Outwardly, she was still a good girl. She worked at a community magazine, she was involved with the PTA. But she must have had some kind of air about her, because people started confiding their own weird stuff. This one wished she could wear shorter skirts; that one wanted to go to the movies. Some women were meeting strangers they had found on Craigslist. One day, she heard her co-workers gossiping about a woman named Chani Getter. Chani was a little older, but Chavie knew who she was—she had grown up on the next block. Someone said, Did you hear? Chani is a lesbian now, and she’s running crazy wild retreats for lesbians, and she takes her kids there. The co-workers were horrified, but Chavie went home, Googled Chani Getter, and called her.
Marie was an Army brat—she grew up half in Germany, half in the U.S. (“Marie” is a pseudonym.) Her father was a Christian, an American soldier; her mother came from a Haredi German family. Neither was religious, and they celebrated holidays in an irregular fashion—a bit of Hanukkah, a bit of Christmas. When Marie was a child, her mother told her stories about growing up Haredi, and the one that stuck in her head was about how if she used the wrong fork and made it un-kosher she had to go outside and thrust it into the ground, and sometimes it was so cold and the ground so hard that it was difficult. At the time, Marie thought this sounded crazy—something that only bizarre, mean parents would force their children to do—and certainly her mother was very bitter about her religious upbringing. But, as Marie grew older, her mother’s stories piqued her interest. She was looking for a way of life that was more spiritual and structured than the way she’d grown up, and, after moving every three years from place to place and country to country, she wanted a community to belong to. By the time her parents settled in Killeen, Texas, near Fort Hood, when she was in high school, she had found herself wanting to become Orthodox.
She couldn’t force her family to keep kosher, so she ate vegetarian. She babysat and mowed lawns in order to earn money to buy an extra set of dishes, so they wouldn’t be tainted by her family’s non-kosher food. She stopped wearing pants. Her mother was appalled; she said that Marie was spitting on her family’s way of life. Eventually, this caused so much strain that Marie went to live with a religious friend she knew from her synagogue. After graduating from high school, she went to Baylor to study premed.
While she was in college, Marie met a rabbi from Monsey. He told her that in Monsey there were men who were a little older than she but still unmarried because for some reason they weren’t considered a catch. If she wanted to marry a Haredi man, he said, she should look for a man like that, because with her dubious religious background she wasn’t a catch, either. It took her a while to get used to the idea of marrying a man she didn’t know, but she believed that she should trust God without questioning, so she did. She met a twenty-seven-year-old man in a religious chat room, and left college to marry him in the fall of 2001.
When Marie first arrived in Monsey, it felt wonderful to her to be in a place where nobody thought she was strange for being religious. There were kosher stores everywhere, lots of people were modestly dressed. People in the community spoke Yiddish, but Marie understood them because she spoke German. Early on, a woman walking near her on the street grabbed her shirt and yanked her over to let a man pass by, so that he wouldn’t have to walk behind or between them, and that startled her, but she told herself that she was new to this, and there were bound to be customs she didn’t know about.
The marriage, though, was difficult from the start. She wanted to go back to college—she still hoped to become a doctor—but she was scolded for trying to overthrow her husband. (Marie’s husband, too, declined to be interviewed.) She saw that as a bride she had not received the same kinds of gifts as other daughters-in-law; her husband told her that she should be grateful that his family took her in after the way she had been raised, like an animal in a zoo.
When she and her husband had their first child, a daughter, she became absorbed in being a mother and felt happier. A couple of years later, they had a son. But the marriage grew worse. Her husband controlled the household money, and told her that in order for him to give her some, even to buy basic items such as sanitary napkins, she had to deserve it. He called her names, and when their daughter was around six or seven he started calling her names, too—ugly, fat, stupid. Finally, in 2012, they went to the beis din to get a divorce. She got custody of the children; he was to see them for dinner a couple of times a week and every other Shabbos.
After her husband moved out, Marie began seeking out family and old friends. Before she had kids, she had been estranged from her parents, but now they travelled from Texas to visit her. Her family knew that she hadn’t had a minute to herself during the more than ten years that she was married, so they gathered together some money and told her to take a vacation. One of the friends Marie reconnected with was an Indian-Jewish woman whom she’d met in college and who had moved back home afterward, and this friend invited her to visit. Marie arranged for the kids to stay with a family in Monsey for two weeks and bought a ticket to India.
Issac was born in Borough Park, Brooklyn, the ninth of ten children, in what would become the Bobov-45 group. (Issac is not the name he usually goes by.) His father was exceptionally devout and rigid about rule-keeping, but Issac was always getting into trouble. When a teacher hit him, he called the Fire Department. When one of the school principals made him angry, he squirted ketchup and mustard all over all the principals’ lunches. He was bullied by the other kids. When he prayed, he tried to feel a connection to God, but it never worked. Mostly, praying meant nothing to him. His father was always telling him stories about people burning in Hell, and those would frighten him for a while, but then it wore off. He didn’t doubt the existence of God, exactly; he didn’t have a strong belief one way or the other.
