It was a serious and somber Sunday evening at Aish Kodesh in Woodmere, where 30 people sat and listened to a panel discussion called Eating Disorders Among Our Young People. Rabbi Dovid Goldvasser, a leading author and expert on eating disorders in the Jewish community, led the discussion as part of a joint lecture with the Orthodox Union and the men’s and women’s divisions of Lander College. He said the evening was all about “insight and perspective about eating disorders.”

Rabbi Yale Butler, the director of programming at Lander College, said the event was put together “to inform and assist the community in issues of import” and “to sound the alarm and make people aware” about the prevalence and seriousness of eating disorders in the Jewish world.

Goldvasser, who is also the director of the center for Torah initiatives at Lander’s college for women, is the author of 10 books on eating disorders, including “Starving Souls: A Spiritual Guide To Understanding Eating Disorders.” He said that the “alarming, alarming rate” of eating disorders in the Jewish community is the same rate as it is throughout the rest of the world, and eating disorders have become a plague of “epidemic proportions.” The rates of anorexia, bulimia and other disorders are equally common “in every sect of Judaism”, Goldvasser said.

Goldvasser discussed a large number of very surprising statistics that shed some insight into how serious these illnesses are. He said more than half of 13-year-old girls are unhappy with their body images, which spikes to 75 percent at age 18. At least 40 percent of girls between the fourth and sixth grades have tried dieting and that “young girls are more afraid with becoming fat than nuclear war or cancer.”