by Julia Dahl
“Are you from Williamsburg?” asks chest hair.
“Gowanus,” says Iris, taking a second puff.
“Are you married?”
“Jesus Christ,” says Iris. She hands the joint back. Chest hair giggles (poor man doesn’t know what he’s gotten himself into) but before she can lay into him, we hear a commotion at the front gate.
“Is that him?” says sidecurls, straining to see over the half-dozen people who are crowded around a livery cab at the curb. Chest hair seems more interested in Iris than whoever has arrived, so sidecurls abandons him and joins the group escorting a man I assume is Dov Lowenstein up the stairs and into the synagogue.
“Do you know him?” I ask.
“From Facebook. I’ve read about him. Everyone hates him, but I don’t know. I wanted to see for myself.”
“Why do they hate him?” asks Iris.
“Because he calls the Chassidim a cult.”
“He does?”
“Yes, of course. Don’t you know? I understand he had a bad time. But he is hoping for a big payday.”
“We should go in,” I say.
“One more smoke?” says chest hair. He loves Iris.
I take her hand. “We’re good,” I say. “Thanks.”
We follow the rest of the smokers and stragglers into the multipurpose room. Iris grabs two more beers from our six-pack and we find two folding chairs along the edge of the room. As we wait, I blurt out: “I called my mom.”
“Excuse me?” she says, almost spitting out her beer.
“She didn’t pick up,” I say. “I tried twice. Straight to voice mail.”
She stares at me, her eyes glassy.
“You’re high,” I say.
“I know!” she says. “Wow.”
If she wasn’t high, Iris would probably have questions, but she’s just sort of staring at me, shaking her head. At the front of the room, Dov has taken off his jacket. He is wearing a white t-shirt with a rainbow Star of David on it, and his head is uncovered. He has very light hair, so light his eyebrows blend into his pale face. People start sitting down, but everyone is still talking. Finally, the boy with the sidecurls from outside, who is sitting in the front row, stands up and yells “Quiet!”
Dov steps forward to the standing mic at the front of the room. He opens a spiral notebook and sets it on the table beside him. “My name is Dovi Lowenstein,” he says, leaning forward. “But you probably know that.” The crowd murmurs a light laugh. “Let me ask you a question. How many of you know somebody who is gay?”
Iris and I raise our hands. I look around and about half the room does the same.
“Okay, put your hands down. Now, how many of you know somebody who is gay and Chassidish?” About the same number raise their hands.
“Yes,” says Dov. “You see. Yes. Now how many of you know Chassidim who are gay and married?”
Fewer hands this time, but Dov’s point is made.
“Yes, you see?” he says. “This is what I am talking about. Why would a gay man marry a woman? Why! Because he has no choice. His parents tell him to marry and so he marries. Or she marries. What else can he do? If he does not want to lose everything he has to pretend. He has to keep who he really is a secret.” He pauses and picks up his notebook, looks at what he’s written, remembers, continues. “Now, how many of you know someone who went to New Hope?”
About a fifth of the room raises a hand.
“And are they still gay?”
“Yes!” shouts a man at the back. Everyone turns around.
“My friend!” says Dov, gesturing to the man. “Was it you?” The man, who appears, like Dov, to be in his mid-twenties, nods. He is wearing jeans and a hooded sweatshirt with BROOKLYN written across it. I don’t see a yarmulke. “How old were you?”
“Sixteen,” says the man.
Dov says something to the man in Yiddish. The man says something back and the room becomes agitated, people whisper to each other, shift broadly in their seats.
“What did he say?” asks Iris.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“We will talk later,” says Dov to the man. “But see? See?” He is trying to bring the crowd’s attention back to the front of the room. “And that is why I said it is a cult. Not Judaism. No. But the way we grew up. You know. In Williamsburg and Monsey and Roseville. It is a cult because you cannot get out without being damaged. You cannot get out without losing your family. It is a cult because you are isolated and insulated. The problem isn’t the religion. Judaism is a beautiful thing. Community is a beautiful thing. The problem is that the people who are born into it have no choice. And the cult, it is not about Hashem. It is about fear. Everybody thinks their neighbor is spying on them! Your parents, maybe, your sisters and brothers, they believe what the rebbe tells them. If the rebbe says send your son to this place, they have doctors, they will make him well. What do they do?”
