News

But, to hear some people tell it, Sarah might as well be dead.

For one thing, she is guilty of an extreme sacrilege. She denies the existence of God.

"Sometimes I lie to myself – but there is no God," she says. "Definitely not. I wish there were."

This is a familiar lament, for there is no shortage of atheists in the world, but precious few of them were born into the family of a conservative rabbi and raised in what many would consider a stifling domain, the austere, God-fearing world of the haredim, as ultra-Orthodox Jews are known.

Sarah is a rarity in Israel. She is a "yotze," the term used here for someone who has left the haredi world behind.

This is her story, a young woman's chronicle of flight, trauma and redemption.

It is also the tale of a controversial organization that each year helps dozens of young Israelis to flee what they have come to regard as a cultural and religious prison.

Escape from that world is almost always a one-way trip. Once a haredi leaves, there is no turning back.

"Very, very few ever return," says Yael Zeevi, head of Hillel, a non-profit agency that specializes in helping disenchanted young ultra-Orthodox Jews to establish themselves in the often forbidding world that unfolds beyond the high, holy barriers of a fundamentalist faith. "The disconnection from their families is very hard."