I said once to a friend of me , a religious woman who was a doctor and had many charidi women as patients , "those women look very happy" You are wrong , Charles , was her answer . The only place where they can tell their problems , is in my consultation room . And sometimes they only cry , and not out of happines , the contrary . This was abroad .

strange birds like myself who need a friend from the "double agent" crowd to scan the article from Yedioth for them because they don't have secular newspapers at home, This are your words. And you try to defende this kind of society????

Oh my God how funny is that? She's actually not far wrong......at least we work to earn those things.

Great job of balancing the reality of life as a religious Jew. I agree completely. Kol Hakavod.

about the secular people who are fed up with the emptiness of their society, the emptyness of their lives who revolve around shopping for "mutagim", gossiping and going "huts la arets". The ones who come back because they decide that there is a G-d who loves us and the observance of his laws brings happiness. The FFB's who leave the fold do not see anymore the beauty of G-d, their eyes turned to the tv and what it's selling, but in time they too will find how empty the other side is. People without boundaries are miserable especially when they mature. But hey! who expects those kind of stories from YNET? After all how will they pat themselves on the shoulder to reinforce their cleverness?

As a secular person with friends who used to be secular, it also gets tiresome hearing about how their former lifestyle was materialistic, selfish, violent, unethical, ignorant, meaningless, and alienated.

A pious person, a hermit, or an unbeliever. Blessings to you.

What did you say in several paragraphs that you could not say in one... that Haredi woman suffer? Leaving is difficult? This is the journalistic equivalent of elevator music!

Seriously..get a life..learn to write and stop talking about nothing. Who the frig cares if these women turned secular or not..Another divorce contemplating her navel..Big effin deal.. These women dont amount to a hill of beans and to waste time thinking about them and such is simply silly. More often than you would like to imagine, their kids grow up with issues that warrant professional mental health experts attention. Get real and speak about issues that matter...

She goes away for awhile...and she comes back a WRITER. So as the poet once wrote about the garden; In between the overgrown Some hardy lilies grew And in amongst these lilies This tender blade of me....Gd knew

for no other reason than it was a looksee into a society about which I have little firsthand knowledge. Of course there are women who are miserable in the Haredi way of life, who feel hamstrung but lack the experience and reflective ability to know why. For those who "escape" this trap, there will be an immediate "black and white" censure of their former way of life. This is clear whenever anyone ever escapes a way of life to which they belonged but became disillusioned with. From a psychological point of view, it's natural and logical to voice one's hatred about the group one breaks away from. This once occurred amongst women as they became feminists and escaped what they perceived as husband/jailers. Eventually, as one matures, one can look back with a more balanced approach. For a Haredi woman, this might include the goodness inherent in the way of life or the piety or the humility or some such aspect. It takes a while to reach this point, however, and some may never reach it.

If you have so little first-hand knowledge, why are you usually so busy commenting on and criticising their lifestyle?

Ok, so I like to think of myself as reasonably intelligent...but that article made little or no sense to me. The author wrote it as though she and I know each other well and she therefore could begin a conversation in the middle of the fourth paragraph and I , the reader would understand. Well, we don't know each other and I don't know what the heck all her flowery words were supposed to mean!

Don't agree with any of your contentions, but eize chaticha! I'd hit that!

I guess every sector of Jewish religion has its cons and pros......but i really believe that if someone isnt happy in their lifestyle, perhaps its more of a psychological problem rather than a religions one.......a person that goes from religious to secular, might still find that their problems are not solved.

You`ll notice that the brunt of my commentary was on the principle of leaving or escaping from a situation or society to which one was affiliated for a long long time. I understand from previous posts of yours that you are a very concrete person who lacks the ability to think abstractly. Your posts are always short and always deriscive. You probably don`t even realize when you are unmasked such as now. As to my lack of firsthand knowledge of the Haredi lifestyle, I note with interest that you always write as if you know something when you really have no knowledge at all. But given my experience reading your posts, it`s apparent that you really lack the wherewithal to even recognize when you possess no knowledge about a situation or event whatsoever. In short, you continue to waste our time on this forum. You add nothing and, to an extent, actually detract from our ability to educate ourselves due to the effort it takes to read your comments.

I read an interesting opening that continues too long with no point, then I reach the ending and realize that all this writer had done is type a rant, a raving introduction with no body and no conclusion one article after another and I am left to search the internet for answers such as "what the hell is this person trying to write about?"

A retied psychologist educating himself on a talkback forum? No wonder you are so well-informed.

Whats the story behind "A hole in the sheet"????? A friend of mine who owns a hotel in Antwerp, Belgium had actually refused to rent hotel rooms to Jewish couples because of this "Hole in the sheet" business. Is it true that a jewish man is not allowed to touch the skin of his partner while being intimate, and thus a hole in the sheet becomes necessary? lol

I am ultra-orthodox (or whatever you wish to call the black orthodox) and have spent my life studying Torah. I have only ever come across one oblique reference to this practice and that is a 1500 year old text in which the subject was mentioned as the extreme and unusual practice of an individual pietist. The halachic (legal) and even more so the kabbalistic (mystical) view requires total physical contact :-) . I did once read though that this is/ was common practice in catholic central america - whether it derives from earlier native practice or through catholicism I do not know. Perhaps someone in the know could enlighten us.