He was sent to sleepaway camp for the first time when he was nine or ten. On visiting day his father came to see him, and while the other parents played games, or took their kids out boating, Issac’s father took him into the empty shul and said, Let’s review what you have studied these past two weeks. The summer that Issac was fifteen, he had a rough week at camp and decided to kill himself. Luckily, he didn’t know how to do it—he took forty Benadryl pills and went to bed. The camp nurse gave him water the next day to flush his system, but apart from that no one did much; mental illness tended to be hushed up, because it could affect the marriage prospects of everyone in the family. Issac didn’t see a therapist until about six months later, and that was to deal with attention deficit disorder. He was advised to tell nobody about the therapy, not even his brothers and sisters.
When Issac turned eighteen, in 2006, it came time for him to marry, and matchmakers started getting in touch. Normally, a person had only one shidduch—one match. Eight of Issac’s nine siblings married the first person they met, but Issac met five girls, and five times he was rejected. Part of the problem might have been that he wasn’t a yeshiva boy anymore—he worked in an office-supply store—and having a job was less prestigious. One matchmaker told him that she’d fibbed on his behalf, saying that he learned with a study partner every night, but it made no difference. He was told that one girl rejected him because he talked too much. By the time a matchmaker suggested a sixth girl, he no longer gave a shit. He agreed to go through with the meeting only to pacify his father. The matchmaker didn’t know him or the girl personally—presumably, she had picked a girl for her failings, to go with his.
His father mentioned the girl one day when he got home from work, and Issac drove up to Monsey to meet her. He was done trying to make himself look good—he thought, Let’s just get through this and go home. But he liked her. She was devout, but not stiff or judgmental. She was very attractive. She had had a difficult childhood and wasn’t living with her family. They talked for about an hour, and, fifteen minutes after Issac left, the matchmaker called both of them and told each that the other wanted to meet again, although in fact neither had said anything about it. They met the following afternoon, and then a third time. At this point, Issac had begun to think that something might actually come of it, so they talked seriously for four or five hours. He asked the girl, Faigy (a pseudonym), if she had any questions for him, and she fetched a list she’d drawn up. Faigy told him about her childhood, and he asked her if she was in therapy. She admitted that she was. Issac told her, “If you weren’t, there is no way I would consider this.” She said, “I want to marry you.”
The first year of their marriage was easy. His wife was the opposite of his parents, he thought—she never told him what to do. He felt that life with his parents had been a constant struggle, and now the struggle was over. Nine and a half months after their wedding, he and Faigy had a daughter. But being happily married to a religious woman didn’t change Issac’s feelings about religion, and, left to his own devices, his observance started to slip. He still did the basics, showing his face in shul when he had to, but he wasn’t praying every day.
Everything changed when his daughter, the summer before preschool, was rejected by the Bobov yeshiva because, he and Faigy were told, Faigy, who had been brought up in a community with slightly different rules, drove a car. He and Faigy had been pleading with the school for months, and finally they asked for a meeting with the grand rabbi in Borough Park. The rabbi didn’t understand why Faigy insisted on driving. Couldn’t she give it up for the sake of her children? Issac said that maybe the Bobov school was the best school, maybe it wasn’t, but he wasn’t willing to chain up his wife to find out. Afterward, as he and Faigy walked away, down Fiftieth Street, he didn’t feel angry; he felt peaceful. He said to Faigy, “It’s over—the book is closed on Bobov.”
The next day, he realized that he was done with more than the school. He said to Faigy, “If I don’t have to follow the rules for the yeshiva, then why do I need to follow them at all?” He told her, “I think I can keep Shabbos, I think I can keep kosher, but beyond that I’m not sure.” This was intensely painful for Faigy, who was deeply pious. Issac had been untethered from religion inside his head for a long time, but to her it felt as though everything she knew about her family had suddenly exploded into pieces.
Up to this point, whatever Issac had done or not done at home was between him and Faigy. Outside the house, he still looked and behaved more or less like a religious man. But now he felt an urge to go to the barber and have his beard shaved and his payos—sidelocks—cut off. At that point, his apostasy would become irretrievably public. He wanted to do it right away, but he decided to think about it, to make sure that he would have no regrets. So he set a calendar reminder in his phone for four weeks from that day, to give himself a chance to change his mind.
Chavie had been afraid to talk to such a wild-sounding person as Chani Getter, but on the phone Chani was very friendly. She invited Chavie to attend a retreat for L.G.B.T.Q. Orthodox Jews. At the retreat, Chavie was asked to speak about herself, and she saw that people were moved by what she said, and she thought, This is real, this is actually who I am. At the retreat, she met many queer parents who were there openly with their children, not hiding or lying to them. She thought about how she had been behaving with her own children, putting them to bed and then locking herself in her bedroom and watching a movie. Her children were four, six, and eight, so it wasn’t too hard to keep them in the dark, but she thought that as they grew older it would be impossible to keep lying and be a good parent. At another retreat, one of her new friends said to her, “I dare you to take your wig off.” Chavie was shocked—this felt even more exposing than being naked, especially since, unbeknownst to anyone, she had let her hair grow out into a Mohawk and dyed it in rainbow stripes—but she did it. After that, things started moving very fast. A month later, she went to the friend’s house for the weekend and rode in a car on Shabbos and ate bacon, and it didn’t feel frightening or sacrilegious—it felt normal and right. And she realized, I guess I never believed in any of this.
