[Hat Tip: Joel Katz.]'Someone like that should never marry'
By Tamar Rotem • Ha'aretz
After the court sent him to a psychiatric facility, the case of Nachman Anshin, who murdered his baby daughter, was closed. In a first interview since the tragedy, his ex-wife slams the Haredi custom of concealing mental illness in the family
Everything seemed to be as usual on the last night of December 2009 in the Anshin family home in Jerusalem. The father, Nachman, was already in bed. His wife, Esther-Malki, had put the two girls - Fruma, eight months old, and a 6-year-old from her first marriage - to bed. But then everything went haywire: Nachman was overcome by a fit of rage, during which he killed the baby girl.
In the first interview she has given since the tragedy, in her parents' home in Jerusalem's Gilo neighborhood, Esther-Malki, who in the meantime obtained a divorce and - unusually in the ultra-Orthodox world - has reverted to using her maiden name, Starik, recalls the events of that night: "He started to scream: 'Who am I? Tell me who I am!' He said that if I did not tell him, he would murder me. I ran out to the balcony and screamed for help. He wouldn't let me back in."
In the meantime, the older daughter heard the screams and went into the living room.
"In tears I begged him to open the living-room door," Starik continues. "He refused. I don't know where I got the strength, but I managed to open the door."
Grabbing her older daughter, Starik says she managed to evade her husband and run out the front door. She ran to neighbors, begging for help.
"The whole time I heard the baby crying through the door," she recalls, emotionally. "The neighbors called for help, but he locked the door and wouldn't open it. He was shouting all the time, probably holding her. Then I hear this 'boom, boom, boom.' And he shouts that the baby is in his hands, and has been slaughtered like a chicken."
A volunteer policeman and a neighbor tried to break down the door, but they lacked proper tools, Starik says: "They couldn't get in. I heard her; she was still alive. They could have saved her. I asked a neighbor to go upstairs and open the window in the apartment, but [Nachman] closed the blinds." In the end, the neighbor broke into the apartment and opened the door for the police.
According to the indictment against Anshin, which was issued in January, after his wife and the older child fled, he took the baby from her bed and paced back and forth in the apartment with her. When he heard his wife's cries and the neighbors' pleas to let them have the infant, he ran amok and repeatedly smashed her head on the floor. Before killing her, the charge sheet states, Anshin was heard reciting a verse from Psalm 137 (8-9): "Happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. / Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.
While denying the murder during initial questioning, Anshin admitted to having done it later, in court. In reenacting the event, he told his interrogators that he had been overwrought that evening.
Starik: "Like we hear about mothers in the Holocaust whose babies were murdered before their eyes - I heard her being murdered with my ears. At first, afterward, I began to wonder why I didn't get her out of there, why I didn't remember her. I thought that if she had been able to walk she would have run away, poor thing. But now I think that if I had gone in he would have killed me and her together. I didn't think about what would happen, I didn't think which of the two girls to save. I just knew I had to get help."
Last month, the Jerusalem District Court ruled that Nachman Anshin was unfit to stand trial. He was committed to a psychiatric hospital, legal proceedings against him were halted and the criminal case was closed.
'Double mourning'
Starik has mixed feelings about the court's decision. "What kind of father could murder his daughter?" she asks. "I ask myself over and over: If he had a psychotic attack, why didn't he pick up a chair and throw it on the floor? Why did he take the baby? And why, after the murder, did he wrap her up in a sheet and hide her in his bed? But there are no answers."
"You can say that I am in double mourning," she adds. "Once because my baby girl was murdered and once because I was deceived when I was not told that my husband was mentally ill and had apparently suffered previous outbursts."
Starik, 26, grew up in the Toldot Aharon Hasidic sect, one of the most insular Haredi communities. She was first married at 18 and divorced a year later (she does not wish to elaborate on the circumstances); she was married to Anshin for three years. She usually speaks Yiddish but has a good command of Hebrew, although occasionally she stops, groping for a word. Her face - framed, as is the custom among the women of such extremist sects in Jerusalem, by a black head covering - is pleasant; a smile occasionally lights up her face and then vanishes.
