IT all started in June of 2000, when Yishai Ghoori and Binyamin Greenspoon, two young kollel guys in BMG with big ideas and hearts to match, knew of some teenage bochurim who they feared would flounder over the summer without an appropriate framework.

“These boys needed something different from the traditional yeshivah camp, which wasn’t working for them. So we came up with the idea of creating a wilderness camp,” says Rabbi Ghoori, a sports and hiking enthusiast, skier, and marathon runner. They soon found campgrounds in Pennsylvania and were off.

“It was lots of fun — serious white water rafting, three-day hikes carrying all our stuff through the woods, camping out, cooking on our own — but more than being fun, it taught the boys leadership skills, responsibility, and communication, because they all had to depend on each other,” Rabbi Ghoori relates. “We saw how you can literally change a kid from acting lazy and self-centered to realizing, ‘Hey, I gotta help my friend out.’ It was really amazing to see what can happen to someone in three weeks, really opening him up to responsibility and being of service to others.”

There was no cook, so the boys cooked themselves. They had their own band and played music all night, no one really caring how it sounded or looked. Once, they heard about a wings competition somewhere in Pennsylvania and decided to join — a bunch of Jewish boys cooking up wings with barbeque sauce and Yemenite schug. On the way home, the smoker was still going in the back of the van when they got pulled over by a cop who told said they couldn’t drive with fire in the vehicle.

“The boys loved it and really thrived,” says Rabbi Ghoori. “And many of the boys came back home ready to sort out their lives.”

But when real life continued, for some of those boys it still wasn’t working. By Chanukah time, some of them had been kicked out of their yeshivos, and who better to reach out to than their summer patrons, Rabbi Ghoori and Rabbi Greenspoon?

While the camp would run for another eight years, in 2001 Rabbi Ghoori came up with their next idea: A part-time yeshivah, or “kollel,” where bochurim would learn half a day and find work for the other half. Unsurprisingly, this raised more than a few eyebrows in the Lakewood community.

“Twenty-five years ago, no one did this,” says Rabbi Ghoori. “Some people felt that this went against everything Lakewood stood for, that maybe it would be more appropriate for these boys to go to a yeshivah out of town.”

But the need was real, more pervasive than people assumed, and Ghoori and Greenspoon persisted, creating a yeshivah called Chavrei Hakollel, or more informally known simply as “the Kollel,” a program that exists until today. Yungeleit are hired to learn and mentor the teenagers, with additional men learning in the beis medrash to create a vibrant atmosphere.

“Over two decades later, our kollel is still serving as an ir miklat for teens who have nowhere else to be,” says Rabbi Ghoori. “Our goal was that if a 16-year-old kid got kicked out of yeshivah in December, he didn’t have to land on the street for the rest of the year. The next morning he could join the Kollel.”

The Kollel was originally located in the front of an auto repair shop, which worked out well because it gave the boys something to do afterward. Some boys worked in the auto repair shop, some built antique cars in the backyard, and some worked at a furniture store next door.

“The Kollel was not an aesthetically beautiful place,” says Yishai Ghoori. “Still, the boys flocked to it, because there they felt appreciated and connected, with no judgments.”

Rabbi Ghoori pretty much remembers every boy who passed through the Kollel’s doors. There was Kivi, a teenage mechanic who was completely disconnected from Yiddishkeit. Yet slowly he started drifting by to check out the Kollel and began hanging out there. There wasn’t much to trigger him there — it wasn’t hard-sell kiruv and there were no philosophical discussions. There was real learning, but zero judgement. No one would flinch if Kivi walked into the beis medrash with a chunky necklace. It was a Yiddishkeit he didn’t feel he had to run away from.

Sruly was a chassidishe boy from Boro Park whose father reached out to Rabbi Ghoori for help. They made up to meet at a wedding hall the next time Rabbi Ghoori was in Brooklyn.

“Sruli was very cool kid, all jeweled up,” Rabbi Ghoori recalls. “But we connected instantly. I said to him, ‘Come learn in our kollel, and we’ll finish Bava Metzia in six months.’ He said, ‘Try me.’ But he showed up, he learned, and we threw a huge siyum for him when he finished.”

When Tzvi, an 18-year-old bochur, joined the Kollel, he couldn’t read Hebrew. “We worked with him,” says Rabbi Ghoori, “And he actually finished his first Mishnah. We threw a massive siyum and his whole family came. There were a lot of tears flowing at that siyum.”

About fifty boys attended the Kollel for the first few years, and Ghoori and Greenspoon began to recognize a common thread. “Much of what these boys were struggling with was related to mental and emotional health,” says Rabbi Greenspoon. “We said to ourselves, we really need a mental health professional on staff.”

But in Lakewood of 2005, there were only a handful of therapists — mental health awareness was still emerging in this yeshivah town, and most people would travel to New York for treatment. (Today, by comparison, there are about 600 therapists in Lakewood.)

At that point, Binyamin Greenspoon decided to pick up the gauntlet himself, and went back to school. Today he’s a sought-after trauma therapist.

“What I realized, from the very beginning of my career as a mentor, is that as much as we were giving these kids unconditional love, reinforcing incentives, and everything else in the manual, I kept bumping into trauma and developing personality disorders — it was like hitting a brick wall,” Rabbi Greenspoon relates. “When I went back to study, my initial interest was in the intersection of trauma and family systems, because I came to see how much of a difference it can make for the child when the family is on board. You can be the best therapist in the world, but you only see these kids at a certain time once a week, and then they go home to their families. So if they have a family environment that understands and supports them, their healing becomes that much faster and more successful.”

He says that over the years working with struggling kids, one question kept coming up — the question so many of us continue to ask: Why is it that the challenges these kids have during their young years often manifest in their challenges with Yiddishkeit?

Of course, not every child who struggles with emotional issues goes OTD. Mostly it’s because youngsters who don’t overthink or overanalyze their struggles have the ability — combined with a supportive family environment and parents who can give soothing affection — to reset themselves. And in general, those are not the kids who abandon mitzvos.

“But then,” Rabbi Greenspoon explains, “you have children like a boy I’ll call ‘Chaim.’ Chaim cares a lot, maybe he even over-cares — when he’d hear about a tzarah, he’d take a Tehillim to bed. Now, you have to remember the backdrop of all these kids from frum homes: The first thing they do in morning is wash negel vasser and say Modeh Ani, and when they go to sleep, it’s Kriyas Shema — which means that Yiddishkeit is with them from the time they wake up until they go to bed. It really the deepest part of them.

“That’s how Chaim is growing up, but there are other challenges. He has a learning disability, he can’t grasp what’s going on in class, and he’s also picked on by a bully — and he doesn’t tell his parents any of this. The teacher comes down hard on him because he daydreams, and he’s developed anxiety, which makes it even harder to focus. Basically, he’s afraid that everyone will see that he’s not normal, that he can’t seem to succeed when everyone else can.

“And so he davens, begs Hashem to make life easier. But as some point, when life stops making sense, so does his Yiddishkeit. It just becomes too painful. It’s too painful that he can’t learn Hashem’s Torah, it’s too painful that his tefillos aren’t being answered, so he can’t bring himself to daven anymore. He feels, ‘I’m a failure, I’m worthless, I’m a disappointment.’ He has no internal way of feeling good about himself, and thinks, ‘I’m going to Gehinnom anyway, so what’s the point?’” 

Rabbi Greenspoon explains that from that point on, everything in Yiddishkeit becomes complicated and painful, so he stops going to minyan, stops saying brachos, watches things he shouldn’t.

“In order to find some inner sense of calm and peace, he turns off the feeling switch, because it’s too painful to feel. And he turns off the Yiddishkeit switch, too, so he can finally get some relief. Yet he’s also lost his sense of self, his primal identity, which means there’s no consistency, no structure. At first, he’ll put on his tefillin — he doesn’t want to miss a day so he’ll wrap himself a few seconds before shkiah. But then those straps become too heavy, and they come with so many mixed feelings: of anger at Hashem, of no self-worth, of being trapped, of being dirty, of not being worthy. Better to keep those tefillin in the closet.

“You know,” Rabbi Greenspoon continues, “when I meet these kids, they always report that for years they felt dead inside. We keep hearing how it seems to have happened so suddenly, literally from today to tomorrow, but that’s not really true. Years before they began to be mechallel Shabbos, they stopped caring about Shabbos. They’ve been struggling for a long time — I used to think the struggle started around 7th grade, but today it’s even earlier, more like 5th grade. And they don’t tell their parents because they don’t want to hurt them, so instead they wind up feeling disconnected from their family system. And we’re not even talking about abuse. Throw that into the mix and multiply all of the above.”

Back when they began working with bochurim in the Kollel, Ghoori and Greenspoon realized that they’d become the go-to address for parents of struggling teens.

