I watched them trying to mould her and twist her and make her into this obedient, quiet, meek woman and I just couldn't do it. She walked away two days after her eldest daughter's wedding, and cites her daughter Miriam's struggles as the final straw. I felt like I was a Martian stepping on earth."īy the time she was ready to leave, she had just 13-year-old Miriam and seven-year-old Aron living at home. In an interview with the New York Timesshe added, " I’d had no radio, no television, no newspapers, no magazines. Looking at the bakery inside but never tasting the croissant." That was still me, nose pressed against the glass. Gradually throughout her 30s, she had been exposing herself to the outside world, which she described to lohud was like "watching a documentary on whales, like watching another world. She worked as a Judaic Studies teacher, but as she got older, she grew more and more uncomfortable with the life she was living.īy the time Haart was ready to leave her old life behind, she was dangerously thin and having suicidal thoughts. At 19, she married her first husband, Yosef Hendler, in an arranged marriage and they had four children.
Haart moved to Monsey, a major centre of Orthodox Judaism, when she was 11. While a man could divorce his wife for something as small as burning dinner, she could never leave him, even if the marriage was violent.Īs we learn from Batsheva, Haart's eldest daughter, sex is such an unspoken topic that even when she was preparing to marry aged 19, "my bridal teacher wouldn't even say the word sex. It was her purpose, as a woman, to follow her husband and be a baby making machine. And then the next morning it would start all over again for thousands of years, or however many years hell lasts," she explained. "In this hell, your mother would dip your clothes in acid and put them on your body, so throughout the day your body would decompose from the acid. She recalls being taught from a young age that if any of her body was uncovered in public, she would go to a "special kind of hell" reserved for just her and her mother.
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