Hillel

Refugees from ultra-Orthodox Judaism get a sympathetic profile in the Washington Post

The world is always fascinated when someone leaves a closed religious group for the outside world.

Think Amish teenagers fleeing the faith; family members leave the Westboro Baptist Church; women fleeing arranged marriages from Somalia to Pakistan and the peeling off of ultra-Orthodox Jews.

What’s up with the latter?

Turns out there’s a form of Orthodox Judaism extant in Israel that Americans barely encounter on our shores. Those are Jews whose lives are controlled from cradle to grave by strict Torah observance. But what if you want to leave?

The Washington Post tells you what comes next.

JERUSALEM — Ruth Borovski, doing a bit of homework, sat in a library and Googled “phosphate” on her smartphone.

That could not have happened 19 months earlier, when Borovski was a 27-year-old living within one of Israel’s cloistered ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects. Then, she had never heard of phosphate. Or of smartphones.

She says she had never seen a library. Now it’s hard to get her out of one…

Borovski’s race into the wider world started in 2018 when, trapped in an arranged marriage, she dialed the hotline of a -Jerusalem-based nonprofit called Hillel and said she wanted to leave her family and her community. With Hillel’s help, she became one of a growing number of Yotzim, or “Leavers,” who have bolted from closed religious communities into a secular world they are ill-equipped to navigate.

One assumes there were no children from this marriage, as the article mentions none.


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