Mikvah Lady is Also Chaplain

By COLlive reporter

Timmy Rubin, Australia’s only Jewish female prison chaplain, has visited too many Israeli inmates over the last two decades, Haaretz reports in a profile article.

“Most Israelis who get into trouble, it’s drug-related,” says the Melbourne-born Lubavitcher about the many Israelis who end up behind bars due to Australia’s strict drug laws (with a an estimated budget of $2 billion a year).

Each week, for the last 19 years, she’s visited Jews in Australian prisons, including many Israelis, often bringing them healthy doses of festive foods. Her estimate is that up to 50 Israelis and some 500 Jews have been imprisoned since she started.

An Israeli couple from Rehovot was busted and jailed in 2011 on drug charges (they claim it was an aromatic product) are are now out on bail, thanks to Rubin, reports Dan Goldberg.

“We don’t have any family or friends, Timmy saved us,” said the Israeli woman, who goes to Rubin’s house for Shabbos and festivals. Her husband added: “She is an angel. I don’t know how we’d get through it without her. They are like a family for us, our only family.”

What’s even more interesting about Rubin, in addition to her work with prisoners, is her background as a hippie and her current work as a mikvah lady.

The daughter of a Kindertransport survivor from Germany, Rubin was “a typical Jewish baby boomer” in Melbourne who lived on Kibbutz Rosh Hanikra with a Habonim group for a year in the mid-1970s.

About a decade later, she was at a full moon party on the beach at Goa in India when she had a realization. Her spiritual quest took her to New York, where she learned in Machon Chana in Crown Heights for a year and married a Jewish psychologist from Ohio.

When she isn’t helping prisoners, Rubin can be found running the Chaya Mushka Schneerson Mikvah in Melbourne, better known to insiders as “Timmy’s Mikvah.”

Her dedicated and hours-long work was inspired by the Rebbe, she told Haaretz.

“He gave me incredibly special attention,” she said. “I guess I was green and I talked back. He said every Jewish soul, no matter who they are or what they’ve done, they need to be visited by somebody from the Jewish community.”