Recommendations

We live in a small town in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming. Our daughter has dreamed about attending an Ivy League school since she was a child. She finished her undergraduate work in a small school in Oregon, traveled to Guatemala for an agricultural internship, then returned home to Wyoming to choose the next steps in her life.

She decided to pursue a master’s degree in urban planning, and Columbia University was on her mind. My husband and I have always encouraged our children to follow their dreams. But we did wonder if the prestigious urban studies department at an Ivy League school might be out of reach for a young lady raised in America’s least populated state.

Rabbi Harry Levin did not have any doubts. True to his nature, Rabbi Levin energetically began prepping our daughter for her GRE, and counseling her on staying true to her goals. Rabbi Levin found articles and books written from varied angles of urban planning vision, so our daughter might deepen her understanding and commitment to this path she had chosen. He encouraged her to believe that she has unique qualities that enable her to achieve her ambitions. He became her editor, her mentor, her confidant.

Last year, our daughter received her master’s degree in urban planning from Columbia. We drove from Wyoming to New York City for the graduation. Completing her first year of challenging work in Salt Lake City, in an urban planning project of national stature, she was chosen to make a major presentation to the mayor.

Rabbi Levin continues to support and encourage our daughter on every level.

Retha New
Lander, Wyoming

“For four decades, I have been impressed with Rabbi Harry Levin’s caring, thoughtfulness, and intellect. Whatever issue might arise in life, a discussion with Rabbi Levin will no doubt shed light on the problem and probably go a long way towards its resolution.

Rabbi Levin’s sagacity. His ability to objectify a situation and see many sides of an issue, his sense of fairness, his unassailable integrity and moral rectitude, all serve to ease difficult situations which might otherwise overwhelm the human heart.

Rabbi Levin offers his sage counsel with a calming tone and presentation.

Simultaneously, Rabbi Harry Levin educates while offering words of support.”

Michael Graime
Retired Sports Executive

“Rabbi Harry Levin is a unique human being. He combines important qualities which are crucial in all therapeutic work: high intelligence, an obvious ethical-moral compass, which drives him to contribute to society, a sensitivity to aching hearts in difficult times. He pursues his caring for people with an intense work ethic and tremendous problem solving skills.

Rabbi Levin has been recognized for his excellence in serving human beings in need. He has earned various awards for his work in human relations, including the annual human rights achievement award given by the city of Albany, New York, and the Campbell Peace and Justice Award from the New York State Capital District Council of Churches. The NAACP honored Rabbi Levin for “your efforts and willingness to impart to others your knowledge and experience, so that we in turn can better serve our community.”

In the harsh times of 9/11, Rabbi Levin spoke to thousands in churches, in the parks of Fair Haven and Rumson, and from the balcony of the Fair Haven fire department. Rabbi Harry Levin has been honored by New York University for standing strong for his colleagues in applied psychology.

For decades, Rabbi Levin has devoted himself to helping others in a variety of settings. He was director of a hospice in rural Wyoming, helping terminally ill individuals and their families. In upstate New York, Rabbi Levin established Care Links, an interfaith volunteer caregivers project which helped individuals after their releases from the hospital.

Rabbi Harry Levin is a superb counselor in critical moments of transition in human lives. He is also a proven fierce advocate for his clients.

Rabbi Harry Levin guides individuals and families in solving insoluble problems.”

Rabbi Dr. Norman Cohen
Professor and Provost Emeritus
Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion

” Rabbi Harry Levin is a compassionate and thoughtful man of great integrity. He is very well qualified to guide individuals, families, and other social groups in times of crisis. My deep confidence in Rabbi Levin comes from twenty-five years of observing his actions and supervising his progress.

The land itself means a great deal to Rabbi Levin. As a young man he worked his way into the heart of a Greek village, digging wells by hand. He has been working his own hay ranch in Wyoming for thirty years. In Wyoming, he immersed himself in the cultures of the Shoshone and Arapaho tribes, and he has been involved in trying to sustain tribal traditions. Rabbi Harry Levin appreciates ethnicity and the many gradations of color. He is the only rabbi I know who has co-hosted a regularly scheduled radio show with an imam.

Rabbi Levin loves the blues, but he does not sing the blues. He is unrelentingly optimistic. For decades he has graced the gritty and the glamorous streets of the Big Apple on various altruistic errands. Back in rabbinical school, he joined in organizing a downtown soup kitchen, which these days, building on his work among musicians, now serves hot jazz with a hot meal.

Visiting the sick is one of his specialties. He knows where all the hospitals are and he is not intimidated by doctors.