Young Haredi women in her sect rarely speak to the press, but Starik is determined to expose the injustice done to her: the fact that her husband's mental instability was concealed from her for years. She and her family cannot understand how, in a society in which "clarifications" are made about every prospective bride and groom, the fact that Nachman Anshin had been violent in the past was hidden, as the court ruling notes.
"This is my outcry - to make sure that there will never be another case in which mental illness is hidden," she explains, justifying her decision to give the interview. "I experienced it firsthand, and I don't want it to happen to anyone again."
In fact, the Stariks' allegations reveal what is apparently a common pattern in the Haredi community, despite the above-mentioned clarifications, of concealing mental illness so as not to spoil one's marital prospects. The incident also reflects the lowly status of divorcees in this society: If Starik had not been married previously, she might not have been matched up with a mentally ill man.
Starik was 23 when she and Anshin wed. "I lived with my husband like a perfectly normal couple with love and affection," she relates. "He was a normal husband. Now I know that he maintained his mental equilibrium with the help of pills. I did not notice; I couldn't even think along those lines. It is so painful that this situation was hidden from me until the last minute."
"Nachman's parents knew about his mental illness and how dangerous it was," declares Moshe Starik, Esther-Malki's brother. "They committed a terrible injustice. How is it that we only now learned about his violent outbursts and psychotic behavior before he married my sister? The heart cries out: Why was she deceived and humiliated like this? I am sure they will be judged in the next world." Starik adds that he hopes this tragic story will foment a radical change among Haredim and force them to stop hiding cases of mental illness so zealously.
"Now I'm told that a day before the murder, my husband spoke with his father and sounded confused," adds Esther-Malki Starik angrily. "He told him: 'I am going to end things.' His father, who was in London, sent all kinds of people to check his condition, and decided to come back to Israel. I was the only one who wasn't told about this."
Moments before the murder, after she fled from her husband, Starik called her mother-in-law. "I told her I was in distress and that something was wrong with him. But she told me, 'Don't be afraid. Everything is all right.' I asked her why his father was coming to Israel. 'For a wedding,' she said. 'You don't want your good name to be harmed.' But what about me, I asked. Don't you think about me? At least tell me: 'Leave the house, he might get violent.' There are no words to explain any of this. His father did not even come to console me or say he was sorry. It's as though he doesn't care.
"We believe that everything is in the hands of Divine Providence," Starik continues. "But every person has a choice between good and bad .... They did not consider me, only the good of their son. Someone like that should never marry. I am shocked that I lived with him in the same house."
Confused phone call
Anshin's parents declined a request by Haaretz to respond to these allegations. In an interview they gave to the daily Yedioth Ahronoth before the court handed down its judgment, they intimated that it was their son's choice to hide his mental condition from his wife. His father told the paper that although Anshin called him in London the day before the murder and sounded confused, he did not think it was an appropriate time to tell his daughter-in-law about the situation.
"When a secret is kept for so many years, you do not want it to be revealed. We were afraid he would go home in that confused state, and that his wife would understand that something was wrong," the father said, adding that he instructed his son not to go back home, and to sleep at his grandmother's instead - but Anshin ignored this advice.
"I think all the time about those minutes, before she died," Starik says, brokenhearted. "How I washed her and put her to bed, all pretty and laughing. I know her life ended quickly, and I believe I was a very good mother."
Despite her feelings, Starik says she has no desire for revenge. "I can't forget the fact that he killed my baby. That is incomprehensible. But to think that I will feel better if he gets a harsher punishment? That will not bring her back. If he is not normal, as I have heard, then with the pills he will be a normal person. I am afraid that they will release him from the hospital, heaven forbid. It doesn't matter to me where he is, but it has to be understood that he is dangerous to me, my family and the public. He has to be in a place where he is under guard his whole life. So he won't be able to do things like this anymore."
Starik says she hopes to marry again.
"An important rabbi told me that I will quickly build a new home in Israel and that he will come to two circumcision ceremonies. When someone asks how many children I have, I say two: one I am raising here and one I am raising in my heart. I talk to her every day. I know I will have to work hard to regain faith in people. With God's help, it will take time, but I am still young."