In high school, she discovered that she was attracted to girls, and she slept with a few of them, especially at summer camp.
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She sneaked glances at the TV in the doctor’s waiting room she stared at people in the mall.
Her community believed the secular world was sinful, but she was curious about it. She knew that she ought to be ashamed of this, and she was, but she wasn’t afraid of God she was afraid of getting caught. She never really prayed she just mumbled the words. When nobody was looking, she would put on the lights on Shabbos, or turn on the air-conditioning. She saw herself as a good girl, a rule-follower, but she never really believed that the rules were important. It also concentrated power in its rebbes, who acted as intermediaries between believers and God.Ĭhavie was the fifth of ten children. Hasidism valued joy and emotional connection with the divine as much as Torah study. Emunas Yisroel, like all Hasidic groups, traced its lineage to an eighteenth-century charismatic movement in Eastern Europe. Her grandfather Rabbi Moshe Wolfson was the venerated founder of the Emunas Yisroel Hasidic group to which she belonged. To many Haredim, the loss of a child to secular life was unbearable, because it meant that the child’s future, and that of all his descendants, would be ruined, not only in this world but also in the next.Ĭhavie Weisberger grew up in Monsey, a hamlet in Rockland County, just north of New York City, with a large Hasidic population.
Secular courts were called upon to determine the best interests of children who were being torn between two irreconcilable ways of life: what to one parent was a basic human freedom might be, to the other, a violation of the laws of God. But, as more people defected, communities alarmed by the prospect of so many children lost to Haredism mobilized to keep them. In the early days, the few who left had not attracted a lot of attention, and some got custody of their kids without much of a fight. One of the most painful difficulties that leavers faced was the risk of losing their children. Some who sought its help first heard of it when they were accused of being members. By then, Footsteps had become notorious among Haredim, suspected of preying on vulnerable people who were struggling in their faith. At that point, around five hundred people had gone to Footsteps for help by 2020, around eighteen hundred had, and still more had contacted other groups that had sprung up. In 2010, Schwartz was succeeded by Lani Santo, who had a master’s degree in nonprofit management from N.Y.U. Over the years, Footsteps expanded into a fully fledged nonprofit.
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She started it as a support group, but she found that people who had left were usually in need of help with practical things as well: improving their English, since Yiddish was often their first language figuring out how to go back to school or find work with few secular qualifications finding somewhere to live.
Then, in 2003, Malkie Schwartz, who had left the Lubavitch group in Crown Heights, founded Footsteps, an organization for people who had left Haredi communities. But many Haredi communities-their preferred term for ultra-Orthodox, which means “those who tremble before God”-restricted access to the Internet. There was a network of blogs written by people who no longer believed but continued to go through the motions some called themselves Reverse Marranos, for the Jews in medieval Spain who faked renouncing their religion in order to survive. They might know no one else who had done what they were doing. Twenty years ago, those who left could feel that they were stepping into a void.
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