Mimi Silbert’s family gathers around large tables each Passover in San Francisco to retell the story of the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt.  In Mimi’s home, renditions of “Go Down Moses” might be sung by a group of black men, and a rabbi or two from the community might attend.  Mimi’s family is dressed in spotless clothes donated by the Fishers, another San Francisco family who founded The GAP clothing chain.  The seder plate is set according to the instructions of Mimi’s mother, and everything from the matzo balls to the dessert is a memory of the Eastern European food she grew up with.  But Mimi’s family is counted in hundreds tonight   Her family are the former drug addicts, gang members, prostitutes, pimps and felons – the residents of Delancey Street, an educational rehabilitation facility founded by Mimi Silbert, 41 years ago .

With a Ph.D. in Criminology and a few years as prison psychologist, Dr. Mimi Silbert, threw out all the rule books, all the studies on psychotherapy and drug rehabilitation, and believed with the conviction that one gains from growing up in a poor extended family - -Yiddish speaking and living with three generations in one tenement flat on the Lower East Side of New York, that when people work together, are taught to love themselves and others, are educated, and trained in a vocation, and when they are treated with dignity, what Mimi calls, “the Harvard of the underclass – the bottom 2% of society,”  can live together and move from a life of despair to a life of hope.  During a brief stay on a Kibbutz in Israel when she was 8 years old she noticed, even as a child, that the survival of an autonomous community could only be achieved when everyone’s contribution was necessary for survival, “where real values matter and you stand together for them…it never left me.”

Her petite frame and her self-called Dolly Parton hairstyle bely the charisma, courage, and craziness with which she tells the stories of her Jewish roots and values to her visitors at the Delancey Street Restaurant—bouncing around the dining room with street language acquired from decades of living with ex-convicts.  Mimi tells about the creation of Delancey Street, an organization lauded with countless awards and recognized as the most successful rehabilitation facility in the world.  Dr. Silbert doesn’t mention that she is the recipient of 11 honorary doctorates, one of the most recent bestowed in May 2010 by Ben-Gurion University in Israel, named by The League of Women Voters as “The Woman Who Could be President” and the subject of Robert Redford’s documentary film, “The New Heroes,” and more articles, interviews, and appearances than could possibly be counted.

The story of Passover is Mimi’s metaphor for the rehabilitation of people that no one in society wants. Many are third generation gang members, their bodies covered in tattooed Swastikas and neo-Nazi epithets.  It’s the story she tells the men and women who live in the dormitories on the 10 million dollar campus built by Mimi and the residents without government money or professional builders, using funds borrowed on an unsecured loan and a handshake with Bank of America.  She describes Delancey Street as built on “the kibbutz model at its purest form – where each person is responsible for another.”

Her seder tells of the Parting of the Red Sea – when the Israelites stepped into the water and began to walk.  One foot in front of the other, deeper into the sea, with only faith that God would intervene and bring them to freedom.  Only when the powerless take a risk, she explains, will anything good happen.

The seder continues with the return of a Delancey Street graduate invited to tell his or her story of what it feels like to be free – of addiction, abuse, hopelessness, violence, and ignorance.  And then the seder concludes with Mimi’s rendition of the Jewish mystical story of the Lamed Vad-nicks.  The gematria of the Hebrew letters lamed and vav is 36, she tells the gathered.  As long as there are 36 compassionate, decent, people caring about others, God-will not destroy the world.  Since no one knows who these 36 are, not even the Lamed Vad-nicks themselves, all humanity must live as righteous people and act as if they are one of the thirty-six.