Prison’s synagogue opens doors for convicts : After winning the right to a place of worship, Jewish inmates have built a community behind bars.

Bennett Seidman was scared to death. His body was vibrating like a tuning fork, and his speech was halting, jumbled. Seidman had been incarcerated in the State Correctional Institution here for more than a year, but he had never endured anything quite this terrifying.

At the age of 41, he was participating in a ceremony most Jewish males go through at 13--a bar mitzvah, the Jewish ritual in which a boy becomes a man and attains full membership in his religion.

Seidman grew up in a Jewish household but, as an act of rebellion against his parents, refused to go through the ceremony. Nearly 30 years later, after being sentenced to five to 10 years in prison for a crime he will not discuss, he was sent to this maximum-security state prison 40 miles northwest of Philadelphia.

At Graterford he found a small, tightly knit community of Jewish convicts who held regular religious services, performed works of charity and looked after their own.

Impressed with their commitment, Seidman underwent a jailhouse conversion and began studying with a rabbi in preparation for his bar mitzvah.

He is quite possibly the first inmate to have a bar mitzvah in a Pennsylvania prison--and his ceremony was performed in the only all-inmate synagogue within prison walls in the U.S. penal system.

“I always felt there was this void in my life,” Seidman said of his bar mitzvah. “And I wanted to do this to make my parents proud of me.”

There has always been a small core of Jewish inmates at Graterford, but it wasn’t until eight years ago that they were granted their own space for worship.

The synagogue story begins with an escape attempt gone awry, creating a hostage situation during which all inmates were confined to their cells for nearly a week.

After the lock-down, Jewish inmates discovered that their Torah, an artifact of their religion that was stored in a classroom used by other prison groups, had been ripped apart by guards looking for contraband.

The inmates complained to a commission appointed by the governor to study the breakout. The panel recommended that they be given their own space for religious pursuits.

“This is an oasis to get us out of the drab setting of prison,” congregation leader Gary Kretchmar said as he looked around the area that now serves as a synagogue and community center. “It’s a place where we can break bread with our brothers.”

Added congregation member Stan Rosenthal: “It’s definitely part of my life now, it’s my mental clearinghouse. At Friday night services, I put up a mental game plan of how I’ll deal with the next week.”

The concept of Jewish convicts doing serious jail time runs counter to a popular stereotype that Jewish felons tend to be nonviolent types who serve their sentences in minimum-security prisons.

But many of the Graterford prisoners were convicted of serious offenses: Kretchmar and Rosenthal, for example, are serving life sentences for murder.

Jews outside prison often find this hard to deal with. “The people who know about it are kind of amazed,” said Howard Cohen, the congregation’s part-time rabbi. “They can’t believe there are really Jews in a prison like this.”

“The old belief that Jews are not supposed to commit violent crimes, that it’s a stain on the whole community, still exists,” Kretchmar said

Despite this, the Graterford congregation has engaged in an aggressive outreach program aimed at the larger Jewish community, and it has been relatively successful in raising money through mail solicitations and small grants.

Some of the donations have gone toward the synagogue, which boasts a library of Judaica, an altar for religious services and an ark for the Torah. Other funds have been spent on a TV, a VCR, a computer, a stereo system and several pieces of office equipment.

The Jewish Congregation at Graterford (as it’s referred to on its letterhead) was able through donations to acquire three Philadelphia houses, which are used as post-release facilities for convicts (Jews and Gentiles) from the Pennsylvania penal system.

The congregation provides a $250 clothing stipend for Jews released from prison, religious paraphernalia for convicts transferred from one prison to another and a personal hygiene kit, as well as plenty of personal advice, for new inmates (Rule No. 1: Don’t borrow anything).

The group has also sponsored a talk by a black former soldier who helped liberate World War II death camps.

Lawrence Karlin, a retired Philadelphia businessman who acts as the official liaison between the congregation and the prison administration, said he feels that the Jewish organization “gives (the inmates) the cohesion of the Jewish community, a camaraderie with Jews they never had on the outside.”

But, he added, “it doesn’t necessarily mean that when they come out, they’re going to be observant Jews.”

Still, Kretchmar said, “you can’t help but gain from the spirituality. The surroundings of the shul (synagogue) provide you with the setting to get closer to God.”