Haredi community forces women to stay Orthodox or lose their children

New research shows how rabbis and family apply communal and financial pressure to turn women who leave orthodoxy into pariahs.

Beatrice Weber has amazing hair. The thick brown curls that frame the face of this bright-eyed, 49-year-old mother of 10 are hard to miss. But for nearly 20 years, not only were her curls hidden from the world, they were also hidden from herself. Beneath her head covering, her head was shaven, as is the custom in the Hassidic communities she came from.

The decision to let her hair grow free was – both literally and figuratively – a formative step in a journey that led to leaving the community, getting divorced, and fighting to retain custody of her children.

Weber, who today works as an inter-spiritual minister, speaker and coach, was still ultra-Orthodox when she decided to end her marriage. The process began when, following a miscarriage, she found herself depressed. Her then-husband, who was always cold and callous to her, responded by reprimanding her, giving her the cold shoulder, and refusing to let her go to therapy.

“Therapy breaks up marriages – that’s what everyone believed,” Weber explains. She eventually went to therapy, where she started to examine her life in earnest. After three years of therapy, “I started getting angry. It was so clear to me. The minute I allowed myself to experience any emotions, I was able to see so clearly that my marriage was abusive. It was a very big shock to my system, going from thinking that I'm a good wife, the wife of a scholar, to, ‘Oh my gosh I'm in an abusive marriage’.”

Over the next few years, Weber began breaking some of the rules in her US east coast community. She went to college, started working, and took up writing. In response to these changes, her family sent her to a different therapist who diagnosed her as bipolar and put her on medication – a decision that would ultimately become fateful later, during her divorce.

Today, nearly 10 years after she began divorce proceedings, she is still locked in a custody battle over six of her children.

Weber is not alone. The tactics that the community used to discredit her – casting her as mentally unstable, ostracizing her, and demanding the courts deprive her of custody of her children – are familiar in divorcing ultra-Orthodox or Hasidic couples when one of the parents begins to question the lifestyle.  

According to Miriam Moster, a doctoral student of sociology at City University of New York, who is doing research on what happens in divorce cases in the ultra-Orthodox community when one person becomes non-religious – or “OTD” (off the derech, the path) – Weber’s experience is not uncommon.

Moster’s research, based on qualitative interviews with 24 formerly Haredi divorcees, found that when someone leaves the community, they are often punished, including by losing custody of their children.

“What the data shows is that in an enclave economy such as ultra-Orthodoxy, in which a person’s whole life is tied up in the community, leaving means losing out on all connections and crutches,” Moster says, “and that can have devastating effects, especially for women.

“A woman’s money is often tied up in the community, and she may not even have access to it. Even if she works, in the Hasidic community the money may go to her husband’s bank account, that she may not have access to.”

Although Moster has interviewed both women and men, she found that while there are many similarities in their experiences, there is a significant difference in what drives them to leave. “With men, the impetus for leaving is usually a religious crisis. That is, they stop wanting to be Haredi, and then everything else falls apart from there.

“But women often leave [marriages] when they are still religious and want to stay [in the community]. They mostly leave because of abuse – and then become non-religious later, following the trauma of not being able to leave what was usually a very bad situation. The lack of support, the pressures to stay in a bad marriage, and systemic abuse, all turn them off.

“The whole process leaves them without a place in society. In fact, women are less likely to want to leave the security of the community – for themselves as well as for their children. And women are usually more vulnerable, and less financially able to leave.

“But with men, abuse is usually not the issue. It’s usually ideological. In terms of becoming non-religious, for men that often precipitates leaving the marriage, whereas for women, it’s the other way around.”

That was the case with US author and activist Shulem Deen, who grew up in Brooklyn’s Boro Park, the largest ultra-Orthodox community in America.  Deen chronicles his story of religious doubts, communal exit, divorce, and losing his children in his memoir, All Who Go Do Not Return (2015).

Similarly, Chavi Weissberger, from New York, who initially lost custody in her divorce when it was discovered that she was gay (but later was awarded custody), has said, “I was still religious at the time.” She was so trusting of her community that she signed an agreement without any of her own legal representation – not knowing that it had a dangerous clause in it.

