BOURNE
Counseling helped her escape cult’s cruel grip
Your campaign gift at work
By Amy R. Kaufman
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Rabbi Ari Crockett, the former leader of Beth El Congregation in Milwaukie, was exposed as a “minister of deceit” by Portland’s NewsChannel 8 on March 21, 2007, following the Oregonian’s investigative story on July 30, 2006.
Sarah Bourne told the Jewish Review she had been seeking a way back to the Judaism of her maternal grandmother when she met Crockett and his wife. There was no synagogue in Tillamook, and a friend had invited her to “hear the new rabbi” at Beth El Congregation during the High Holidays, she said.
Bourne’s attempted return to her faith was a descent into hell. She said she fell under the control of the Crocketts, and it was not until she underwent counseling at Jewish Family and Child Service that she realized what had happened to her.
Bourne said she suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder, which she believes made her vulnerable to brainwashing.
“Something has to be done to stop these people from hurting those of us who have disabilities,” she said. “They prey on the weak so they don’t have to work as much.”
While she slept on the couch in the Crocketts’ home, she said, “they took almost all my money for rent and food and still made me clean the house. They told me what I could eat and what I couldn’t eat. I was thin and always shaking. They wouldn’t let me braid my hair because they told me it made me look sickly. … They said it was because they loved me and it was a form of loving correction.”
Bourne said the Crocketts forbade her to contact her family or talk to anyone “from the outside.”
Finally, she said, after a rabbi who had learned of her trouble called the police, Crockett and his wife ordered her to pack her bags and left her at the bus stop bound for Portland at 1:30 a.m.
Bourne said she is grateful to Rabbi Michael Cahana of Congregation Beth Israel for recommending a Jewish agency that could help her.
“He was open, warm, protective, loving. He got me help right away. He got me into JFCS,” said Bourne, who attends Friday night services and works with the sisterhood at CBI.
JFCS is a non-sectarian, private, non-profit social service organization that “provides services to the most vulnerable, disenfranchised and at-risk populations, older adults, people with disabilities, and those seeking assistance with mental health issues and life transitions,” according to its mission statement.
JFCS, which received $331,680 from the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland for the 2007-08 fiscal year, offers services including emergency assistance; case management; individual, child, couple and family counseling; community education and advocacy programs, and Holocaust survivor and immigrant services.
Bourne said Barbara Kollmar, LCSW, clinical director of JFCS, “has helped lift a huge burden from me.”
“Barbara believes in me,” she said. “It’s always very positive. I think there’s nowhere to turn for people who are in cults. … I want to do something to stop cults.”
Bourne said she has been seeing counselors at JFCS every week for four months. OCD impedes her ability to work and focus, she said, “but in the last three weeks I have improved.”
Meanwhile, JFCS counselors have helped her buy new clothes and shoes. She said she is currently living with friends, but JFCS is helping her to find her own apartment.
“They also help me with case management and filling out papers,” she said. “They are always saying, ‘Call any time.’”
Bourne has started her own business, making hand-pieced “Torah quilts” embroidered with Hebrew words and symbols “so that people can wrap themselves in Torah or hang the quilt on the wall so they can have it all around them.”
She said she will exhibit her work at Hadassah’s Hanukkah Fair Nov. 18 at Congregation Neveh Shalom.
Bourne said she now hopes “to be able to forget what happened.”
“Maybe someday I could help people in the same situation,” she said. “Let them know they’re not alone, that they can get out, that people will believe them, give them a lifeline. There’s a future.”