The tragic death of Faigy Meyer, a former Hasidic Jew who plunged to her death in Manhattan last week, is not the norm for people who leave the tightly controlled life of New York’s Hasidim. But feelings of alienation and despair are often difficult to handle for those who leave, and making it on your own is not easy without a great deal of support.
‘I now have to make choices every single day,’ Meyer told a National Geographic documentary. ‘I know that sounds liberating. And it is. But at the same time it is also very scary.
‘It was so challenging, like emotionally, the whole transition. And my parents they were, like, point blank, you have to get out of here, we’re just cutting you off: “We’re not supporting you because you’re not religious.”’
Coming from an environment like this requires a real deep taking stock of what you believe in
Deen knows firsthand how challenging the transition to normal life can be.
‘Coming from an environment like this requires a real deep taking stock of what you believe in,’ he says.
Raised in the Hasidic community of Borough Park, Brooklyn and educated and married at 18 in New Square, a Hasidic village 30 miles north of New York City where only Yiddish is spoken, Deen was judged a heretic at age 30 and forced to leave his wife and five children behind.
His unacceptable behaviour involved listening to the radio, watching TV and using the internet. He secretly topped-up his woeful secular education, which amounted to grade five maths and spelling in the community’s yeshiva, by secretly visiting a library and reading a children’s encyclopaedia.
When he gave encouragement to a young Hasidic man from the village who sought his advice about leaving the community to pursue a college education, Deen was brought in for questioning as a destabilising element.
It is not that the Skver Hasidic community, one of the many Hasidic sects, did not have its attractions to Deen. As a young man, the communal experience of prayers and celebrations often late into the night had an ecstatic quality that forged deep bonds between the young men.
‘There is something very dramatic about the visuals of it,’ he says. ‘There is singing and there is stomping on the floor and dancing along with it.
‘It is a very sensory experience, you hear and you feel … and you are completely enveloped in the that whole experience … that was something that was very transformative as a young teenager.’
The sensuality of the all male celebrations, called ‘the Rebbe’s Tish’ (the spiritual leader’s table) were in high contrast to the sexual repression practised when it came to girls and women, with whom all contact is forbidden. Averting one’s eyes from any girl over the age of 13 was mandatory, even if she was a neighbour you grew up with. Boys were not allowed to walk down the New Square street on which the girls’ school was located.
Sexual repression went hand-in-hand with early arranged marriages. Deen describes the shidduch or arranged meeting with his proposed bride as being the most awkward experience imaginable. After no more than seven minutes of excruciating shyness, the two were pronounced a good match, and the spiritual leader’s blessing was sought.
But nothing—not even the groom instruction session that he was hastily given prior to the wedding—prepared Deen and his bride for the duties of the marriage bed. A midnight phone call to the rabbi instructor was required. Eventually they would have five children in quick succession.
For Deen, the most painful part of leaving the community has been the loss of his children, who were initially allowed to see him as arranged by him and his estranged wife, but were later turned against him by a community that saw him as a corrupting influence rather than as their father.
Deen has no contact with them, was not invited to his two sons’ bar mitzvahs or to his oldest daughter’s wedding two years ago. It is at this point that our conversation slows to a deeply emotional pause.
‘I do have to think what effect this will have on him, and to what degree I was responsible for it, and so I do have a measure of guilt,’ he says.
Shulem Deen is the author of All Who Go Do Not Return, a community activist, a board member of Footsteps, and has a blog, unpious.
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