Under their breaths, people respond. In the row behind me, the woman who asked us if we were married whispers, “You send him.”
“Yes! You send him! Because the rebbe knows best. But they are not doctors! They are frauds! Everyone knows this. Everyone outside. But your parents, and your brothers and sisters, they do not know this. Because they are in a cult! They may be wonderful people. They may be kind and they may mean well. But they are in a cult! Their minds have been abducted by the wrong priorities. Their priorities are appearances. And if you make a different choice—if you dare to choose something else—pack your bags!”
Dov is a riveting presence. I’ve never seen someone speak so viscerally from the heart. His remarks seem both prepared and completely spontaneous; eloquent and clunky. He gestures wildly, waving his arms as he tells stories, his voice up and down—practically shrieking at points, then mumbling and making little jokes with his friends who are gathered at the side of the room. Like so many of the ultra-Orthodox I’ve met, he has an accent, and for the first time it strikes me as quite beautiful. Iris’s mouth is slightly open; she looks hypnotized. Dov talks for the next forty minutes. He says he was born in Brooklyn and moved to Roseville when he was a child. He says he was never sexually attracted to girls and at age fifteen his sister caught him kissing another Haredi boy. When his mother confronted him he told her he was gay. He said he found the word on the Internet when he rode his bike to the public library and looked up “boys who want to kiss boys.” (Everyone laughs at this.) A year later, his parents sent him to New Hope, and when he ran away from the program, they cut him off and he lived on the street and with friends and people he met on Facebook. I wonder if he ever stayed at the Coney Island house. He says he started speaking out when one of the boys he knew from New Hope committed suicide. And then, he says, he was approached by the lawyers. He stops speaking abruptly.
“I have been talking a long time. Thank you for coming. If you would like to get more information about the lawsuit you can talk to me.”
He steps back from the mic and the room fills with applause. The front two rows are on their feet. Dov suddenly looks shy. He smiles and puts his head down, then grabs a friend from the front row and drags him to the buffet table.
People stop clapping and immediately start talking.
“Did you know about any of that?” Iris asks.
“I knew gay people weren’t accepted. But, I mean, they’re barely accepted at my dad’s church.”
“I’ve read about gay conversion therapy,” says Iris. “There have definitely been articles about it. You know Brice’s sister is gay.” Brice is the nice young man that Iris has been dating for a few months. I don’t really get the attraction—he doesn’t seem terribly interesting. He works in men’s fashion, which is one strike against him in my book. And he has highlights, which is two. Iris hasn’t brought him around much. But I guess I haven’t been very fun lately.
“I didn’t know,” I say. “You never told me.”
“You never asked.”
True. “So did she go through gay conversion t
herapy?”
“No, but he said her girlfriend did. She’s from Utah and her family was Mormon. Anyway, in California, I think they actually outlawed it. Or maybe they tried to.”
“They should,” I say.
Iris nods. “That guy was amazing,” she says. Dov is surrounded by people; everyone seems to have a question or a story to share. “Are you gonna talk to him?”
“Yeah,” I say, “but it looks like it might be a wait.”
“So we wait. I’m getting another beer. I have cottonmouth. I’m calling in sick tomorrow.”
Iris goes to the buffet, and I lean against a covered piano in the corner of the room, watching. It’s almost midnight on a weekday, but the event shows no sign of slowing down. A group of young men in black hats brings in a case of beer. Three frum girls are bent over an iPhone, laughing. A teenage boy in Borough Park black is challenging a man maybe ten years his senior to explain why, if it’s okay to be gay, it isn’t okay to be a heroin addict or a prostitute or a murderer?
“If there are no rules, where do you stop?” he asks.
