Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski, a psychiatrist whose concern for those with addictions led to the founding of Gateway Rehabilitation Center in Pittsburgh, and an author whose 60-plus books ranged from Jewish scholarship to self-help works illustrated by “Peanuts” artist Charles Schulz, died Sunday.

He was 90 and died in Jerusalem after being ill with COVID-19. He had moved to Israel several years ago after many years in Pittsburgh, and divided time between the two countries.

He said he found an “exquisite harmony” between his medical and religious callings.

As Dr. Twerski, he was clinical director of psychiatry at St. Francis Hospital in Pittsburgh for two decades, beginning in the 1960s. Along with the Sisters of St. Francis, the Roman Catholic religious order that oversaw the hospital, he founded Gateway Rehab and was its longtime medical director, then medical director emeritus. He chronicled his interfaith venture in one of his many books, “The Rabbi & the Nuns” (2013).

“Dr. Twerski saw the need for a facility where men and women could learn to confront the disease of addiction with dignity,” the Gateway website says. In 1991, he estimated in a Post-Gazette column that he had worked with 30,000 alcoholics across a career that was far from finished.

As Rabbi Twerski, heir to two rabbinic dynastic lines in the Hasidic stream of Orthodox Judaism, the Milwaukee native wrote many books of Jewish scholarship, and he showed up for work dressed in traditional Hasidic garb.

There was really no separating the psychiatrist from the rabbi, as indicated by another of his book titles, “From Pulpit to Couch.” 

“He was able to bring the most spiritual concepts into this very mundane, physical world,” said Rabbi Yisroel Rosenfeld of the Lubavitch Center in Squirrel Hill, a Hasidic congregation of which Rabbi Dr. Twerski had long been president while living in Pittsburgh.

Rabbi Dr. Twerski — who also created sublime religious music as a cantor and composer — was equally comfortable among people of “all walks of life, the Talmudic scholar and the drug addict,” said Rabbi Rosenfeld.

In 1978, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote: “He has the spare, ascetic look of a Talmudic scholar. The long, gray beard, the sidelocks, the ancient Hasidic garb proclaim devotion to an older, immutable world. … He is also a psychiatrist, immersed in grubby and searing problems of the 20th century. … Some might find a contradiction in all this. Dr. Abraham J. Twerski finds only ‘exquisite harmony.’”

He was born on Oct. 6, 1930, in Milwaukee to immigrant parents from Russia. He was descended on both sides of his family from rabbinic dynasties going back to the 18th century founding of Hasidic Judaism in Eastern Europe, an Orthodox movement stressing devotion in prayer, piety and service to God in daily life.

Married and ordained by age 21, he worked as an assistant rabbi in the Milwaukee congregation of his father, Rabbi Jacob Twerski.

But with psychiatry and psychology on the rise in the 1950s, “I noticed that people weren’t flocking to me for counseling the way they had to my father,” he later recalled in Pittsburgh Quarterly. “I decided that if I wanted to be the kind of rabbi my father was, I had to become a professional. So I went for broke, going to medical school to become a psychiatrist.”

He was going for broke almost literally.

He and his wife, Golda, already had a growing family. Even with help from members of his congregation, he fell behind on tuition. Then a gift of $4,000 arrived from an unexpected source, he wrote — the actor Danny Thomas, who had read a newspaper article about the young rabbi struggling to get through medical school at Marquette University. (Time magazine, too, caught interest early, profiling the “Rabbi in White” in 1959.)

His work brought him to the University of Pittsburgh for teaching and clinical work, and eventually to St. Francis Hospital, where he dealt with a range of mental health issues, including addictions. Seeking to break the cycle of short-term treatment and relapse, he and the Sisters of St. Francis worked to create the first Gateway center, located in Aliquippa, for long-term residential treatment.

Today, Gateway Rehab has 22 locations in Pennsylvania and Ohio, serving some 1,700 patients daily, according to its website.

Rabbi Dr. Twerski often wrote for general audiences on topics such as self-help and self-esteem. His advice column, “Ask Dr. Twerski,” appeared regularly in the Post-Gazette.

He would see a need — and write a book.

During the Great Recession, when many were losing work and with it their sense of self-worth, he wrote “Without a Job, Who Am I?” 

“We're a human being with intrinsic value” was his answer. A job is “not who we are.”

He got the idea for that book from a comic strip, and not for the first time. He was a fan of the “Peanuts” strip, often clipping out and displaying poignant examples of it on the clinic bulletin board. That led to collaborations with the strip’s creator, Charles Schulz.

“I stumbled upon what I thought was a good book idea,” Rabbi Dr. Twerski later recalled. “I called Mr. Schulz’s publishers and told them about it. Schulz thought it was a good idea, so I wrote the first book with his ‘Peanuts’ insights titled, ‘When Do the Good Things Start?’” That was followed by more books illustrated by Mr. Schulz, including “Waking Up Just in Time,” about the 12-step approach pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous.

It was an approach — which tied recovery in with spirituality, personal reform and mutual support — that he strongly defended throughout his long career, and that he said was compatible with Jewish practice.

He routinely took part in 12-step meetings and rituals such as undertaking a personal “moral inventory” — even though his only addiction was, by his own admission, to writing.

He maintained that addiction “is a symptom of the absence of spirituality, and the treatment is the development of spirituality.”

And spirituality, he said in a Post-Gazette commentary in 2006, was “independent of religion.” Rather, it involved unique human traits such as the ability to learn from the past, prepare for the future, search for truth and purpose, make ethical choices, forgive and empathize.

Spirituality “is being the finest human being one can be,” he wrote. “… True religion must have spirituality, because otherwise it is merely superficial ritual. However, it is possible for a person to be spiritual even if one is not religiously oriented.”

He also challenged his own Jewish community to confront the subject of domestic violence in his groundbreaking 1996 book, “The Shame Borne in Silence.”

“Some of the people read the book and told me, you saved my life, but others called me a scoundrel, how dare you besmirch your Jewish brethren?” he later recalled to the Post-Gazette, adding that eventually the message became more widely received.

He is survived by two brothers, Michel and Aaron, his wife, Dr. Gail Bessler-Twerski, four children, and grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren. His first wife, Golda, predeceased him in 1995.

He was buried at the Eretz Hachaim Cemetery west of Jerusalem late Sunday.

Rabbi Dr. Twerski’s will specified that mourners recite no eulogies. Instead, he asked that they sing a melody that he composed decades ago and that became popular in Jewish circles, based on words from Psalm 28 — “Deliver and bless Your very own people; tend them and sustain them forever.”

Peter Smith: petersmith@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1416; Twitter @PG_PeterSmith. The Associated Press contributed.

First Published: February 1, 2021, 3:52 p.m.