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.”
