Unmuting the silent voices

It is not trawling for pity to say that it is hard being divorced, that it is harder to be divorced if you are a woman than if you are a man, and that it is particularly hard to be divorced and therefore feel alone in a thriving community made up, apparently overwhelmingly, of happy families.

It is fair to say that it is easy to overlook those women, that the stigma with which they feel they live makes it hard for them to demand the support that in theory is their right, and that this is a self-reinforcing cycle.

It also seems clear that in some ways the irony of living in a community — such as a suburban Orthodox community — that is tight-knit and based on the model, seemingly attainable by other people, of mother, father, and children, all happily ensconced in various local institutions — makes it even more painful if you don’t fit the mold.

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And it also seems clear that the women who live this life both deserve attention and support and also are — and increasingly become — strong, resilient, and self-reliant. But still they need support.

That is the conclusion of a report the Orthodox Union released in 2022, called “Kol D’mama Daka: Silent Voices: The Needs of Divorced Women in the Orthodox Community.”

The report, based in part on the work done by a group called Sister to Sister as well as on research its writers conducted, tells us that almost all of the women it surveyed had dealt with a great deal of marital conflict; many of them are economically vulnerable; most are responsible for almost all of the child care (because almost all of them have children); that many feel both stigmatized and deeply, achingly lonely. Many of these findings apply both to divorced Orthodox women and divorced women in general; other findings are more specific, like mothers’ despair not only in not having good male role models but in having no one to teach their sons how to fulfil the religious obligations that are demanded of them but not of their mothers.

The report also is the impetus for an initiative that Congregation Rinat Yisrael in Teaneck, like some other Orthodox shuls, is undertaking — and that its leaders hope will spread to other Orthodox institutions.

The story of working with divorced women in Orthodox Teaneck began before the report was published. About 20 years ago, Carol Glaser, who is a psychologist, a member of Congregation Beth Abraham in Bergenfield, and an associate member of Congregation Bnai Yeshurun in Teaneck, was asked if she would be “interested in running a group for divorcing and divorced women, and right away I said yes,” she said.

The woman who’d asked Dr. Glaser that question, “a lovely woman, had gone to a program at the 92nd Street Y for divorced Orthodox women, and she said then that if she ever got back on her feet, she’s start a group for other women. And she did.”

The first meeting was at Bnai Yeshurun. “It was almost 30 women in the group, everyone crowded into a little classroom, so I asked if people would prefer coming to my home. I have a home office there. Everyone said yes, and everyone who was really interested came that following week, and that’s how it all started.”

Dr. Glaser had spent years running support groups, particularly women’s groups. “It had always been an interest of mine,” she said. “So this was the chance to do what I love to do.”

It wouldn’t have worked without community support, she said. “But we live in a glorious community, and we had and have extraordinary religious leaders, who are really supportive. They’re kind. Even if you didn’t belong to his shul, a rabbi will give a lot of money or support to try to go the distance in terms of helping women out.

That group ran, on and off — Dr. Glaser and her husband spent seven years in Toronto — for two decades. But now Dr. Glaser has retired. The problem hasn’t gone away. Couples continue to divorce, families continue to splinter, and women still need support.

Now, in response both to the OU’s report and to a working group OU convened to figure out what to do about it, Congregation Rinat Yisrael has established an initiative to help divorced women reclaim their sense of belonging to their own community.

Menachem Schnaidman, a retired businessman who is an extremely active member of Rinat, as well as a board member of many local institutions, also sits on the board of the Orthodox Union. He was drawn into the issue when the OU convened a group of a dozen rabbis and asked each one to bring a layperson with him.

Rinat’s Rabbi Chaim Strauchler was one of those dozen rabbis, and Mr. Schnaidman was the layperson who accompanied him. “We attended a full-day session,” Mr. Schnaidman said. “It was intense. And then he and I spent some time over the next weeks and months to see what we could do at Rinat.” They decided to enlist some of the women in the community to act as concierges to divorced women. Those concierges ideally would “develop personal, individual relationships with divorcees within our synagogue, and serve generally as go-betweens for whatever we could provide — financial assistance, social assistance, child care — whatever we could do we would do. Instead of the divorcees having to navigate the system themselves, the concierge would do it for them.

“The concierges are not likely to be divorced. They are people who are sensitive and familiar with the shul. Right now, we have five concierges and 14 to 16 divorcees” who are working with them. “They’re of different ages, and from different parts of the populations within our shul. We had a number of meetings with the concierges, and with Sister to Sister. And we also don’t want to ignore women who aren’t part of the synagogue. We know that there is a not insignificant number of women who are uncomfortable joining a shul alone. We wanted to be sensitive to them too.

“So we focused on Rinat, but we didn’t exclude anyone.”

