Distant sisters

Ultra-Orthodox women do not wear veils, but their long, guarding garb and head coverings symbolize an eternal partition dividing them from their contemporary western sisters. Author Judith Rotem was born into one such Orthodox family in Budapest. In the early 1950s, her family moved into Bnei-Brak, an Israeli town whose population includes many of the very religious Jews known as the haredim. Rotem married at age 18 and went through ten pregnancies in twelve years, losing two babies and suffering a near-fatal premature delivery. After twenty years of marriage, she divorced her husband and haredi society, and took her daughters with her. Her son remains haredi. Ten years after Rotem left the ultra-Orthodox community, she returned to try to understand her former life, in which women are expected both to raise a houseful of children and to support their husbands while the men study Torah. She interviewed dozens of these women (often without their husbands' approval) about such topics as marriage and divorce, children, "superwomanism," mothers and daughters, menopause, mikvah laws, the gap between men and women, the rejection of books, and new attitudes regarding materialistic life. Although her appraisal of their lives is often harsh, she is never critical of the women themselves, whom she sees as her sisters, even as she distances herself from them.