Film tracks the match made in prison that turned a convict into a rabbi on a mission
‘The Jewish Jail Lady and the Holy Thief’ tells feel-good true story of Harriet Rossetto and Mark Borovitz, who turned over a new leaf to help former convicts and addicts in LA
When Harriet Rossetto first met Mark Borovitz, it was hate at first sight.
Borovitz, who would later go on to receive rabbinical ordination — and the moniker “The Holy Thief” — was serving just under four-and-a-half years in state prison for writing bad checks. Rossetto — who would become known as “The Jewish Jail Lady” — was visiting. He thought she didn’t know anything about helping convicts; she thought he was very arrogant.
“Hey smart ass, when you get out of here, come help me,” she said to the future rabbi.
A new documentary film, called “The Jewish Jail Lady and the Holy Thief,” tells the story of their unlikely union and the religious homeless shelter and rehabilitation facility that they established in Los Angeles to help Jewish drug addicts and convicts. The film has been screened in dozens of film festivals around the world, including the United States, Canada, Italy, Ukraine, and India. This month, it will be shown at Congregation Sukkat Shalom in the Chicago area on May 6 and at Congregation Adas Israel in Washington, DC, on May 9.
At the time when they first met, Borovitz, who’s now in his early 70s, had a rap sheet five pages long. He bought cars with bad checks and committed insurance fraud. He was also an alcoholic, drinking a gallon of whisky a day, he says. He’d been to jail four or five times and to state prison twice.
Rossetto, now 85, had been a divorced social worker pushing 50 who once had her stomach pumped after trying to take her own life by overdosing on valium, and was battling food and sex addictions. Then she got a job visiting Jewish inmates in California’s prisons.
Every week, Rossetto would go through lists of prisoners looking for Jewish names, then pay the inmates a visit, supplying them with funds, delivering boxes of matzah on Passover, and helping them when they were released. The job gave her a sense of purpose.
“I didn’t even know that there were Jewish criminal offenders,” Rossetto said, referring to the stereotype often prevalent even within the Jewish community that most Jews get jobs as doctors and lawyers. “For a nice Jewish girl who liked bad boys, it was the perfect job.”
In the 1980s, Rossetto became concerned that there was nowhere within the Jewish community for Jewish convicts and drug addicts to turn to once they got out of prison. Jews at the time believed that Alcoholics Anonymous with its religious overtones was a Christian organization, she said.
So in 1987 Rossetto applied for a grant, rented run-down old house in Los Angeles, and built a shelter for Jewish men and women who were coming out of prison called Beit T’Shuvah, Hebrew for “House of Repentance.”
“Most of them were there because of addiction. They kept going back in. The recidivism rate in and out of prison is about 90 percent. I wanted to change that,” Rossetto said. “There is a teaching in Judaism that to rescue a Jew from captivity is the best thing you can do — you’re even allowed to sell the Torah. It’s holy work.”
Then, one day, Borovitz showed up. He had gotten out of prison and was living in a halfway house, unable to find a job. While in prison he’d become very interested in Judaism and had studied with a rabbi. Rossetto took a chance and hired him to teach Jewish subjects to the residents at Beit T’Shuvah. In the backyard, they put up a tent where they held Shabbat services on Friday nights.
“I saw myself in every chapter of the Torah,” Borovitz says. “I had fallen in love with a Judaism that I never knew existed — a personal Judaism that was helping me with my inner life.”
He had also fallen in love with the Jewish Jail Lady, who was 14 years older than him.
“We became friends, then a couple of months later somehow that transformed into lovers, and then we got married,” Rossetto says.
While working at Beit T’Shuvah, Borovitz exchanged his habit of crime-fueled adrenaline for a passion for helping drug addicts and criminals. He went back to school and got his Bachelor’s degree. When the first rabbinical school on the West Coast, the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, opened its doors in 1995, Borovitz applied and was accepted. In the year 2000, he became a rabbi.
As a former convict himself, Borovitz talked to the residents of Beit T’Shuvah in a language they understood, Rossetto says. He pointed out the stories in the Bible about people who had done bad things before improving themselves.
“That’s why people were willing to study Torah with Rabbi Mark — because he pointed out that all the matriarchs and patriarchs were flawed, and people identified with that,” Rossetto says.
With Rossetto’s and Borovitz’s commitment, Beit T’Shuvah grew into an organization with 140 full-time residents and a budget of $10 million a year. (“People started to come who belonged to families that were influential and affluent. Their kids would get arrested,” Rossetto explains.)
With support from donors, Beit T’Shuvah moved out of the gang-infested neighborhood and opened a new space with a synagogue attached to the rehab.
And on Friday nights, Beit T’Shuvah organized a unique Shabbat celebration, singing Hebrew prayers to popular music with events such as Beatles Shabbat and Motown Shabbat.
“It was like a rock concert, a revival meeting, and a Conservative Jewish service all rolled into one,” Rossetto says. “Every Friday we had 300 people for services and we would serve them dinner.”
One day filmmaker Barry Rosenthal walked in.
The band on the stage was then singing Hebrew prayers to Bob Marley songs. Then the rabbi got up (with his fingernails painted in different colors) and started delivering his speech, addressing the audience with the f-word sprinkled here and there. An Alcoholics Anonymous meeting followed.
“I was blown away,” says Rosenthal, who is a recovering alcoholic and former cocaine user himself. “I said, ‘This is the best-kept secret in LA.’ And I asked, ‘Have you done a film about it?’”
He began filming and documented Borovitz’s and Rossetto’s retirement and the way that Beit T’Shuvah changed without them.
Borovitz is now writing a book called “Pardon Me.” He is trying to get the governor’s pardon because he wants to become a real estate agent, he says. He is already the author of the 2005 Los Angeles Times bestseller, “The Holy Thief: A Con Man’s Journal from Darkness to Light.”
Rossetto is also writing a memoir, to be named “The Lost Founder.” She is the author of a book called “Sacred Housekeeping” about how she started Beit T’Shuvah and how even small acts like making your bed are sacred, she says.
The couple now lives in a community for older people in Palm Desert, California.
Meanwhile, Beit T’Shuvah is going through a transition — but is still continuing on with its unique mission.
“It’s become more bureaucratic. They are taking government money. The Jewish segment is not as central as it was,” Rossetto says. “But people are still getting help, that’s the most important thing.”
