"That's when I realized that if I stayed there," Rachel, now 17, recalls, "this is where my life would be going."

The road to rehabilitation proved long and arduous for Rachel, who discovered marijuana the summer before she entered seventh grade. When she began to smoke regularly, her life started unraveling.

"It was like a disease," she notes. "Drugs overcame my entire being. I didn't show up to my sister's birthday party because I was too busy getting high. I stopped going to school, and I was so high that I couldn't stay awake the few times I did go. I dropped 65 pounds in six months. I was depressed, anxious, and I couldn't sleep."

Rachel found valuable help through Jewish Alcoholics, Chemically Dependent Persons, and Significant Others (JACS), a program of the Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services in New York. "It was about changing my entire life," she explains. "I had to get new friends, hang out in new places, and do new things.

Today, Rachel has restored ties with her family, is enrolled in college, and hopes to visit Israel for the first time. "Today, I have so many opportunities because I stopped taking drugs," she notes. "My life was so limited back then. I was paralyzed by my addiction. Today I'm free."

What can she tell kids who feel they can never change their bad habits? "I'd probably tell them the same thing that people told me," Rachel responds. "They do have beh.irah. They do have a choice."

"It was like opening an inner dimension,"he recalls. "I felt it was telling me something about myself."

"Fluent in 13 languages, Natan understood the nuances of the spoken word; yet Hebrew touched him like no other foreign language had. After receiving a full scholarship to Hebrew University, the African prince left his country for Israel."

"I began to discover the beauty of Judaism," he says. "But it was frustrating. I couldn't understand why someone like me, who wasn't Jewish, had such a thirst and love for Judaism."

To escape his growing attachment to Judaism, he decided to visit Rome, the center of his Catholic faith. Surprisingly, he felt an urge to recite the Shema in his hotel room near St. Peter's Basilica. "To this day," he says, "I can't explain what happened there. It was a frightening and powerful experience."

Later, Natan sat down to breakfast but discovered he could not eat. He checked his calendar and discovered that it was Yom Kippur. At that moment, he decided to convert to Judaism.

"I knew the road was going to be extremely difficult," he admits. "Wherever I'd go in the Jewish community, I'd stick out like a sore thumb. But I was confident I was doing the right thing."

Despite their initial shock, Natan's parents supported his decision. "I was brought up in a home that emphasized independent thinking and self-reliance," he explains. "My choice was an outgrowth of this upbringing. How could they oppose it?"

Today, Natan is a rabbi in Israel, where he lives with his wife and two children. He understands his conversion as a way to spread God's glory. "For many people," he explains, "seeing a black Orthodox rabbi hits a chord. It opens people's eyes to the universality of Judaism."