Anonymity

I didn’t go undercover.

This has to be said out loud, because everyone who reads “journalist” plus “a year inside” will silently assume undercover, and undercover carries a whiff of exploitation. This is a true story of lived experience from the “inside” as a resident with nothing to sell and no exit strategy, which is why the material is deeper than any embed could produce. The craft came later, when I sat down to render it.

About the author

Rabin Stone

Rabin Stone writes literary memoir exploring survival, poverty, faith, motherhood, and institutional life.

Beginning during the COVID pandemic, she spent a year in unsheltered homelessness and the following year inside a high-control Christian residential recovery program. There, she kept Shabbat and kosher, completed the annual cycle of Torah readings, and finished six hundred hours of structured coursework in addiction recovery, trauma, grief, boundaries, and related behavioral health subjects, along with one hundred fourteen hours of one-on-one therapy.

She later held director-level responsibility in survivor services, drawing on lived experience to develop programming for survivors of human trafficking, sexual assault, domestic violence, and stalking. Her work served people of all genders, along with their children and pets.

ANONYMITY: A Year Inside a Christian Recovery Program is her debut and the first book in the Anonymity Trilogy, followed by UNSHELTERED: A Year Inside Homelessness and RECIDIVISM: A Year Inside Human Trafficking.

Stone writes under a pen name to protect the privacy of her children and the lives that intersect these stories.

The book

She was not an addict. She was a Jewish mother who had lost her home, her business, and physical custody of her children during the COVID pandemic. After a year of unsheltered homelessness, she signed away another year of her life for a bed inside a high-control Christian residential recovery program.

Her children were on the other side of that year. So she stayed.

As sermons echoed through the building, she held on to a Jewish life the institution could neither understand nor absorb. She studied Torah, kept Shabbat, kept kosher, and counted the days until she could be reunited with her children. Every act of faith became an act of resistance.

Christian rescue had its own vocabulary. The women became students when the institution needed a fundraising success story, residents when it demanded obedience, and volunteers when it needed free labor.

Then antisemitism and violence erupted inside the house. The program's first instinct was not to protect the harmed, but to control the story.

ANONYMITY is an unflinching literary memoir and a fierce institutional critique of what happens when public systems outsource rescue to religious organizations that make shelter conditional on obedience, labor, and belief. At its heart, it is the story of a Jewish mother who refused assimilation, even when survival demanded almost everything else.

Why this book

How did she hold on?

Most contemporary Jewish memoirs trace a journey away from religious observance. Away from Orthodoxy, away from inherited tradition, or away from faith altogether. ANONYMITY reverses that arc. It is not the story of someone escaping Judaism. It is the story of someone fighting to remain Jewish while living inside an institution determined to absorb her into a different religious worldview.

That inversion is rare. The tension is not between belief and unbelief. It is between survival and religious continuity. Whether Judaism is true or meaningful was already settled for me. The conflict is whether I can preserve my Jewish identity when every institutional incentive pushes toward assimilation.

Most faith memoirs are conversion stories or deconstruction stories. This one is neither. It is a story of religious endurance.

Speaking and panels

She has run the programs, and she has needed them.

Rabin Stone speaks on shelter, poverty, trafficking, and institutional care from both sides of the intake desk. She is available for keynotes, panels, university lectures, staff training, festivals, and broadcast.

Background

• Director-level responsibility in survivor services, developing programming for survivors of human trafficking, sexual assault, domestic violence, and stalking, serving people of all genders along with their children and pets.
• A year of unsheltered homelessness beginning during the COVID pandemic.
• A year inside a high-control Christian residential recovery program, keeping Shabbat and kosher and completing the annual cycle of Torah readings.
• Six hundred hours of structured coursework in addiction recovery, trauma, grief, boundaries, and related behavioral health subjects, and one hundred fourteen hours of one-on-one therapy.
• Author of the Anonymity Trilogy, published by Vagabond Compass Media.

Topics

• Faith that comes with conditions

  What it is to keep a Jewish life inside Christian rescue culture, and what institutions ask people to surrender in exchange for a bed.

• The myths of homelessness

  Employment, business ownership, and professional work are not protection. Why the public picture of who becomes homeless is wrong.

• Poverty that arrives before you do

  Generational housing insecurity, and the policies and bureaucracies that keep families cycling through instability.

• What trafficking actually looks like

  The many forms it takes, the misconceptions that follow survivors, and why the public narrative fails the people inside it.

• Building zero barrier programs

  Designing services that serve every gender, their children, and their pets, and that measure success in stable housing.

• Writing from inside closed worlds

  Memoir, observation, and the ethics of telling a story that belongs partly to other people.