Last update - 15:21 13/03/2008
Family Affair: Igor, Avraham and Kosta,
By Avner and Reli Avrahami
Emtza Haderech Hostel, Nesher
W The cast: Igor Tselis (36), Avraham Cohen (34), Kosta Roshkov (41).
W Industrial zone: Evening descends on signs advertising garages and skewered-chicken eateries. Next to a paint store and above a steak place is an old stone building of reddish hue, accessed by a steel staircase. This is a halfway house/hostel for former prisoners undergoing rehabilitation in a Haifa neighborhood. Its sign proclaims "Welcome to Emtza Haderech [literally, middle of the way]." We enter. On the ground floor a meal is being organized; in the adjacent office we meet Margalit.
W Margalit: The director of the hostel, on behalf of the prisoner rehabilitation authority. A social worker by training, Margalit Balal is an unmarried woman of 53. She has been working with prisoners since 1990 and has been in charge of the hostel since last year ("very satisfying"). She is assisted by a social worker and three counselors, who are "graduates" of the place.
W Design: The facility has two floors, the bottom one for eating (and watching television), the top one for sleeping (and washing). An air of boarding-school cleanliness wafts through the place, mixed with aromas of cooking. On the white walls are the sayings of wise men; on the staircase laundry is drying. Through the windows the smokestacks of Haifa's oil refineries are visible. The hostel's five rooms house nine occupants.
W The occupants: Recently released prisoners who are also drug addicts and display motivation to "go clean." They did time for drug dealing, theft and robbery (and, in one case, rape). Most of them have done time more than once. "The goal of the hostel," Margalit says, "is to instill in them a desire to lead a productive way of life that will be beneficial for them and for society. This is done by teaching them routine."
W Routine: In their nine months at the hostel, the occupants get up at 5:30 A.M., go out to work and return by 5:30 P.M. Sleeping here is obligatory. There is also a routine of cleaning up, doing laundry and cooking (without outside help), along with a routine of undergoing urine tests, pep talks ("group sessions") and sandwich-making rotations. "The hardest thing for a felon is to leave home with a sandwich" (Margalit).
W Sanctions: Failing to sleep in the halfway house, going back on drugs or using violence will get you kicked out.
W Being kicked out: A hard blow. Each occupant chose to pay NIS 1,000 a month for his stay here. We go up to room No. 4.
W Room 4: Clean, tidy, orange curtain, four outsized youth beds, bureaus on which are aftershave lotions, framed views of Switzerland and plastic flip-flops. They agree to be interviewed. Kosta is delayed: He is duty chef.
W Duty chef: "I make everything according to my taste." This evening he has prepared sausages with cabbage and potatoes, and he can also do borscht and pilmeni (a stuffed delicacy).
W Last time inside: Igor - 9 months for stealing car tanks in the Haifa area; Avraham - 17 months for five grams of heroin in Ashdod; and Kosta - 10 months for breaking into an electronics warehouse in Be'er Sheva.
W Igor's bio: Born in Kishinev, now in Moldova, to a secular Jewish family; his parents, who are construction engineers, live in Kiryat Motzkin, a Haifa suburb. An outstanding swimmer, he was sent at the age of 15 to a sports boarding school in Moscow and was later a member of the Soviet national team and a candidate for a medal in the 1,500-meter race ("I swam with the great Salnikov"). He swam, he says, mainly because of his father's ambition. In the boarding school he had to get up at 5 A.M. every day in order to be in the water at 5:30. He swam between 10 and 16 kilometers a day, all the time trying to figure out how to tell his father that it was not for him. In 1991 he immigrated to Israel with his family, two years after winning a bronze medal in the Soviet championships, but knowing already then that he would never be a champion swimmer. In Israel he swam a little (in Kiryat Ono), took part in a competition in Scotland (with the Irsaeli national team) and retired from the sport.
W Retired: "I was a bit confused." He attended Tel Hai Academic College, in Kiryat Shmona, for one semester (electrical engineering), was drafted and served as a lifeguard in an army hospital ("The most terrific time of my life") until his discharge (1994), then worked as a lifeguard in Acre and started to study thermal engineering at Atid College (in Haifa), completing his studies in 2000. In the meantime, he got married ("a blind date") and the marriage (which lasted five years) produced a boy, now eight. In 2003, his wife said she wanted to go back to Russia; he objected, and that was why the marriage fell apart, he says. His wife now lives in Moscow, and he last saw his son in 2006 ("I miss him").
W After the divorce: Igor cracked ("Suddenly I was alone"). All his life, he says, he was used to moving from one structured framework to another. He started mainlining heroin in 2003, his addiction led to his bankruptcy, and in 2007 he was sent to jail for theft ("I was under the influence of drugs"). He did his time in Atlit Prison ("which is also a civilian facility"). After his release he returned to his parents' home and there encountered the unkindest cut of all: "I was thrown out of the house, and my brother called the police, which I didn't expect of him."