As it turned out, the concierge model alone wasn’t enough. “We also discovered the importance of having a support group,” Mr. Schneidman said. By then Dr. Glaser had retired, but they found another leader who, like Dr. Glaser, is universally praised. Janet Hoffman. (Yes, that sounds like hyperbole, but to ask anyone who knows either of these two women is to be bombarded with expressions of appreciation and even love for them.)

Some of the help the women need is straightforward, Mr. Schneidman said. “It’s inviting the women to some shul events,” to waive fees and help with seating, so a woman without a partner isn’t marooned at a dinner.

“Before Pesach, we try to make sure that they have invitations for a seder, and for other meals. And then there are other things — selling chametz, for example. We want to be sure that women are aware that they can do it in a way that is as comfortable and convenient as possible.”

Pesach involves a lot of physical work. The amount of cleaning that an observant Orthodox family does is formidable. “Our concierges have talked about trying to get teenagers to help with things like cleaning out cars, which is a pain,” Mr. Schnaidman said. “And there is the question of food access. Our concierges know about access to food and food banks.

“To be totally blunt, we haven’t done as much as we should be doing. I don’t want to oversell what we are doing. Some of this is aspirational.

“I want to make sure that the community is broadly aware of the problem, but in a sensitive way. This is not a nebbuch group.”

And, Mr. Schnaidman added, he and everyone else understand that divorced women are not the only groups of people who need support; who never should be objects of pity but who should be included. Being single, or alone with children — divorced, widowed, never married — does not render a person invisible.

He’s optimistic, Mr. Schnaidman said. “People in general are becoming more sensitive. We have to start to include people somewhere, in a real tangible way. Here, we have the data that we can work with.”

Rabbi Strauchler sees the problem divorced women face as an unintended consequence of one of the Jewish community’s greatest strengths. “The challenge is that much of Jewish community life is family-based,” he said. “We do believe that the family is a center of Jewish life. But not all families are the same. Very often, and specifically in modern times, there is a great need for us to be able to see the diversity of families, and to bring people together so they can enjoy the benefits of the community, to participate in it, and to contribute to it.

“And when it comes to divorce, very often the tools people can use to join a community and engage in community become frayed, and sometimes they even break. So we’re trying to lower the barriers to entry to the community to these diverse families, so they can give to and receive the beauty of Jewish communal life.”

The initiative is just about a year old, Rabbi Strauchler said, and the public is just starting to become aware of it. That’s by design. “Our model is evolving,” he said. “We’re making mistakes, but there is value to moving and trying. When divorcees see that you are trying, it means that yes, there can be clumsiness, there can be mistakes, but the fact that you are trying sometimes can be half the battle.”

Like Mr. Schnaidman and Dr. Glaser, Rabbi Strauchler emphasized that the divorced women at whom the initiative is aimed “are highly talented, who can contribute enormously to the community. This is not a one-way street. These are not nebbuch people. This is not a nebbuch problem. This is not about pity. This is about opening doors. It is about mutual support. It is about being able to grow the pie that is the community.”

Sarah Wagner was a member of one of Dr. Glaser’s groups. “I am not a support group person,” she said; it’s clear from talking to her that instead she is a movie person. Her knowledge of film and her ability to use that knowledge to illustrate her point is awesome; she compared her distaste for them to a scene from “Jerry Maguire.” But despite her discomfort with groups, Dr. Glaser’s worked for her. “Carol led it very gently,” she said. “You’d be with a group of five or six women, you really got to know them, and their stories.” Eventually, “Carol would graduate you.

“Carol helped hundreds of women,” she said. Among the many gifts the support group gives its members is the chance to make friends within the group, with people whose experiences you share, or at least understand.

Ms. Wagner is “a veteran at this point,” she said. “It takes you about five years to feel normal,” as she had confirmed in the Meryl Streep/Steve Martin/Alec Baldwin film “It’s Complicated.” It’s been eight years for her, she does feel normal now, so she doesn’t need the new initiative at Rinat. But she does feel a responsibility to the women coming behind her to help with it.

“So when I heard about the divorce initiative at Rinat” — the shul to which she belongs — “spearheaded by Manny Schneidman and Rabbi Strauchler — who has been exceptionally supportive and is very empathic, not a glory seeker but someone who does whatever he can in whatever capacity is needed — and I heard that there weren’t any divorced people on the committee, I couldn’t believe that a committee could think it could imagine the needs of divorced person without talking to one.

“So I said, “Get me on it,’ and they did. And I explained to them what the deal is. I said that I would make it as down and dirty as possible. I want you to understand the population you are trying to serve. It was raw and honest.”

Being divorced and still living in the community gives you a feeling of deep vulnerability, she said; at one point, she explained, she dreamed that she was standing outside her front door naked, as people walked by. “That’s how exposed you feel,” she said.

But the community she lives in “is a gift. I don’t understand how people go through life without one. I can’t imagine not being connected to a community.”

Part of the task of the five-year struggle toward normality is “pushing past the discomfort, the unwarranted sense of shame that goes with finding yourself in that circumstance,” Ms. Wagner continued. “There was no coming back. I realized that if I were to stay in the community, then I would have to deal with it. That was a conscious decision. And if I need help, I will have to ask for it.”

