Fifteen-year-old Shlomo is the eldest of five children in an English-speaking, ultra-Orthodox family. Two years ago, he was brought to the Crossroads Center by some of his Beit Shemesh peers, youth connected with Crossroads who saw that Shlomo needed help.

His childhood was not an easy one. His family relocated repeatedly: Israel to Belgium to America to Russia, and then back to Israel. There, his father abandoned the family, while his mother—now on her own with five young children—became physically abusive. She also attacked Shlomo verbally, attempting to convince her thirteen-year-old son and their community at large that he was crazy and dangerous.

In part because of his mother’s misinformation and in part due his reaction to it, he was expelled from a series of schools. At the same time, he began picking fights with other children in the neighborhood. It was some of these children, in fact, who brought him to the Crossroads Center for rehabilitative therapy, responding to his calls for help rather than his physical antagonism.

Shlomo began to recover from this physical and emotional battering in the welcoming and nonjudgmental environment of the Crossroads Center. He started spending his afternoons and evenings here, in Jerusalem, instead of hanging out on the streets of Beit Shemesh. The Center quickly became a substitute home for him, within a few days of his arrival setting him up with a Crossroads social worker who helped him present his problems to the municipal authorities. (Although the authorities had opened a file on this family, they had made no attempts to find an appropriate school for him, or help for his mother.) Thanks in large part to this same caseworker, Shlomo succeeded in leaving his mother’s home and moving in with his grandparents.

Shlomo has come to the Crossroads Center on a regular basis for the last two years. When he fought with his grandparents, and even when he ran away, he still came to the Center. There, we helped him work through his problems and return to his grandparents’ home. We have accompanied him to schools and educational programs, to the police station and to court; we brought him to a mental hospital when he confided in us his fear that he would hurt himself. He calls Crossroads the one place where people understand him, the one place where he belongs.

Like many teens, Shlomo meets the definitions of neither of the two categories that merit governmental assistance: he is not criminal enough to be held in a closed facility, and not mentally ill enough to be enrolled in a psychiatric program. Nevertheless, as his at-risk behaviors have increased, we have continued to advocate heavily within the system to find a viable solution for living and learning.

Crossroads and its staff have been the only consistent and stable force in Shlomo’s life for the past two years. So long as we have the means to do so, we will continue to stand with him.