After Incarceration, Creating Hope and Future

By. H. Glenn Rosenkrantz

She described a journey through a darkness most know nothing about — that of a professional Jewish woman navigating the netherworld of prison life and later reemerging into society to reclaim her dignity and purpose.

Evie Litwok was at a New Jersey synagogue speaking at a social action Shabbat, and if her tale of a life bent to extremes by the criminal justice and penal systems created awareness through discomfort — and it did, judging alone from the air in the room — then she hit her mark.

“I am gifted with being articulate, and so I have to tell this story,” she said. “I need to use all my strength to make people aware and force change.”

That story is one of two decades fighting charges of white collar crime and culminating in two years in federal prisons — including a stint in solitary confinement. The experience introduced her all too intimately to social malignancies and human rights abuses festering and growing there, from homophobia to misogyny to racism and just about everything in between.

“I’ve never been physically or emotionally the same since then,” said Litwok. “I have no serenity anymore. I have no choice but to channel what I’ve seen and experienced into activism. I am a baby of the civil and women’s and gay rights movements, and I’ve never checked my activism, and I’m not going to now.”