Does Heroin Overdose Signal Bigger Problem For Brooklyn Ultra-Orthodox?
The public health crisis of rampant opioid abuse has reached the insular ultra-Orthodox community in Brooklyn. Malky Klein, a 20-year-old ultra-Orthodox woman from Borough Park, died of an overdose last month, the New York Post reported.
Jewish volunteer ambulances were called to the Klein home on June 24th after Klein’s mother found her unconscious in bed. Within an hour, doctors had pronounced her dead.
“We’re definitely losing more people to drugs — there’s no question,” Yaakov Behrman, director of the Crown Heights drug prevention group Operation Survival, told the Post. “It’s getting worse in the United States, it’s getting worse in the world, and it’s affecting our community.”
A friend of Klein’s said that Klein had felt alienated from her community for being less religious — going “off the derech,” or path, in the parlance of Orthodox Jews.
Klein had recently returned from two years of rehab in California, according to the friend.
Advocates say suicide and abuse are growing problems in the Orthodox world.
Contact Ari Feldman at [email protected] or on Twitter @aefeldman.
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.
In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.
At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.
Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we still need 300 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Only 300 more gifts needed by April 30