“At a certain point we realized this was bigger than a problem of some bochurim not finding their place,” says Rabbi Ghoori. “We were getting calls from all over — parents, rabbanim, and askanim were reaching out to us. We had to streamline our process to ensure that no one fell through the cracks.”

They also discerned that in addition to some young people needing professional help, there needed to be collaboration between schools, parents, and mentors, in order to provide an all-encompassing therapeutic environment for the client. Parents, too, required guidance and connection with professionals from whom they could gain better clarity and understanding of their child’s struggles.

And so in 2008 they opened Nesivos, an organization dedicated to guiding young people and their families, through a team of licensed professionals, treatment plans, case management, school advocacy, after-school programming, and parenting intervention and support, to make sure all avenues are covered and goals actually met.

While at the time, they weren’t sure Lakewood was ready for such a center, they didn’t feel they had a choice. “Askanus caps out at a certain point,” says Rabbi Ghoori. “There’s only so much you can do from your cell phone, on the go.”

With the office, there was structure, follow-up, coordination, and ongoing care. And most of all, there was professional oversight.

The office also allowed for meetings with the teens and their parents in an honest and open platform. “We meet the parents and the child so we can get a full perspective,” says Rabbi Ghoori. “A lot of things come out in our office for the first time. We also take input from anyone else involved, such as the family’s rav or therapist, or the child’s rebbi.”

What happens next? “We help with school advocacy, job placement, family support, sibling support — and case management that pulls it all together with a compressive approach,” says Rabbi Greenspoon, Nesivos’s clinical director. “And our mentoring program is the first line of defense, because most teenagers aren’t open or ready for ‘real’ therapy.”

When they started out, there was a four-to-one ratio of boys to girls falling out of the system. While Nesivos began with servicing teenage boys, today half of the teenagers they service are girls.

“The girls were more protected within an insular system,” Rabbi Ghoori explains, “but in recent years it’s turned into a one-to-one ratio due to the ease and access of handheld devices.”

But while the girls are no longer naturally sheltered, their options are more limited if they don’t fit into the system.

“Practically, there are a lot more options for the boys,” Rabbi Ghoori ads. “There are about 12 girls’ high schools in Lakewood while there are about 90 mesivtas, catering to different levels and different needs.”

Furthermore, each story is different, and each parent of a struggling teen will reach out at a different point.

“Everyone has a different bandwidth,” Rabbi Greenspoon says. “Life becomes unmanageable at different points for different people.”

He says through his two decades of dealing with young people and trauma, he sees two kinds of children in pain.

“There are the sponges and there are the rocks,” says Rabbi Greenspoon. “The rocks have thick skin on the outside. Nothing really bothers them, and it seems like everything is always fine. But then they’re hit hard and they crash, and when they fall apart, they don’t bounce back so easily.”

Rabbi Greenspoon shares an example: A 17-year-old boy was doing well in mesivta, considered to be a real “metzuyan.” And then one day he shuts down. He can’t get out of bed, he can’t put on tefillin, and he can’t open a sefer. He spends his time in bed depressed, watching movies. Before this, something in his life wasn’t balanced, but it wasn’t outwardly evident, and no one in his orbit picked up on it.

“Sponges, on the other hand, are more resilient souls,” Rabbi Greenspoon continues. “When you push a foam sponge, it leaves an impression, but then it bounces right back. These are the children who’ve always dealt with challenges, but at the same time they are used to bouncing back. But sometimes, after enough challenges, it’s not so easy to just bounce back.”

Rabbi Greenspoon says some parents have the attitude of “What do I need to do to get my kid through high school? Just get her through seminary so we can marry her off.” But the issues, he says, need to be dealt with before real life.

When, in 2008, a Lakewood boy died from an overdose, the community as a whole was shaken up to become more introspective.

“We wanted to make a difference on a broader level and came up with the idea of supporting the parents,” says Rabbi Greenspoon. “We knew that if we could help the parents, then we could help the child. Parents just weren’t trained in dealing with crises.”

Over the years, more and more parents joined the support groups that provided education and guidance. But more importantly, it normalized the struggle.

“Today there is much less stigma,” says Rabbi Greenspoon. “People used to think that mental health support is for people who have something really wrong them. But today it’s become normalized. People from the ‘best’ families can have mental health struggles. No one is immune to anxiety or depression, and your own neighbors might be good people and have a child who’s struggling.”

