What it’s like to live in - and leave - the ultra-Orthodox sect that banned women driving [View all]

[rpannier]

Emily Green didn’t decide to leave the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community she grew up in, she decided to leave her husband. But that decision had consequences.

“I was pushed out in a sense,” she says. "One thing led to another, the way people in the community sided with him. I just felt more and more alienated. I was very respected, I’d been the wife of someone respected. It all changed very quickly."

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After the rumours started, and when the Rabbi of the school she taught in threatened her job, Emily knew she and her children would no longer feel comfortable living by the strict codes of the Charedi ultra-Orthodox Belzer community, which recently hit the headlines after one of its schools threatened students with expulsion if their mothers drove. On some days there, Emily says “I felt like I was choking”.

Emily was lucky: she was eventually awarded custody of her children in the secular courts but leaving meant discovering an entirely new world and being shunned by her family and friends she grew up with. That she survived at all, Emily says, is a miracle.

link
http://indy100.independent.co.uk/article/what-its-like-to-live-inand-leavethe-ultraorthodox-sect-that-banned-women-driving--Z1gdlMZkrZx