"…I personally was very close to a young [ex-haredi] man who killed himself a year and a half ago. He was 24 and had gone through all the possible options in the haredi world before leaving – Bratslav [Breslov; a hasidic movement], kabbala, the Lithuanians [non-Hasidic] and a yeshiva – but couldn’t find his niche. We started to meet for coffee to talk. He worked as a butcher in a supermarket, and one day he told me that he would look at all the knives and was afraid he would do something to himself. I took him for emergency psychiatric help. He started therapy and his condition improved. But then he went to his brother’s engagement party, and his older brother told everyone to ignore him. The next day he killed himself.…"
Yair Hass is the head of Hillel, the Israeli nonprofit that helps ex-haredim acclimate to living in secular society. (Hillel is not in any way a part of or related to the North American-based campus organization of the same name.) Ha'aretz has an interview with him. Here's an excerpt:
Is the price [of leaving the haredi community] complete severance from the family?
Almost always. You can’t go home again. If you’ve enlisted [in the IDF], you can’t enter the neighborhood in an army uniform – it's considered shameful. In fact, that’s one of the reasons we encourage the young people who leave the haredi world to enter the army: that way we know that for at least the next three years they will have food to eat and a place to live, and they themselves know what they’ll be doing every day.
What about those who don’t enter the army? They have no support, no resources, and not very much to offer the secular world.
They try to find their way in a world whose rules and laws they don’t know. Most of them work at odd jobs, such as waiting in restaurants. But even that’s complicated: You can’t become a waiter instantaneously if you’ve never even been to a restaurant before. We tell those who contact us: Don’t go out into the world before you’ve saved some money. It’s a very tough transition, because they really don’t have a clue.
One time a few of us went to the Cinematheque. We were standing in line, when suddenly one of the group said in embarrassment: “This is the first time I’ve ever gone to a movie.” Then I realized that he didn’t know that you buy a ticket, wait and then go in.
A few years ago, we had a guy who joined the army but didn’t think about getting a place to live, because in the stories he’d read about the Russian army, they took you for three years and then you went home. On Shabbat, when all the other new recruits went home, he didn’t know what was happening.
Maybe that explains the large number of suicides in the community.
You know, the classic haredi way of coping with those who cease to be religious and leave is to ignore the issue completely – which is far worse than being pursued. Parents who go after a child who has left are expressing love, a desire for his return. The greatest suffering endured by those who leave is the ostracism. The family and the community erase you, and that is enormously painful. That is what ultimately leads to suicide.
I personally was very close to a young man who killed himself a year and a half ago. He was 24 and had gone through all the possible options in the haredi world before leaving – Bratslav [Breslov; a hasidic movement], kabbala, the Lithuanians [non-Hasidic] and a yeshiva – but couldn’t find his niche. We started to meet for coffee to talk. He worked as a butcher in a supermarket, and one day he told me that he would look at all the knives and was afraid he would do something to himself. I took him for emergency psychiatric help. He started therapy and his condition improved. But then he went to his brother’s engagement party, and his older brother told everyone to ignore him. The next day he killed himself.…
Hass is himself an ex-o whose father banned him from the family home when he found out Hass was no longer Orthodox and prevented Hass from visiting even when Hass' mother was dying of cancer.
Hass's family is Zionist Orthodox-haredi, and one of his brothers donated the money to publish the racist book Torat HaMelech, which among other things advocates for the murder of Arab babies during wartime – which the authors and their mentor. Chabad Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh, define loosely to include Israel's situation today – if expedient to do so. What's their rationale for authorizing the killing of Arab babies? Those babies will one day grow up to hate us.
But what most jumped out at me in the interview is that the people who call Hillel's hotline for help do so from a public phone or from a regular cell phone because it’s impossible to call Hillel's hotline from the “kosher” cellphones haredi rabbis demand their followers use if they use any cellphones at all. These so-called kosher cellphones are modified by haredi organizations to block Internet access and file sharing. But those haredi organizations also block for-pay porn phone numbers and, it seems, the number of the only nonprofit in Israel that helps haredim who want to leave the fold.
If you need to use thuggery, threats, enforced ignorance and draconian censorship to keep your followers in the fold, you're not much of a leader, and the fold you're trying to keep them in isn't much of a religion. It is, however, a reasonably successful cult.