After about twenty minutes, I see an opening and approach Dov by the buffet table.
“Hi,” I say, “I’m Rebekah. From the Trib.”
“Rebekah!” he says, opening his arms for a hug. I oblige. “Thank you for coming.” He looks to his friends and says, “This is the reporter I was telling you about. She found out who killed Rivka Mendelssohn. She’s writing about Pessie.”
Dov’s friends nod and say hello.
“Do you have time to talk?” I ask.
“Of course,” he says. “Let me finish here. There is a diner nearby. Can we meet there in half an hour?”
“Sure,” I say. Dov gives me directions and Iris and I step out of the noisy, overheated synagogue and into the nearly still late night. Ocean Parkway is a four-lane highway with wide pedestrian and bicycle promenades leading to the beach at Coney Island on either side. It’s a mix of residential and commercial here. Big prewar apartment buildings next to doctors’ offices and day care centers, many with Hebrew lettering on the signs. We pass a Haredi man sitting alone on a bench, talking on his cell phone. He turns away from us as we pass.
“You seem a lot better,” Iris says as we walk. “Do you think the medication is helping?”
“I guess it must be,” I say. And then: “Thanks. For, you know. Taking care of me. I know I’ve been a pain in the ass. I just…” Just what? Just everything.
“It’s okay,” she says. “So you called your mom.”
“Yeah. I can’t help but think she, like, sees my number and is purposely ignoring me.”
“That’s dumb. She’s the one that called you.”
“And now she’s disappeared again.”
“You’re the most ridiculous pessimist I know. She probably forgot to pay her bill or something.”
“Maybe.”
“Have you told your dad she called?”
“No,” I say. “I thought I’d wait until I actually talk to her.”
Dov and his friend Frannie get to the diner about twenty minutes after we do.
Frannie tells us she was also frum, but grew up in Baltimore. She and Dov met through Facebook, and now they’re roommates, along with four other people, in a house near Poughkeepsie. The rent is cheap, and none of them like the big city. Dov says that they’ve both applied to the community college there, but won’t hear whether they’ve been accepted until the summer.
“Pessie’s sister Rachel told me that Pessie had a bad reaction to her medication, passed out, and drowned,” says Dov. “But when I asked what medication she wouldn’t tell me.”
“Her husband said she’d been on antidepressants since after the baby was born,” I say. “But you can’t, like, OD on those.”
Dov shakes his head. “You know that, and I know that, but Pessie’s family probably thinks Prozac is the same thing as, like, OxyContin. They probably heard ‘antidepressants’ and assumed she wanted to kill herself. She still has sisters and brothers who need to get married and a suicide in the family would make shidduch much more difficult.”
“What’s that?” asks Iris.
“Shidduch is the matchmaking process,” says Frannie. “And every little thing matters.”
Dov nods. “And who wants to tell people their sister committed suicide? Blaming it on the goyish medication they don’t know anything about is easier. But none of it makes any sense.”
“What do you think happened?” I ask.
“I really don’t know,” he says.
“But you don’t think it was suicide.”
Dov wipes his hand across his face. “I don’t. She just … wasn’t the type. Some of us don’t fit in from the start, but Pessie did. She was a happy kid. Kind of a goof, you know? Her mother was a great cook and she sold food for holidays and stuff. There were always people in and out of her house. And I think she was one of eleven or twelve.…”
“Twelve kids?” gawks Iris. “Holy shit.” I kick her under the table.
Dov nods. “In a house like that, there just aren’t enough adults to keep an eye on everybody. It can be easy to get into trouble. Her older brother went OTD back in, like, the nineties. I think he got into drugs.”
“A lot of people do,” says Frannie.
I’ve heard this before. Iris and I take the fact that we can dabble in drinking and drugs and casual sex, or take the occasional “sick day” from work, without really having to worry that one indulgence will lead to too many. We’ve had years to learn self-control and moderation in a world full of temptation and moral relativity. Not Dov and Pessie. Like the boy at the chulent asked: If there are no rules, how do you know where to stop?
