More than 70 people will be joining the walk in Braddock Park-Bruin Stadium in New Jersey on Sunday, September 18, to honor the memory of an individual whom they knew and loved—Eric Eliezer Levenson, a” h. The 2 1/2 hour event will be duplicated throughout the country and throughout the year by hundreds of thousands of people to raise awareness and funds that allow the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) to invest in new research, create educational programs, advocate for public policy and support survivors of suicide loss.
Eric, a” h, was born to Eta and Mark Levenson on July 4, 1987. He was their first child and the first grandson in the Levenson and Krasna families. Eric grew up in Passaic-Clifton, attended first Hillel Academy and then Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy and graduated from the Sage Day High School in Rochelle Park with top honors. He attended Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where he majored in music and psychology. During college and after his 2010 graduation, he composed numerous original music pieces while working as a counselor at a group home where he helped seriously challenged individuals to the great approbation of his clients and co-workers.
After a 14-year battle with mental illness, Eric succumbed to it on February 4, 2016. His loss reverberated loudly within the West Orange, Clifton/Passaic and Allentown communities and deeply pained the hundreds who had interacted with him so positively throughout his 28 years.
The bereaved family, mother Eta, father Mark, sisters Hadassa and Jessica and brother-in-law David Mirsky, in struggling to bring understanding to their loss, discovered AFSP. “ As our family struggles to bring some understanding to our loss, we looked to AFSP for assistance in dealing with it. When we hear of so many others with different and yet also similar experiences, we realize that this is a national epidemic, and we are committed to bringing both awareness to the problem, and to fight against it,” says Eta Levenson.
Eta Levenson is well entrenched in social services in the New Jersey Jewish community. She has worked as a social worker for more than 35 years. After moving to New Jersey from New York, she worked for the Jewish Family Services in Bergen County after which she served as the Assistant Director of Yachad, the National Jewish Council for Disabilities, for 16 years. For the past 10 years Eta has been an adjunct professor at Rutgers University’s School of Social Work. Her community work includes serving as president of the JFS of Greater Clifton and Passaic, and she is currently Chairperson of MetroWest ABLE. Levenson is the founder and current coordinator of WestOrangeJewishConnectionZ, a consortium of local synagogue chesed committees. Recently, she was appointed to the board of Jewish Service for the Developmentally Disabled (JSDD). No stranger to the many and varied challenges to the Jewish community, Levenson sees hers as well as her family’s mission to “ raise awareness of mental illness within our community, remove the stigma attached to it for the victim as well as the family and be proactive in finding ways to prevent suicides.”
“We need to reassure families that they are not alone in facing this struggle, that nobody in the community is judging them or looking down at them and that they need not be afraid to go to shul, attend community events and hold their heads up high,” urges Levenson.
Father Mark Levenson, a transactional real estate attorney and Jewish communal leader both in New Jersey and nationally, joins Eta in attending AFSP support groups in New Jersey and Manhattan. Daughter Jessica, who resides in Forest Hills with husband David, and works as a junior team leader for a technology and marketing staffing firm, also attends AFSP support groups in Manhattan. Recently, Jessica and David participated in the AFSP Overnight Walk, which began on a Saturday night before the end of Shabbat. In consideration of her and others’religious observance, AFSP was able to arrange for them to join the 16-mile walk in progress after Shabbat. Twenty Orthodox participants took part in that walk. Sister Hadassa resides in Miami where she is a high school math instructor and very active in the Jewish community, including The Tribe, an organization for young, Jewish professionals, which she currently chairs.
In May, Eta initiated a support group in Essex County for parents of children with mental illness. She serves as a peer facilitator at the meetings, which are held twice monthly in private, confidential locations. The rabbis in the area as well as the West Orange chesed consortium have been instrumental in referring families to these support sessions. Levenson is also trying to promote the agenda of mental illness within the Greater MetroWest ABLE which assists families with special needs children.
Other groups that are addressing the issue of suicide within the Jewish community are Elijah’s Journey and a group run out of JFS in Teaneck. Both The Jewish Press and The Jewish Week have run articles recently dealing with personal stories, as has The New York Times.
AFSP’s bold goal is to reduce the suicide rate in the United States 20 percent by 2025. This can be accomplished by raising awareness through the media, community and campus walks, research and advocacy. To learn more visit their website at www.AFSP.org. To learn more about Team Eric, or to join another community walk in the metro-NY area, follow the links to Join Out of the Darkness Walks.
By Pearl Markovitz
