Rabbi Dr. Abraham Twerski ZT”L

There aren’t many people whose name belongs in both a beis medrash and a rehab center — but Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski somehow did it. He brought Chassidus into the language of psychiatry in a way that didn’t sound borrowed or tacked on. It just… fit. If you’ve ever met someone who swears a Twerski book “helped them,” they usually mean it literally, not as a nice figure of speech.

He never spoke down to anyone. Never tried to impress with fancy language either. His writing sounded like a man talking across the table, sleeves rolled up.

Growing Up in Milwaukee

Milwaukee, 1930. Avraham Twerski grew up with Torah everywhere — not just in the bookshelves but in the air of the house. His father, Rabbi Jacob Israel Twerski, ran a shul with a strong chassidish flavor. His mother, Rebbetzin Devorah Leah, was Bobover royalty — a Rebbe’s daughter. The house probably had more seforim than chairs, and still, it wasn’t stifling.

If anything, that world gave him room to shoot higher. He finished high school at sixteen and was already off to Chicago for Hebrew Theological College. By 1951 he had semicha. Helped in his father’s shul. Then came the curveball nobody expected: medical school.

A Chassid in Anatomy Lab

This was not a common thing in the 1950s. A bearded chassid with payos walking into anatomy lab — you can imagine the looks. But he didn’t see a conflict. For him, Torah and psychiatry were not enemies. They could live side by side.

He got into Marquette. By the third year, he was buried in clinical rotations and tuition debt. And then there’s that story he never got tired of telling.

His wife once asked him on the phone, “What would you do if you had $4,000?”
He said something like, “Wouldn’t help — I don’t have it.”
“Well,” she said, “you do now. Danny Thomas just sent a check.”

And yes — that Danny Thomas, the TV comedian who later founded St. Jude. No gala, no big ask, just a plain check in the mail. It didn’t just keep him in school; it changed his whole trajectory.

Pittsburgh and the Gateway Years

After graduating in ’59, he went into psychiatry and landed in Pittsburgh. He wasn’t the kind of doctor who scribbled a script and walked out. He actually listened. You got the sense he could hear the shame behind the words — maybe because he’d been listening to human struggle since his teenage years in the shul.

In 1972, he started Gateway Rehab. It didn’t feel like an “institution.” The place had warmth. People would show up carrying more pain than they knew what to do with — you could almost see it on their faces — and he’d sit with them long enough that little by little, they started talking, letting go of things they’d been holding for years.

That was his style — let people feel like people first, worry about the fixing after.

Writing on the Side — Sixty Times

In between patients and lectures, he somehow found time to write — around sixty books, depending on how you count. These weren’t books you buy and forget about. They went straight at the awkward things no one wanted to say out loud — codependency, feeling worthless, the slow-motion breakdown of family life — the kind of topics most people would rather avoid.

And then there was the Peanuts collaboration — When Do the Good Things Start? He worked with Charles Schulz himself. Schulz once told him, “If I saw what you see in my cartoons, I’d probably stop drawing.” That was Twerski: finding meaning where others just saw gags and handing it back with a grin.

Staying Chassidic

Even with the white coat and the MD after his name, he never stopped being chassidish. He kept halacha and minhagim the way he always had. Quietly wore tzitzis with techeiles — one blue string per corner like the Raavad says. It was private, not performative.

A Life That Kept Giving

That $4,000 story wasn’t about bragging rights. He saw it as proof that one act of generosity can turn a whole story around. And he just kept doing that for other people — not once or twice, but over and over again, for decades.

The Final Years

Rabbi Dr. Twerski was niftar on January 31, 2021, in Yerushalayim, at the age of ninety. His seforim, his lectures, even old shiur recordings — you can still find them, in print or floating around online — and they keep reaching people who never had the chance to meet him. The underlying message he left is simple: life is hard, and that’s normal. He made it clear you didn’t have to choose sides: Torah and psychiatry could work hand in hand together just fine. And he truly believed, that one small kindness could flip a person’s whole story around.