“It caused her parents a lot of heartache and I know that upset Pessie. She used to say that she thought it was very selfish of her brother to leave like he did. But it was easy for her to say that. She was pious. She really believed that all the rules and rituals were important.”
Dov pauses. “I haven’t seen her in a few years, though. Since before she got married. If you can find him, you should talk to Sam Kagan. He probably knew her better than anyone.”
Iris and I look at each other. Kagan. That’s Aviva’s last name.
“Sam Kagan?” I ask.
“They were engaged at one point. We all grew up together in Borough Park and our families moved to Roseville around the same time. His family and Pessie’s lived a couple streets away from each other. There was a lot of turmoil in his family; his mom died in childbirth and his father never remarried. One of the sisters was OTD, too. Boys and girls aren’t supposed to hang out, especially if they’re not related, but no one noticed they’d become best friends. By the time they were sixteen, the families were discussing marriage. They got engaged, but there were big problems: he had been abused.” Dov shakes his head. “Monsters like that are very good at finding the boys who are different.”
“It’s really hard to be gay and frum,” says Frannie. She has been slumped low in her seat picking at a Greek salad while Dov has been talking. “The number one thing we are supposed to do is to make a big family. When you are gay you are shamed because you are gay. But also you are shamed because you betray Hashem by not marrying and making more Jews.”
Dov nods. “Sam loved her, I think. But not the way she loved him. She would have married him even knowing he was gay. She probably thought she could fix him. It was a while before she agreed to consider another match. And Sam’s been in a lot of trouble since he left. We haven’t spoken in years. His family sent him to New Hope, too. I found him on Facebook when the lawsuit was first getting started and asked if he wanted to talk about joining. He was, like, fuck lawsuits, I’ve got a gun.”
Dov purses his lips for effect, then sighs.
“I’m glad you’re looking into this, Rebekah,” he says. “I think what you did writing about Rivka Mendelssohn was very brave. And very important. A lot of people don’t agree. I’m sure you’ve read the blogs. People can b
e such assholes online when they know they’re anonymous. Believe me, I know. I’ve been getting death threats for, like, years. But maybe it takes someone outside the community to really investigate the bad things that are happening. I don’t know how Pessie died, but I don’t think she killed herself. And if all she was taking was Prozac, it doesn’t make sense she OD’d. But if that’s what her family is saying I doubt anyone in the community is going to do anything about it. They just want everyone to go back to normal and pretend no one has problems that can’t be solved by prayer.
“But prayer doesn’t make you straight,” he continues. “That’s why I’m in this lawsuit. And prayer doesn’t do police work. Her sister says she had a reaction to her pills, but how could anybody know? There was no autopsy.”
Dov wipes his mouth with his napkin and sets it on top of his plate.
“Do you know if Sam has a sister named Aviva?” I ask, feeling my face flush.
“Yeah,” he says. “I think that was the one who went OTD. She was a lot older than us, though. I never met her.”
“Do you know where she lives now?” asks Iris.
Dov shakes his head. “No idea.”
It’s after three when we leave the diner. Dov and I exchange phone numbers and he promises to call or text if he hears anything about Pessie or Sam.
In the livery cab home, Iris asks about the blogs Dov mentioned.
“Have you read any of them?”
“No,” I say. And I don’t want to, I think. Dov said he’d received death threats. And he said it with a kind of conciliatory tone—like I might have, too.
“Are you gonna look Sam up on Facebook?”
“I guess,” I say. My lips feel swollen, buzzing with the anxiety shooting up from my stomach. “If he’s OTD and she is, too, maybe they’re close.”
“Maybe he knows where she is.”
“Maybe,” I say. “Or maybe she bailed on him, too.”
We get out in front of our building on Third Avenue. The F train rumbles above us. Across the street, a sanitation truck idles. One of the men who collect steel in grocery carts and push it to the scrapyard on Smith Street rolls by, his cart empty.