Learning to ask for help was one of the hardest things, she continued. “I had no choice. I was a person who never asked for help, and I would have given my right arm not to have to, but there was no choice. There is a gift of clarity when you realize that you have to do it, and you lean on it, because your kids are depending on it.

“You are a walking blister. There is a lot going on. You can lean on a friend, but you have to share the load. You learn not to lean on any one person too much. And you have to keep it from your kids, because they end up picking up the largest portion of the tab in a divorce.

“It is a lot.

“But this community, and this initiative, stepped up to address some of the issues that some women need help with. And particularly if you have young boys in your home — they would go to shul with their father.”

Ms. Wagner drew on her own experience with the support group Ms. Glaser had led to suggest that Rinat start one of its own, and she suggested that Janet Hoffman lead it.

Dr. Hoffman, also a Rinat member, is a retired social worker who earned a doctorate in early childhood education and spent 17 years working at the Abraham Joshua Heschel School in Manhattan. “When I retired, I realized that I had skills that I wanted to continue to use, and I’m not someone who plays golf or mahjong. Instead, I do a lot of listening.”

She did some consulting work, “but it wasn’t enough,” she said. “So when I was approached, just about a year ago, to start a support group at Rinat, I said okay.”

Both Dr. Glaser and Dr. Hoffman emphasized that these are support groups. They are not therapy groups.

Dr. Hoffman talked about the twists that participants’ lives have taken before they find themselves in her support group. Life’s supposed to be a straight path in the Orthodox community, she said. ‘You get married, you have children, you become part of the community. But then life starts happening, and things start changing.”

So she started a support group for divorced women — or it might be more accurate to say that she revived the one that Dr. Glaser had run for so many years. “We meet every two weeks at my home and sit in front of a fire. That’s something that Carol initiated. We want a safe place, where people feel at home.”

The group sometimes includes four women, and sometimes it has nine or 10, Dr. Hoffman said. “They’re at different stages, ranging from newly separated to heavily engaged in the legal or halachic process. Some have been divorced for more than 10 years.”

Couples get a civil divorce; halacha also demands that the man give the woman a get to dissolve the marriage Jewishly. In the civil procedure, which can be nasty, men and women are treated equally. The process of obtaining a get, which happens in a beit din, is inherently unequal because the man must give it and the woman cannot do anything but wait for it, and perhaps bargain for it. She cannot remarry without having gotten a get; her former husband, at least in theory, can.

“The issue of agunot” — that is, a woman who has not been given a get and so is legally bound to her ex-husband — “is discussed almost every week,” Dr. Hoffman said.

For many years by now, when they get married, couples are advised to get a prenup — that is, a prenuptial agreement that specifies that if they were to get divorced, the groom would be legally bound to give his wife a get.

“My kids all got prenups, but these women didn’t,” Dr. Hoffman said. It’s entirely understandable; it feels counterintuitive to stand under the chuppah knowing that you’ve negotiated something that would happen only if the ketubah you signed turns into a bitter farce, and your promise to build the Jewish home the chappah symbolizes has turned to ash.

“But a prenup should be part of the process,” she said. “It isn’t, so in the civil process, you have judges with dockets a year out.

The process can be horrifyingly bitter, and the women often feel “shame, isolation, anger, resentment, the feeling of ‘why me?’

“And then there are discussions of Shabbat plans, holiday plans; sometimes a woman ends up alone if dad decides to take the kids to the Bahamas. We talk about the impact on kids. Where does their allegiance lie?

“Some issues are specific to the Orthodox world, and some are not. There’s the loneliness of being alone in your house on Shabbat, the power of the get. What about estranged former family members?

“And what are we teaching children and young adults about intimacy and conflict and how to manage conflict?”

But, Dr. Hoffman stressed, just as everyone else has, “these are not nebbuch cases. They are great people. Each one of them is competent, bright, and talented. And they’re all survivors.

“I know that Rabbi Strauchler meets with couples before they get married,” she said. “And I said to him, ‘What about a month in? A year in? Do we assume that once they’re married, everything will be hunky-dory?

“When people are betrayed, how do they get past it? You enter a union with similar values and similar dreams, or at least you think that’s what you’re doing, but then you find out that the person you married is not the person you ought to have married. What do you do?

“And these are terrible times that we live in. We” — people her age, with grown children and grandchildren — “lived in a bubble. We raised our children without antisemitism. I think about these kids and their families now. Not only do they have to make a living, keep their heads above water, deal with the get process, but they also have to navigate this wacko world that we live in now. So whatever support, recognition, and validation we can give them we should give them.”

Because, Dr. Hoffman said, they can use it.

Rabbi Strauchler said that anyone who needs help dealing with a divorce and its repercussions should get in touch with him, and he will connect her with Rinat’s resources.