That clause, which stipulates that if one of the parties becomes non-religious, they will lose custody, is one of the secret weapons used against people who are leaving. Some Haredi organisations, like Brooklyn-based Yashar, claiming to promote marriage and divorce, use this kind of clause in pre-nuptial agreements to lawfully ostracise and punish non-conforming parents.

The social and economic pressure and threats against people who leave the community – ostracism, being cast as mentally ill and punished via losing custody – are applied to both women and men. “One of the men I interviewed said that even when he was just contemplating leaving, his rabbi threatened that he would lose his children if he did,” Moster says. “So that goes all ways.”

But women are often particularly vulnerable because of their lack of economic resources – as  Weissberger was because she did not have a lawyer. Another American woman, who I’ll call Aliza, left the Hasidic community due to her treatment after leaving her abusive husband, who beat her and her children and raped her. She is now is in danger of losing custody of her children.  

She says she experienced “a campaign of intimidation, harassment, and worse” by her husband and community leaders, and now “has gone deep into debt to protect herself and her children.” The community raised money for lawyers for her husband, and she “cannot compete with his lawyer and the amount of backup he has.” 

The lack of financial resources adds layers to her vulnerabilities. “Your case is only as good as your lawyer,” adds Moster, who founded an organisation called Right to Parent to help OTD parents in the process of divorce. 

This process of weaponising people’s vulnerabilities, which may start early, before the person even knows where they are headed, can be very painful. “Sometimes, when a person first goes to their rabbi seeking guidance with their problems, that very rabbi will be the one who starts with the threats and ostracising,” Moster says.

Communal rabbis often lead the charge against the non-conforming spouse, in what Moster calls “communal abuse”. Aliza, for example, finally escaped from her husband to a domestic abuse shelter, and her husband was arrested for domestic abuse. But the leaders in her community, her family, and her husband’s attorney intervened: They brought her to a synagogue, where they engaged in a campaign of intimidation.

“My father pressured me not to get a restraining order,” she recalled. “My husband’s attorney threatened me, saying that if I got the restraining order, he would ‘fry you like a fish on the stand.’ The rabbi said that he and his wife are in charge of all the foster care in the area, and he would make sure that I end up in a mental institution and my kids would be taken away from me forever.”

Even people’s own families will often turn on the person who is leaving. This happened to Weber. “My father, my brother-in-law, my son in law, and all my kids came to court support my ex,” she says. “That was quite shocking.”

The issue of being labelled mentally ill, which happened to both Weber and Aliza, is widespread. According to Moster, the non-conforming parent is usually not punished for being “non-religious” but is framed as mentally ill, unstable, an unfit parent.  “People who are OTD are often branded as mentally unstable, and that’s all they need to lose custody.”

Beth Alexander, a British woman who lost custody of her twins to her abusive, Haredi ex-husband, suffered greatly due to being falsely branded as mentally ill, which was used as the excuse to deprive her of all custodial and even visitation rights.

Aliza’s husband has been convicted of multiple counts of child abuse – and yet she is still fighting for custody. His lawyers put in a motion for a previously unheard of “reunification bootcamp” which would allow the abusive father uninterrupted access to the children.

According to Footsteps, an organisation that helps ex-Hasidic Jews integrate into society, this is a new strategy employed by Hasidic leaders, and has led to parents losing custody of their children. A judge is currently considering the request.

In the Haredi community, even the slightest transgression can be used to taint people as OTD and hence mentally ill and unfit parents – such as a woman who wears the wrong colour tights or is found speaking to a man. “My mother was supportive when I wanted to go to college,” Weber says, even though women in her family were not supposed to do that. “But when I said that I wanted to get an advanced degree, that was when she switched.”

The question is why the Haredi community works this hard and often throws so much money at divorce cases involving someone who is OTD? One reason may be the obsessive need to stay insular and protect the community practices from outside scrutiny. The recent outcry following the New York Times expose about corruption and illiteracy in ultra-Orthodox New York schools is perhaps a cautionary tale about the potential impact of exposure on the community.

“In the enclave economy,” Moster says, “everyone and everything are connected – economically, politically, socially,” a point starkly illustrated by the New York Times. “If one falls, the entire system can fall. Divorce involving someone who is a free outsider can threaten to expose the entire system, and it seems that there are those who have financial and political interests to keep that from happening.”

Illustration: Avi Katz