HasidiCult

If you got past the title, good for you! Not many want to hear about my sexually repressed ass. I guess you are one of the weird few.  Growing up in an uptight religious community, I thought little of sexuality. Most of my friends' parents didn't touch in front of the kids- no, not even casual touch. There's this law (or tradition? I don't even know what it's classified as, to be honest) that couples should not touch at all when the woman is on her period, and to prevent the kids from knowing when that was, they don't touch at all. Also, they claimed some crap about PDAs being reserved for the bedroom. As if your hands brushing while passing the salt is a PDA. I know. In that case, I have had many, many affectionate touches with various cashiers. What a whore I am. Who did my parents raise me to be?! So, I had dreadfully little understanding of sexuality. Even though I was sexually abused as a child, I didn't understand what was happening. It felt awful and

Shabbos, the weekly Jewish holiday, should be a day of rest. But for survivors, it can be just the opposite. I was going to write this as an inspiration piece, full of encouragement of how you can keep going and keep Shabbos even when the going is really rough. (Haha, as if.) But then, I thought, to hell with that. Let's be real.  Keeping Shabbos as a trauma survivor is hell. Plain and simple. Majority of my coping mechanisms are melacha ( which is the term for forbidden work on Shabbos), so I can't cope with the tremendous amount of anxiety I feel. Listening to music? Nope. Putting on lotion? Nada. Calling a friend? Can't do that either. Cutting myself? Just kidding. Don't do that anymore. Plus, all of my major traumas happened on Shabbos, so that doesn't help things much. Even just thinking of the day gets me jittery. As a child, I was molested by a predator in the neighborhood who attended the same Shul (synagogue) as my family. He also happens to be a huge donor

          Sitting at the Friday night Shabbos table last week, I was hit with some shocking news. Casually, one of our guests threw the bombshell that Malka Leifer was extradited to Australia from Israel.      "What, you didn't hear yet? It was all over the news last week."       She said it so casually, as if discussing last night's meatball and spaghetti dinner or the latest celebrity gossip. Meanwhile, my jaw had dropped so low that I was incapable of forming coherent words. After so many attempts to extradite her, countless interventions of the three sisters at the forefront of the case, and the strained relations between Israel and Australia, it had almost become somewhat of a righteous yet unattainable goal. The kind of thing that you hope for desperately but resign yourself to the thought of it never being achieved.      The fact that it was now a reality stunned me speechless. The relief and ecstasy that the news brought me rendered me a jiggling glob of jello

     Thirteen years after Malka Leifer fled Australia to escape 74 charges of rape, indecent assault, and child sex abuse charges, among others, she is finally extradited to Australia. This followed attempts in 2014 and 2016 to extradite her, both of which were unsuccessful due to Leifer's fabrication of mental illness that deemed her unfit to stand trial. Israeli Deputy Minister of Health Yaakov Litzman is being investigated by police for interfering into the mental health assessment and pressuring psychiatrists to proclaim Leifer unfit to stand trial. Only last year, once an Israeli psychiatric panel declared that she was lying about her mental illness, was her case set back into motion. Israel began the process of extraditing her yet again, leading to the Supreme Court rejecting a final appeal against her extradition. After that, Israel's justice minister, Avi Nissenkorn, signed an order to send Leifer back to Australia.     Leifer has already had her first hearing, at which