Sympathetic Ear : Pauline Ledeen, 81, Always Has Time for Jewish Inmates

After he was arrested for petty theft, David found that his family and friends wanted nothing to do with him. Sitting in jail, he felt alone.

One day a stranger came to visit.

“I got to the attorney’s room,” he recalls, “and there was this little old lady wearing this big hat. The deputy called my name, and she raised her hand. And the deputy pointed for me to go sit in front of her.”

“She had gotten my name by looking at the list of new bookings,” says David. “She asked me if I was Jewish, and I said ‘yes.’ She asked me if I’d like to attend a Jewish service in jail. . . .

“Then she asked if there was anything she could do for me--call my mother, call my girlfriend? She said if there was any footwork I wanted her to do, she was available. There was an overwhelming feeling that someone cared.”

The visitor was Pauline Ledeen, a sweet-tempered but persistent little old lady from Pasadena who, at 81, has spent 25 years reaching out to Jewish prisoners.

Ledeen, called Bobbe Teresa (Grandmother Teresa) by her colleagues, has devoted herself to helping others. She has phoned inmates’ families, interceded with judges and offered a willing ear to men who had no one else to talk to--all as part of the Jewish Committee for Personal Service, established in 1921 to ensure that California’s Jewish prisoners and mental patients were not forgotten.

For the first 15 years, Ledeen visited hundreds of inmates, including murderers, at prisons from Soledad to Chino. Since she broke her spine a decade ago, however, she has visited only the Men’s Central Jail downtown.

There, in a small booth, the man across from her often handcuffed by chain to a floor bolt, she listens attentively to his story and tries to make him feel comfortable.

“One of the things I think is important in jail,” she says, her white, wavy hair wrapped in a bun, “is that the inmates have just been arrested, and they become terribly tense and upset. Their attorney doesn’t come as often as the prisoner wants. Sometimes they are not feeling good or they don’t have medicine (they need) . . ..

“They’re (also) thinking of family problems. Maybe their car is on the street. Maybe they have an apartment and their belongings are there. Maybe they have a pet which needs to be taken care of.

If she sees an opportunity, she will gaze through her tinted glasses and offer gentle advice to nudge the inmate toward rehabilitation.

“A person can get himself dirty, but no one is inherently dirty,” she says. “I believe everyone is entitled to respect unless they have reached the point where they throw it away like your wanton killers who don’t give a damn about anybody, including themselves.

“One thing you learn to do is to separate the offender from the offense. . . . Suppose I’m sitting with a man who killed his wife. . . . I’m not saying it’s acceptable. But I can understand how circumstances can cause you to do something you would not always think of doing.”

Over the years, Ledeen has applied this philosophy to all kinds of criminals. She taught English to Yehuda Avital, an Israeli who killed an Israeli couple in the Bonaventure Hotel in 1979, and she regularly visited Edward Wein, who killed a Westchester housewife in 1975.

But Ledeen was seldom scared, she says.

“The only time I was ever afraid was when a paranoid schizophrenic threatened to kill me. I said, ‘Wait a minute. You can say anything you want, but don’t you raise your hands.’ Nothing happened . . . .

“If you went some place knowing law officers were all around, you wouldn’t be scared either. . . . The fact that you’re coming to see prisoners is a pleasure for them. They would do anything to protect me. Whenever I get to prison, they all kiss me.”

Ledeen adds that the majority of Jewish inmates, who make up an estimated 1% of the state prison population, have committed nonviolent crimes.

“Most of our inmates suffer from diseases of affluence,” says Harriet Rossetto, director of Beit T’Shuvah, a halfway house for Jewish prisoners founded in 1987 by the Jewish Committee for Personal Service. “The crimes usually involve drugs, gambling or other addictions which lead them to antisocial behavior to satisfy those cravings.”

Often it takes several sentences over decades before inmates admit their addictions and turn their lives around. For example, David, who grew up in Lennox, met Ledeen after his first arrest in 1979. He returned to jail several times throughout the 1980s.

“I’d always get at least one visit--from Pauline,” says David, who asked that his last name not be used. “She’d say, ‘Are you ever going to learn? You’ve got to stay away from those drugs. You’re ruining your life.’ She was very motherly. . . .

“Once there was a young lady I was seeing, and I asked Pauline to call her and ask her to visit me.

“A week later Pauline visited me and said, ‘David, have you thought about a new girlfriend? I don’t think this one has your best interests at heart.’ My girlfriend was only interested in me as someone to get drugs from. At the time the truth hurt, but I knew Pauline was right. She had a five-minute conversation with her and knew what she was all about.”

Arrested again last year on a charge of auto theft, David, 34, has been at Beit T’Shuvah since July trying to conquer his addiction and end his criminal career.

Ledeen joined the Jewish Committee for Personal Service in 1947 and served 20 years on its board of directors. Then she and her husband sold their mechanical parts business and she had more spare time. The committee’s executive director asked if she would begin seeing prisoners.

Starting in 1967, Ledeen drove to prisons throughout the state. After she fractured her spine late in 1980 and her husband died the next January, she confined her visits to County Jail.

Today, Ledeen visits the jail two days a week. Each time, she walks slowly into the chaplains’ offices carrying a heavy briefcase. On Tuesday mornings, she sits in a small cubicle and looks for new Jewish inmates, examining every page of a 3-inch-thick printout listing as many as 37,000 inmates in the county jails.

If the printout is clear, she can complete the job with her glasses. But if the list is blurry, she bends over the records with a magnifying class for hours.

To save time, she nibbles crackers at her desk instead of going out for lunch. To decide whom to contact, she relies on instincts and “a photographic memory.”

On Wednesdays, as she walks through the jail to visit inmates, Ledeen carries a bag of candy, handing pieces to deputies along the way. The candy, she says, is a symbolic attempt to make jail life sweeter.

For Ledeen, who was recently honored as part of the Jewish Committee for Personal Service’s 70th anniversary, life becomes sweeter when she sees a prisoner leave jail for good.

“I’m not a trained social worker. I’m a perceptive individual,” she says.

“We can’t pick the prisoners up, but we can let them see that it’s possible to pick themselves up and that there are people who are quite willing and eager to give them a ladder to climb.”