Jews Seek Spiritual Help for Illnesses : Health: San Francisco center offers counseling, workshops and a hospice program. It plans to open a national office in New York.

Roxane Dinkin was 42 when she discovered a lump in her neck. When her doctors diagnosed it as non-Hodgkins lymphoma, the type of cancer that killed Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Dinkin wondered if she would make it to 43.

But as the shock waned and her survival instinct surged, Dinkin realized that to cope with the crisis she needed spiritual--as well as medical--healing.

“I immediately made an appointment at the Jewish Healing Center,” said Dinkin, a psychologist who lives in Marin County. “Their idea was to help me mobilize my own spiritual resources to deal with the cancer. And that, in turn, led me to a deeper degree of self-acceptance.”

The Jewish Healing Center is a service, education and resource center dedicated to meeting the spiritual needs of Jews living with chronic and acute illness. Established three years ago in San Francisco, the center provides its Bay Area clients with pastoral counseling, healing services, spiritual support groups, educational workshops and a hospice program.

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Begun on a shoestring budget by a small group of women rabbis, the center was initially expected to operate at the fringes of the mainstream Jewish community. But a deluge of individual and congregational interest has convinced organizers to open a national office in New York this fall.

According to some observers, the center’s appeal reflects a spiritual turn among American Jews.

“This is an expression of a broader movement that I call a return to spirituality in American Judaism,” said Rabbi Neil Gillman, an associate professor of philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. “It’s part of an attempt to reassert the balance between the intellectual dimensions of religion and the emotional and spiritual parts.”

For Dinkin, whose cancer is now in remission, that balance was crucial. A convert to Judaism, she was already committed to Jewish learning. But her status as a cancer patient led her to ask how the tradition could help her accept the hardest lesson of her illness--living completely in the present.

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“This is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it,” Dinkin said, quoting a psalm she used for meditation. “Cancer changed my orientation to life. You only have today.”

Dinkin’s “teacher” during her illness was Rabbi Nancy Flam, the center’s West Coast director and one of its founders. Flam and several friends began discussing the Jewish approach to healing when they were in seminary. Flam had lived with the pain of her parents’ divorce, another woman had breast cancer, a third was tending to a terminally ill spouse.

“We wanted to know what guidance and support Judaism had to offer,” Flam said. “That’s why the Jewish Healing Center is dedicated to examining Jewish texts and finding Jewish rituals that have healing power.

“I have heard Jews say they have found spirituality in 12-Steps or Esalen or Buddhist meditation,” she said referring to Esalen, the New Age meditation center located in Northern California. “But why shouldn’t Jews learn about and experience healing in a Jewish context?”

The center’s dual emphasis on education and experience--teaching what Jewish texts say about healing and sponsoring services, programs, and support groups--has sparked similar efforts nationwide.

In Washington and San Francisco, congregations initiated programs for “bikkur holim,” or visiting the sick. Synagogues in Dallas and Evanston, Ill., hold regular healing services. A conference on healing and the rabbinate, sponsored by the center in February, brought about 150 Jewish leaders together.

“Many of these rabbis were very mainstream, and they want to integrate this stuff into their congregations,” Flam said. “The experience of illness has catapulted congregants into exploring their spiritual lives. They are saying, ‘We are thirsty. We need sustenance.”’

But this sustenance is not for everyone. Rabbi Morton Summer, of Yeshiva University in New York, said Orthodox Jews, with whom he works, are not part of the trend.