If you believe the measure of a man’s character is how he walks through this world, you will be very impressed by Rabbi Harry Levin. If you come to him, Rabbi Levin will do his best to help you and your family. His accomplishments have been an inspiration to me and his friendship is a profound blessing.”

Richard A. Biagioli, Ph.D.
NJ Licensed Psychologist

“A life in the creative arts requires certain life decisions that are tough. How can a creative person sustain the vulnerability necessary to feel the world, and yet choose a discipline which can shut the world out? The mind of the creative personality is oftentimes rife with issues which prevent personal happiness.

Through my twelve years of knowing Rabbi Harry Levin, he has exhibited time and time again a remarkable capacity for untangling the knots of life, and then guiding creative minds past crisis, toward productivity and peace. With years of experience in counseling, an overriding compassionate nature, and a strong moral center informing his therapies, Rabbi Levin is able to distill the harsh challenges of living to their understandable elements.

I have witnessed Rabbi Levin’s work with children and teens in crisis, and find his results extraordinary, as he gently guides young people with a fatherly touch and his own fertile mind.

Rabbi Harry Levin helps people come to grips with behaviors that may be preventing them from finding a path to move forward.”

Janis Siegel
Winner of Nine Grammy Awards
Professional Musician for Forty-Five Years

“Rabbi Harry Levin has a deep understanding of the developmental needs and concerns of teenagers, and an insightful affinity for the relationships between adolescents and their families. Rabbi Harry Levin has provided individual and group therapy for families in crisis. He has worked in residential settings, where he deepened his understanding of teens coming from broken homes. 

Rabbi Harry Levin understands the special needs of teenagers from the inside out. Rabbi Harry Levin works closely with collateral contacts. This means that with ethical precision he communicates with sources whose information can refine and enhance progress in the therapeutic relationship. He is comfortable at the interface of treatment and the courts.”

Richard A. Biagioli, Ph.D.
NJ Licensed Psychologist

“ ‘How are you, young lady,’ ” was always the warm and enthusiastic greeting for my aging mother-in-law when Rabbi Levin came to call. On his visits to our home, her ninety year-old smile was immediate, and she would always recognize him—and they would talk. Harry could penetrate the fog of her dementia and reach her spirit in ways that even some of her family could not. He just knew how.”

Charles Smith
Retired School Counselor
Inducted Into Education Hall of Fame, Lander, Wyoming

“We observed no religion, we had no obvious community beyond our families and careers. But when my beloved husband of 38 years faced his last weeks and we prepared together for his dying days and his funeral, we knew where to turn for counsel and closure, because, through our closest friends, we knew Rabbi Harry Levin. We had heard Rabbi Levin speak during High Holy Days and at eulogies; we got to see him in informal settings. And though we did not lead conventional Jewish lives in any sense, we wanted a thoroughly decent, thoughtful passionate and eloquent individual to preside over the funeral and deliver the eulogy and knew we wanted Rabbi Levin to lead us in our journey. Despite his extraordinary schedule he made the time to help us all in more ways than we could have anticipated or hoped, in ways that reverberate beyond the year of our mourning to this day.

Rabbi’s way of working in these instances is to conduct deep interviews with family members and close friends and the dying person, if at all possible. In our case, these interviews took place over the course of a month, sometimes individually, often in small groups of close family with my husband present. Though they were ostensibly preparation for the eulogy, his visits became a highlight in our lives, something we, and Jack above all, anticipated as nothing else in those final weeks. Facilitated by stories, pictures and other mementos, the Rabbi’s questions and observations inspired surprising revelations and crucial conversations—and some crying but much more laughter—and, surprisingly, moments of joy. I know now that they were therapeutic for all of us at a time when we most needed catharsis, clarity, comfort, and ritual. That they led to an astonishingly rich tribute to Jack that we will treasure forever almost seemed beyond the point.

It is not the Rabbi’s way to part ways with the mourning family after the funeral or shiva, when the real work of mourning and healing needs to begin. A wonderful human being and a gifted psychotherapist, Rabbi Levin stayed in touch with our family after the funeral, visiting with me and our one daughter and her new baby, born days after Jack’s death, going out of his way to visit another daughter in New Mexico. With warmth, humor, and deep understanding and acceptance of human needs, motives and yearnings, he has stayed in our lives and earned a special place there. I know that he has performed this very same service for countless, diverse others whose paths have crossed his, to the same wondrous effect.”

Dr. Vita Carulli Rabinowitz
Social Psychologist
Executive Vice Chancellor,
City Universities of New York