She began introducing her children to her new friends—a lesbian couple, a trans woman. She felt that she and her kids were pushing open the door of their ghetto together, and it was both scary and thrilling. She thought that, since she was abandoning the values of the community, she should come up with alternatives, so she started a “values wall” in her house, and when she read a book with the kids they would extract a value from it and paste it up: kindness, inclusivity, social justice. She believed that a family should have rituals, so for every ritual she abandoned she invented a new one to take its place. She was worried that when the community saw what she was up to it would try to turn her children against her—she had seen that happen. But the key was she had time. Outwardly, they were still a good Hasidic family, so no one was paying attention.
For three years after the divorce, Chavie didn’t tell her children that she was queer. But then, in 2012, she thought that her older daughter suspected it, and Chavie told her that she was. That fall, a transgender friend of hers had a fire in their apartment, and she invited them to stay with her, at her home in Borough Park. They brought their cats; pets were not exactly prohibited in the community, but they were a tell. Chavie grew bolder. She allowed the kids to eat non-kosher food a few times. She let the girls wear pants inside the house. She let the kids watch a movie called “How the Toys Saved Christmas.” She told them that certain Hasidic beliefs were sexist and homophobic, and that she was an atheist. Finally, she thought, I am done trying to please people. One day, she impulsively went outside in her neighborhood wearing secular clothes, with her hair—now short and blond—uncovered for everyone to see. She walked past a group of mothers waiting at a bus stop. At first, they didn’t recognize her, and then they did, and grew very quiet, but she kept walking.
She decided to come out publicly as a lesbian, and was promptly fired from her job at the magazine. The community was horrified that Rabbi Wolfson’s granddaughter had turned out to be such a shocking person. People wrote her letters telling her that she was disturbing the soul of her father, who had recently died. But she never imagined that she would run into custody problems. Her ex was busy with his new children. She figured that, even if he did take her to a secular family court, the judge would side with her, because she was progressive and wanted her kids to get a good education.
It turned out that she was wrong about this. In November, 2012, she received an emergency order to show up in Kings County Supreme Court. The judge told her that she was confusing and harming her children by making such drastic changes in their upbringing, and ordered them removed from her and sent to stay with their father that very day.
A few days later, the judge issued a temporary order decreeing that Chavie’s children could live with her for three nights a week, on the condition that while they were with her, and whenever she was in Borough Park, she dressed and acted like a proper Hasidic woman. In a subsequent hearing, Naftali told the judge he had assumed that Chavie would have relationships with women after the divorce, but he had expected her to keep them secret from the children. Chavie said that a parent who hid her authentic self from her kids, and raised them according to values that she didn’t believe in, was not a parent but a nanny, and to deprive children of a parent was a terrible thing.
The judge summoned several experts to give testimony on the family. A therapist testified that, ever since Chavie had begun openly flouting Hasidic rules, her older daughter said that she could not have normal friendships with her classmates in school, and that she and her siblings were afraid of being seen in the streets with their mother wearing secular clothing. A psychologist testified that her son’s behavior in yeshiva had grown disruptive and defiant. Both said that Chavie’s criticisms of Hasidism had left the children deeply confused. A forensic psychologist testified that although Chavie was a loving mother who had a strong bond with her children, by disparaging the Hasidic way of life in front of them she had put her own needs ahead of theirs; she should have shielded them from anything that could turn them against their father and his community. The judge, appalled by what he felt was Chavie’s “remorseless” violation of her agreement to raise the kids religious, made his temporary ruling permanent.
Chavie appealed, and, two years later, the ruling was overturned, on the ground that a religious-upbringing agreement could be enforced only so long as it was in the best interests of the children. The appeals court was more impressed by Chavie’s care of the kids, and by Naftali’s spotty visitation and child-support record, than by Chavie’s rogue behavior. The appeals judges accepted Chavie’s argument that it was not in the children’s interests for her to conceal her beliefs from them. They pointed out that the plain language of the agreement required a Hasidic upbringing for the children, but did not specify any requirements as to the behavior of the parents; nor was it acceptable for a court to compel an adult to practice a religion. The solution was to split the difference: Chavie was to make sure that the children dressed and acted like Hasidic kids when visiting their father or attending school, but she could dress or act as she liked.
Chavie had been lucky, but she had also had help. Around the time of her appeal, in 2017, Footsteps hired Julie F. Kay, a human-rights lawyer, who began recruiting attorneys from top Manhattan firms to represent Footsteps members in custody cases pro bono. For a long time, Footsteps members had been at a disadvantage in court because they couldn’t afford to pay lawyers. Many Hasidic parents were also poor, but they could turn to the community for help, raising money in crowdfunding campaigns:
