officials told Mizrahi that they’ve also been searching for a Jewish chaplain. That was three years ago.
In the meantime, Mizrahi wants to organize a Jewish group to visit the woman on a semi-regular basis.
After all, she said, it’s what she would have wanted while in prison.