W Plans: In four months' time, after completing his stay at the halfway house, he will rent a place in Nesher. He has savings from his current job as an electrician ("I am optimistic").
W Happiness quotient (scale of 1-10): 9 ("I am afraid to say 10").
W Avraham's bio: Born in Casablanca, one of nine children ("one died"). The family immigrated to Israel in 1962 and was sent to live in Ashdod ("We were one of the first"). His father worked for the Post Office ("digging ditches") and afterward was a stevedore ("There were good years, it was the period of Yehoshua Peretz" - the militant labor organizer). Avraham dropped put of school in seventh grade, and as a boy collected copper in the dunes ("in the direction of Ashkelon") and squeezed oranges from the orchards of Kibbutz Nir Galim. Times were hard at home; he didn't get along with his father, who often hit him. At the age of 17 he met a 21-year-old female volunteer from the United States in Kibbutz Zikim. Half a year later he moved with her to Kibbutz Maabarot ("I spent the whole day smoking in the room"). They were married in the summer of 1973. Her parents bought them an apartment in Ashdod ("including the furniture"), and they had two children. She was a teacher, he was a drug dealer. They separated in 1977 ("She wanted me to change, and I couldn't"). He remarried in 1978 and became the father of three more children. That marriage lasted 16 years, 10 of which he spent in prison ("She didn't have the strength for it anymore, and I understood her").
W Prisons: He did his first jail term at the Tel Mond facility in 1971 ("half a year for breaking and entering"), and since then, he says, he has been incarcerated 10 times - a total of 27 years ("Prison is my second home"). His longest term behind bars was five years, for extortion and threats ("But the truth is, I didn't extort anyone"). He has shared a jail with some famous convicts.
W Famous convicts: Herzl Avitan ("He broadcast very serious mental strength"), Shmaya Angel, Yaakov Alperon ("in the Hermon facility, in 2005"), and before that with his brothers, Nissim, Zalman and Aryeh ("I don't like any of them in particular").
W Self-image: "I don't feel like a criminal. Where I grew up, all the thefts and drugs were a necessity for making a living." He says he had rules.
W Rules: "I don't sell drugs to children, I haven't cried since I was a boy, I don't sleep with married women, don't steal from old people, don't hurt people who are down and out. And I don't shoot up, but that rule was broken."
W Present situation: "I am not a user." He is working as a welder in a factory that manufactures security doors ("I changed a lot thanks to this house"). He has a girlfriend in Ashdod and they are raising her daughter together.
W Dream: "A little house in the Arava."
W Happiness quotient: 7.
W Kosta's bio: Konstantin "Kosta" Roshkov, 41, was born on the Russian island of Sakhalin, which borders Japan. "I am not a Jew," he says immediately. He describes his family as "Russian atheist, but not communist," and he misses the rugged terrain of his homeland very much. His father was a stevedore, his mother a pharmacist; his (only) brother was murdered in a gang war in Vladivostok (in 1995). He was involved in "business" from adolescence - including the smuggling of cars from Japan to Sakhalin ("I was the driver"). In 1990, he met a Jewish girl in the Siberian city of Komsomolsk. She worked in the stockroom of a factory; he was a local "finagler." They were married in a civil ceremony, immigrated to Israel in 1996, lived in Be'er Sheva, and had two children. Kosta worked as a truck driver (for Tnuva, the giant food company) and did time twice for breaking and entering ("I always worked alone"). Now he is torn. On the one hand, there are the children, whom he loves very much ("I was a father who went to parents' night in school"); on the other hand, he is constantly asking himself: "What I am doing here?" In any event, a court order forbidding him to leave the country has resolved that particular problem for the time being. He owes NIS 300,000, he says.
W The debt: Part of it in child support to his wife, from whom he is separated ("only because I was a user"), part to banks.
W Plans: After completing his stay at the hostel, in another five months, he will rent an apartment in the Nesher area. This is his first drug-rehab experience and he has hopes. He does not want to go back to Be'er Sheva: He is tired of the desert and afraid of the familiar setting ("where I was a user"). He now works for a company that installs lighting poles at road junctions and is very pleased. He talks to his children on the phone. They don't know where he is, and Kosta does not invite them to visit ("a short encounter can be harmful"). Every evening after lights out (11 P.M.) he listens to music (until 12:30 A.M.). He likes Russian rock, Vladimir Vysotzkij and also Shlomo Artzi.
W Dream: "To be clean and find love."
W Happiness quotient: 3-4.
W 7 P.M.: They have to go - it's supper time, and after that there is a "group" (a collective conversation).
W Future ties: "Only if we stay clean."