Occasionally, parents are reluctant to join the support groups, but when that happens, Rabbi Ghoori has one of the other parents call him. “It’s a very easy sell,” he says. “For these families, the support groups are a lifeline. They often stay for hours afterward talking to each other.” Today, he says, the stigmas have dropped. Most of Nesivos’s clients are mainstream bnei Torah families, and they’re servicing a few thousand families a year.

Rabbi Greenspoon wants to help parents shift their focus, to help them help their children find self-worth and a meaningful identity, instead of just seeing that their son is not going to shul or their daughter’s skirt is too short.

“These kids have a different way of coming back, and it’s not going to be just by putting back the mitzvos that have been so painful for them and that are tied up with so much disappointment, shame, and anxiety. In fact, those might be the last things that come back,” he says. “We need to show them that they can be successful, that they’re still a part of us, to help them rebuild without diving back into all that pain. Often the first place of reconnection is with their families, but that will only happen if the family can accept where they’re at.”

Until recently, teens in severe crisis were sent to non-Jewish programs, but now there are two frum options. And in the field of mental health, there is no competition. One of them is Nesivos’s Individualized Outpatient Program, which provides a structured day program for teens struggling with severe mental health and addiction. (The Partial Hospitalization Program is similar, but includes on-staff medication management.)

At the IOP there is individual therapy, family work, and group therapy, which is a big thing. “It’s important to normalize what the patients are going through so they can feel safe and understood,” says Rabbi Greenspoon. “The group dynamic creates that feeling of ‘I’m not alone.’ We’re social beings and we all thrive on connection. A big part of what we do is building that connection.”

Ghoori points out a recent shift — some good news that that’s happened over the last ten years.

“Today so many more kids are making it through the system,” he says. “Kids aren’t getting kicked out of yeshivah anymore. The yeshivos are trying very hard to keep the boys in the system, fine-tuning their processes. They are allowing boys to attend for shorter hours with private chavrusas. Sometimes, though, the yeshivos max out of ideas and it just isn’t working.”

Before these programs existed, there was a lot of “crash and burn.”

“These were the very unfortunate stories that we heard about,” says Rabbi Ghoori. “The kid that disappeared to Florida. The teen in rehab in California or the teen that overdosed. The new mental health initiatives are preventing many of these stories. And by addressing them early on, we are saving lives.”

And that’s one reason the Kollel has been so successful all these years. “Most bochurim really do want to shteig, they want to find their place. They’re not looking to leave the system,” Rabbi Ghoori says. “They’ve had negative experiences and it doesn’t even matter why or what, but for whatever reason, those negative experiences tell them, ‘This is not for me.’ But if you provide the right environment where people trust them, have confidence in them, are there for them, they can integrate back in. And you know, the Kollel is a real makom Torah. We hire yungeleit — sure, they can talk to a bochur about outside things, but I want a kid to come into the beis medrash and feel the simchah in learning, that they can attain the real thing.”

Still, some parents are apprehensive. What will it look like for their family? What about this bochur’s future shidduchim? “I tell them, if you’re doing ratzon Hashem, don’t worry about the stigma. Just do what you have to do. It’s the same with Nesivos. We’re talking about regular bnei Torah Lakewood families. There’s nothing shameful about a struggling kid. Catch it when you can before it’s too late.”

What about if it’s not your child, but you happen to notice a 15-year-old from your neighborhood riding his bike at 11 in the morning on a random Tuesday? Saying the wrong thing to a struggling child could put him over the edge, but Rabbi Greenspoon is definitely in favor of engagement.

“Take an interest in him. Strike up a conversation. Talk about the weather. Engage with him in anything that may be of common interest,” he says. “It’s always helpful to be kind and genuine. If the kid is out of school, he’s surely feeling disconnected from the community. If someone in the community can help him feel connected, it can be a protective factor in helping him deal with whatever is going on inside.

“If you’re connected to his parents, reach out to them,” he continues. “People are so afraid to approach parents of a struggling child, but it’s no different than any other tzarah, and they need support, help, and resources. Offer to help out and the parents will often appreciate it, as long as it’s genuine and kind and respectful.”

Rabbi Greenspoon was recently contacted by a young man struggling with addictions and severe mental health challenges. He’d spent years in and out of rehabs and hospitals and had little will to live. When he reached out, Rabbi Greenspoon was surprised and said to him, “You get triggered from frum people, and specifically from Lakewood people because that’s where you’re from. You can find any therapist in the world to help you. Why are you reaching out to me?”

“Because,” the young man responded, “I know that you get me.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1047)