Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on March 16, 2015

How Beatings and False Reports Pass for Talmud Teaching in Hasidic Enclave

Anya Ulinich

A young father in the insular Skverer sect, Shulem Deen took the one job available to him: teacher. In an exclusive excerpt from his forthcoming memoir, All Who Go Do Not Return, which chronicles his painful journey from 18-year-old newlywed to being expelled from New Square as a heretic, he recounts how the need to provide for his growing family led him to practices he would later question.

It was now fourteen years since my third-grade rebbe thwacked my palms for my profane drawing, eight years since my ninth-grade rebbe slapped me for eating a bag of potato chips during a lesson on liabilities for digging pits in public places. All that thwacking and slapping now came to mind as I tried to teach Srulik Schmeltzers sixth-grade class the laws of discarding leavened bread on the day before Passover. The boys chatted throughout the lesson, as if I werent there, some even getting out of their seats and strolling around.

Chaim Nuchem Braun, can you please sit down and keep quiet? I called to a skinny boy who had stood up to look out the window and shouted something to a friend across the room.

Chaim Nuchem Braun, can you please sit down and keep quiet? the boy mimicked, then grinned at his friends as he walked to his seat and the class burst into laughter. I could feel the blood rush to my head as my body froze. I could not process any thoughts beyond the feeling of humiliation. I felt a kind of physical weakness in my body, a tremor in my jaws, and I clenched my teeth to keep it from showing. It was the second day of a two-week job. I could not imagine how I would last two weeks. But how could I, a twenty-two-year-old man, be cowed by a class of ten-year-olds?

At 12:45, I walked the two blocks home for an hour of lunch, before I would return for the afternoon. Along Clinton Lane, near the site of a new home construction, I spotted a wire on the ground, at the side of the road. It looked almost exactly like the one my fourth-grade rebbe had used instead of a rod, a white length of round, hollow rubber. It was the perfect size, twice arms-length, just right to fold in half and hold at one end.

Halt arois di hant. I remembered the hundreds of times I had heard it. Hold out your hand. Without thinking, I picked up the rubber cord, wrapped it around my fingers, and then placed it inside my coat pocket.

There were the usual bouts of shouting and laughter across the classroom that afternoon, and I began to grow accustomed to it. I would not use the wire in my pocket, I decided. I would deal with the boys as best I could and somehow get through it. The next day, however, the boys grew even rowdier; when I called to Berry Glancz to stop speaking to the boy sitting next to him, his response sent me over the edge.

Ich feif dich uhn.

Read the rest here:

Lessons of Crime and Punishment in New Square Yeshiva

Category: Talmud
Tags: