Religion: Rabbi in White

Abraham Joshua Twerski, 28, graduated from medical school this week. It was no mean feat, for Twerski is a Jewish rabbi like his father, two uncles, father-in-law, two older brothers and (when they finish their studies) two younger twin brothers. And to keep the Torah as an Orthodox Jew for six years of studies in Milwaukee’s Roman Catholic Marquette University was something like running a sack race, an egg race and an army obstacle course at the same time.

First there was the problem of keeping his religion from growing rusty; he rose each day at 5:30 a.m., put in an hour’s study of the Talmud before early service at Milwaukee’s Beth Jehuda Synagogue, where he is assistant rabbi. Medical school classes began at 8 a.m., and here real complications set in. His full, black beard was a sanitary problem in surgery, requiring special snood-like surgical masks. His tallith katan, a small prayer shawl worn by many Orthodox Jews under their shirts, had to be made of cotton instead of wool —which might set off a static spark and ignite the anesthetic in an operating room.

Lectures on Saturday. Religious holidays sometimes required months of advance planning. The nine-day Feast of Tabernacles, for instance, with four days when work is forbidden, fell during a series of lectures before a make-or-break exam in pathology. Abe, as students and professors call him, met the situation by studying by himself all the preceding summer, put himself so far ahead of his class that he could afford to miss the lectures. “I hated like heck to miss them,” he explains, “but I creamed that exam.”

When lectures came on Saturdays—during which Orthodox Jews are forbidden to work, ride in a vehicle or talk on the phone—Abe would have a friend put a sheet of carbon paper under his lecture notes and hope he remembered to use a ballpoint pen. Sabbath restrictions begin on Friday night, just before sundown, and on occasional Fridays only a lucky break in the traffic has saved him from having to abandon his 1952 De Soto and walk the rest of the way home. On Saturdays Abe was not on duty, but sometimes, to follow up on one of the cases he had been observing, he would leave his car in the garage and walk five miles to the hospital and back.

Work on Tish ‘ah Be’ab. Abe brought his own kosher food to school every day and ate it in the student lounge, where he also said his midday prayers in a corner, surrounded by chattering fellow students. Hospital duty during the 24-hour fast without food and water at Tish ‘ah Be’ab (commemorating the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D.) Dr. Twerski describes as “murder,” and the last six years have left him hollow-eyed and slightly sallow. But he is eagerly looking forward to the next stage: a year of internship at Milwaukee’s Mount Sinai Hospital, followed by a three-year residency in psychiatry.

“Psychiatric training was the motivation for my going into medicine,” he says. “I felt I could be a better adviser to my people and more help to them with their problems.”