They are busy with kids, school, family, friends, holidays, synagogue, shopping and a million other things. They work hard, but have lots of support from the community.

Why does Tali have to get someone to scan the article for her? If she wants to look then she should admit she wants to look at something in a "secular" newspaper and not be such a hypercrite. If she doesn't want to read anything else in yediot she could always excersize self control and only read the one article. And if she read something extra why would that matter?

"...the basic need of the average formerly religious person to turn the entire haredi society into a silent, black-and-white horror movie. ..." One doesn't need to be formerly religious to be so disgusted at the Haredim. Neither does one have to be secular. As Professor Menachem Friedman has shown, the Haredim are NOT keeping traditional pre-war Eastern European Ashkenazi Judaism; in his own words, "In my opinion the Eastern European, Ashkenazi character of haredi Jewry remains questionable to this day." See his articles at http://www.biu.ac.il/SOC/so/mfriedman.html; see especially "Life Tradition and Book Tradition in the Development of Ultra Orthodox Judaism" and "The Lost Kiddush Cup: Changes in Ashkenazic Haredi Culture - A Tradition in Crisis". See also Professor Haym Soloveitchik's "Rupture and Reconstruction: The Transformation of Contemporary Orthodoxy", http://www.lookstein.org/links/orthodoxy.htm. So it's not only the formerly religious who despise the Haredim; those who strive to keep authentic Orthodox Judaism also despise the Haredim for destroying their beloved religion and turning it into a pathetic caricature of its former glory as an esh dat, a fiery law. I mostly follow the German Neo-Orthodox approach (which is a conscious imitation of pre-Reconquista Judeo-Arabic Judaism) and the Turkish/Balkan Judeo-Spanish approach. NOTHING in Haredism anywhere near resembles what I know to be historic Orthodox Judaism. An example: the Talmud says, "A man is forbidden to marry off his daughter until she is old enough to say, 'I want to marry so-and-so'". Tosafot says that the Ashkenazim violate this because they were afraid the Christians might start a pogrom any moment, and so it was vital to ensure that families would be formed as soon as possible, and there was simply no time to let youth choose their spouses. Pray tell, what are the Haredim thinking today when they marry a young woman off after a two-hour meeting? Are they afraid the hilonim are going to start a pogrom? (Based on the recent parking-lot riots and accusations of Nazism directed at Hadassah medical staff, maybe the Haredim are in fact this paranoid.) Or maybe the Haredim literally read the words "...until she is old enough to say..."; the Gemara says she has to be old enough to say "I want to marry so-and-so", but (to the perverted Haredi mind) it doesn't say she actually has to say it, or that she has to be listened to, only that hypothetically/theoretically she has to be old enough to say it! For good reason did Rabbi Dr. Eliezer Berkovits, the student of the renowned gaon Rabbi Yehiel Weinberg, speak of "Karaites of the Oral Law". So count me as a hater of Haredism as well. The hilonim and Reform Jews make not keep the Torah, but at least they're honest about it. The Haredim, on the other hand, claim to keep the Torah even as they pervert it beyond all recognition. It's a hillul hashem and a bearing G-d's name in vain if there ever was one.

for sheep who aren't intelligent enough to understand it's all bs. if you want to live a restricted lifestyle based on all sorts of illogical superstitions i have no problem with that. but if you refuse to work and pay taxes, and have huge families that i have to pay for then i'm against you and your kind in every possible way. stop the welfare state of supporting people too lazy to work.

AS ALWAYS. Just ignore it, as most of us now do. If you read Hebrew go to haredim.co.il go to תרבות then to einfeld and veinfeld by Rifka Schwartz.

Once again another story against Haredim. Any dig you can do then you do it, you make people class all Haredim under the same umbrella. You tell the story of one woman who ran away from being a Gerrer Haredi lifestyle but what about those who go from Secular to Religious, forget which sector, as all sectors of a religious lifestyle seem to be taboo to you. I myself am modern orthodox and I have friends who are Haredi and very happy. I don't see you write about the many unhappy marriages amongst the secular, non religious couples, just go the Rabbanot today and see how many of them are filing for divorce. I don't see the need to write about the televisions in the cupboard, the newspapers or the hole in the sheets you forget about the internet. Your just another trouble maker trying to add her own little bit of poison. Why don't you mention the counting of clean days before sexual intercourse, the mikva and so on that many secular people do as well In short you make me sick.

Danny you should be thankful, as you put it, huge families, if they were not the number of Jews in this country would be out weighed by the Muslims. Islam is taking over the world we can't let it take over our own country. As for taxpayers, the wife normaly works so, don't believe all what you read. And go to the unemployment offices and see how many secular people are collecting your money, there is work out there but their to lazy to go and find a job.