Lorne, what's the Hebrew word for "pussy-whipped" again??
Mon., January 19, 2004 Tevet 25, 5764
Haredi society discovers family violence, but slowly
By Tamar Rotem
About three years ago, on International Woman's Day, B. called the hotline of the Crisis Center for Religious Women, and asked for help. It was already dark when she summoned the courage to dial the number being broadcast over the radio all that day. The next day, a Friday, she packed a few suitcases with trembling hands, and fled with her young children to a shelter for battered women, far from the Haredi city where she lived. She couldn't bear the thought of spending another Shabbat with her husband's violence.
At the height of the crisis, she says, there was something calming and "less threatening" in the knowledge that she had found refuge in a Haredi shelter. Long before she fled to the shelter, she had endured more than her share of suffering. After several years of marriage, during which her husband abused her physically and emotionally, B. divorced him, but was forced to leave her two children in his custody.
After some time, when her husband was in the process of becoming newly religious and she failed to get the children back, she remarried him and adopted a Haredi lifestyle. She hoped the family values so sacred to Haredi society would spread to her home. But her hopes were in vain.
The more extreme her husband became in religious observance, the more frequent became his outbursts of violence toward her and the children. B. was isolated in the heart of a community where everyone knows everything about everyone.
Several times B. turned to the community rabbi, hoping he would be able to influence her husband, who had a criminal record, and bring an end to the violence. But, she says, the rabbi made do with half-hearted comments about shalom bayit ("peace in the home," or marital harmony). "I often had a feeling he was afraid of my husband," says B. The years went by, and three more children were born. It had become more difficult to leave.
It took another six years for her to get up her courage again. Like many battered women, B. came to her senses when her husband began to cause greater harm to the children. A few weeks before she fled to the shelter, he closed the credit account in the neighborhood grocery, and as a result, her children often went to bed hungry. After he threw their 10-year-old daughter out of the house one night in one of his fits of rage, B. decided to run away.
For an outside observer it may be difficult to understand the necessity for a Haredi framework in a situation that is defined as pikuah nefesh (life threatening). However, B. paid a high price for staying in the ordinary WIZO shelter she was forced to move to after her husband discovered the address of the Haredi shelter and began to threaten to murder her.
When her husband complained in the rabbinic court that his children were violating the Sabbath in the secular shelter, the dayanim (rabbinic court judges) decided the three children under the age of six would be transferred to his custody, despite his violent past. Only after she appealed to the Supreme Court did B. win custody of the children.
Banished women
In 1995 Noach Korman, a Haredi attorney, founded the non-profit organization Bat Melech (King's Daughter, a Talmudic reference to a modest Jewish woman), which operates the only shelter in the country for religious and Haredi women. He did so when during his work as a rabbinic advocate (the equivalent of a defense attorney in the rabbinic courts) in the legal aid department in Jerusalem - a government body that provides free legal advice to the financially distressed - he encountered cases of women who had nowhere to go.
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No statistics
Apparently keeping the family secret, which perpetuates the pattern of violence, has deeper roots in Haredi society, because of the taboo related to abuse and because of the fear of ruining the family name and the shiddukh (match). One of the battered women in the shelter says her husband imprisoned her in her house in a Haredi city when she was pregnant, for over 24 hours, without electricity and water. She could have opened the window and called out to passersby, but she didn't do so for fear that it would be discovered that her family was defective.
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Rabbis won't believe
On one of the days of Hanukkah a party was planned in the shelter, but the four women who were staying there were too upset to celebrate, and it took time until they were convinced to participate. The youngest, in her early twenties, shares a room in the shelter with her four children. In the next room, which is clean and well-kept, lives a woman in her forties, with her young daughter. She arrived at the shelter from Bnei Brak, where she enjoyed a high economic and social status.
Nobody, she says, imagined that for six years her husband, a respected rabbi, beat her, and later even threatened to kill her. According to her description, before marriage she was an independent woman, and she says that her husband succeeded with threats and beatings to cause her to become frightened and emotionally disturbed. This is her second time in the shelter. She came in the summer, and after a month returned to her husband. "Now," she declares, "it's final."
Even after they have publicly announced their intention to divorce, over 25 percent of the women who come to the shelter return to their husbands; about half the usual percentage among women who stay in shelters. "Anyone who has left the Haredi community no longer has a place to return to," explains Plant. When a woman wants to return to her husband, the approach is "to go along with the woman and her wishes," as she puts it. Therefore, although the professionals don't always believe in it, they help her by enlisting support in the community, and particularly that of the rabbis, in order to scare the husband and to prevent a repeat of the violence.
The success of the treatment for violence against Haredi women, like that for children at risk and other problems, depends on the delicate communication that takes place behind the scenes with the rabbinic establishment, says Shlomit Gidron, who until last year was the director of the social services department in the Bnei Brak municipality. She says that "when the Haredis are convinced that there is a need, they establish a wonderful system of services."
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haaretz.com |
