San Quentin Planning First Prison Program in Jewish Studies

San Quentin Prison, the nation’s largest, is planning to offer Jewish history and Jewish ethics for high school credit in the January term. It would become the first prison in the United States to make Jewish studies part of its regular education program, according to Dr. Homer J. Hastings, chief of education for the California Department of Corrections. The teacher will be Rabbi David Davis, 34, spiritual leader of Reform Congregation Rodef Sholom of San Rafael, Calif., near San Quentin. Some formalities are still to be worked out. He said he would tell his convict pupils: “I’m not here to rehabilitate you or remake you. But I am here to tell you things about Judaism that I think are as meaningful today as they were 4,000 years ago.” There are between 75 and 100 Jewish prisoners at San Quentin, in a total inmate population of nearly 4,000. The Jewish inmates recently former Congregation Beth Shalom under Jewish chaplain Jacob Traub at the prison. Davis, who has been at San Rafael only five months and formerly was a director of the National Federation of Temple Youth in New York, said he was invited to teach at San Quentin by prison officials. The invitation was extended after the young rabbi held a four-hour rap session with the Jewish inmates, who were so impressed with him that they petitioned the prison brass for courses in Jewish studies. The courses would be open to any convict and would include a survey of Jewish history and the relevancy of Judaism to the contemporary world; interfaith marriage, black anti-Semitism, Jews and dissent, and Zionism. Rabbi Davis said that when he spoke to the Jewish inmates he had the feeling “there was a certain chemistry between us, that they thought, ‘Here was a rabbi who cared.’ What they sensed, I think, was that I wasn’t looking at them as prisoners.”