I have numerous hasidic friends who are happy, open-minded people who live good and fulfilling lives. At the same time, there is a troubling discovery I have made in the past few years: there is serious dysfunction in parts of the hasidic (and to a lesser degree in the yeshivish) community. (That is not to say that there is not dysfunction in every community, but as I will explain below, unfortunately the dysfunction that I speak of has become enmeshed with Judaism itself.)
As a ba’alas teshuva who became frum in my late teens, I have had the privilege to basically see only positive, beautiful things out of the frum world. It was for this reason that I founded Jew in the City in 2007, a 501c3 that uses social media to show the positive side of the Orthodox community.
By showing the positive, baruch Hashem, we have heard countless stories from Jews all over the world who have made a journey to observance as we opened their eyes to an engaging and meaningful religious Jewish life they didn’t know was possible. But something unexpected happened: the people who had only experienced frumkeit in negative ways (namely, members of the ex-charedi, OTD community) started coming out of the woodwork. They called us “liars” and “whitewashers,” but then another group from this population emerged. They believed the Orthodoxy we were promoting—which stresses menschlichkeit as the basis of Yiddishkeit and integration with the world, while at the same time being fully committed to halacha—was true. And they wanted in.
And so we opened a division of Jew in the City called Project Makom in 2016 that helps former and questioning charedi Jews find their place in Orthodoxy. In our first year of programming, with no marketing whatsoever, we attracted over 700 people to our Facebook group and nearly 200 unique individuals to the 36 events we ran. The need was clearly there. (No one has any hard data on how wide of a scale this problem is, but happy chasidic insiders have estimated it to be 20 percent of the population, which would equate to tens of thousands of people.)
For many people seeking Project Makom’s services, the first line of programming is Jew in the City content. How could it be possible that someone raised Orthodox would need to have “stereotypes about Orthodoxy” corrected? Because just as many Reform Jews believe that Orthodox Judaism has no place for dinosaurs or family planning, so too a large percentage of the charedi population did not grow up with a Judaism that included perspectives like this.
In year two of our programming we felt we could do better than just run events. We (a) wanted to screen incoming members to get a sense that we were taking people who had a basic stability (i.e., if someone doesn’t have a place to live or food to eat, figuring out their hashkafa should not be their top priority) and (b) we wanted to follow the journey of our participants.
By implementing an intake for members (whose profiles are stored in our database) we had the ability to see the challenges each member came with and the knowledge and services they hoped to gain from us—services like monthly social events, shurium, Shabbos placements and shabbatons.
In just over a year of conducting intake we have 115 members and we have gotten to see the pain up close, and it is serious. Nearly every one of our members is a trauma victim. And while many had challenges at home, nearly all experienced serious problems at school. These people were not just taught to fear God, they were taught of a diabolical being who counts up their aveiros with delight so he can burn them in the hottest fires of Gehinnom. They were taught that things like babies dying can be attributed to breaches of tznius or owning a smartphone. They were not allowed to ask questions, and every piece of Judaism (including community norms with no basis in halacha) was taught as mitzvos d’oraisa. Their secular education was seriously lacking and, believe it or not, so was their Jewish education. Not just because they were not taught a full picture of halacha, but because many parts of the Torah (like bnos Tzlafchad) are subversive and don’t comport with the community hashkafa.
While the problem is grave, we have found that by loving our members unconditionally and without judgment and by modeling happy, healthy frum life we can begin to repair the damage. Here’s where you come in. We are having a shabbaton in Bergenfield on June 15-16. We are still looking for a few host families (to provide dinner and sleeping), someone to host Shabbos afternoon classes, and several people to contribute to our potluck lunch. If you’d like to learn more, please email [email protected] to learn how you can get involved.
To learn more about Project Makom, please join us this Tuesday night June 5 at 8:30 in a home in Teaneck. Email [email protected] for the address.
By Allison Josephs, founder & director of Jew in the City
