A woman who wisely chose not to return to Jewish "Taliban cult"

Here's an interview with a woman who wisely left what's called a "taliban cult", one of the worst products of Haredi clans like the Satmar and Lev Tahor in Israel:

When Rose Feldman wants to explain where she came from, she looks through her phone for a photo from the not-so-distant past. For a moment, it is hard to connect the young woman with flowing hair sitting in the room with the girl staring back from the screen: covered from head to toe, her head wrapped in a burqa-like covering.

She rarely allowed herself to be photographed in those years, but that rare image says a great deal about the world she came from. To outsiders, they were known as the “Taliban cult” or the “shawl women.” For Rose, it was simply life itself: the world in which she grew up after her family joined the cult.

Today, as she volunteers for national service at a boarding home for children removed from their families — a home very similar to, and located near, the one where she herself spent her later teenage years — Rose can define more clearly than ever just how abnormal the place she grew up in really was. “Everything was very detached. We moved all the time from place to place,” she says.

The cult, built on a sophisticated system of control by multiple authority figures who frequently change, is constantly evading the authorities. School was out of the question. From the moment her family joined the cult, when she was 8, she stopped studying.

‘The shock of my life’

Rose’s life was defined by wandering: from Jerusalem to Tiberias and from there to Bnei Brak, often at night, in order to evade the authorities. Sometimes they slept in cemeteries and at the graves of righteous figures. Every so often, someone would be added to or removed from the family.

“At one point, I was raising a baby who was not even connected to our family,” she says. What sounds absurd now felt almost self-evident to her at the time. “I was mature from a young age,” she says, because she always knew she had one purpose in life: “They teach you to prepare to be a mother. That is the role. That is what a woman is supposed to do in the world.”

One of her friends was already engaged at 11. Rose was told she was engaged — to a man she did not know and had never even met — when she was 14, two weeks before the planned wedding. “Relatively late,” she says. “He was in Jerusalem and I was in Tiberias,” she recalls. Although she had been prepared for that moment throughout her short life, when it finally arrived she was mainly “in the shock of my life. Just stunned.” Rose was brought to Jerusalem, to the place where the wedding was supposed to take place. But the ceremony never happened. Moments before it began, police raided the site and arrested everyone present. Rose was taken to a police station and from there to an emergency center. Afterward, by court order, she was formally removed from her home and transferred to a boarding school. [...]

For her, service at the boarding home is an opportunity to give back to the place that gave her safe ground and allowed her to choose a life different from the one laid out for her. It is also a deeply personal closing of the circle. “The children are my heart,” she says. “When a child chooses to share something with me, it is worth everything. It is the most meaningful thing I could have done.”

The psychological control and prohibitions: ‘You’ll go to hell’

The police raid on Rose’s child wedding was dramatic and traumatic, but it was far from the happy ending of the story. As the cliché goes, you can take the girl out of the cult, but you cannot take the cult out of the girl.

Another four years would pass before Rose decided, in a single phone call, that she was not going back. Reaching that moment required enormous patience and acceptance from the staff at the last boarding school where she was educated — an Or Shalom family home operated for and supervised by the Welfare Ministry. Eventually, because of the seeds planted during that period, and very much because of Rose herself, she decided to begin a new life.

Read the full article. It's very fortunate she came to her senses, considering all the intimidation tactics they brainwashed her with. Such cults have to be dismantled and dispersed, and her parents, whether they were Haredi or not, should be utterly ashamed of themselves for doing something that could've endangered her health and life, along with her humanity and dignity. Now, she's lucky to have found and regained it again.