Anyone watching this series on Netflix? I’m a little more than halfway through and am finding it very interesting. It’s about an Orthodox Jewish young woman that escapes her family binds in NY and goes to Berlin.
What is most fascinating to me are the customs and rules the Orthodox Jews follow. Not many of them are explained, so I’ve been Googling like a madwoman.
Does anyone here have any knowledge of their customs?
Here’s an interesting book I’ve read on the subject:
Around Sarah’s Table: Ten Hasidic Women Share Their Stories of Life, Faith, and Tradition,
by Rivka Zakutinsky and Yaffa Leba Gottlieb.
It discusses matchmaking, dietary rules, ritual baths, etc.
There are quite a few of us Orthodox Jews on this board. If you want to post specifics, I’ll do my best (and I’m sure others will be along to join in) to explain things, but I don’t subscribe to NetFlix, so I haven’t seen the series, so I don’t have independent knowledge of what customs and practices you see that you’re unfamiliar with.
Thanks for allowing me to ask you a few questions.
I was curious about the wedding and marriage traditions. Of course, I don’t know if what I’m seeing on this series is completely factual.
Why do the women shave their heads and then wear wigs after they are married?
After the wedding ceremony and before the reception, the couple was put into a private room, served a bowl of soup and were told that they had 7 minutes (I think that was the amount of time). What was that for?
Why do the women and men wear head coverings to bed?
When the couple was intimate, they didn’t remove their night gowns. The man also wore a special vest-type thing over his. Is this a common traditional thing?
Are arranged marriages still common? Are couples able to marry because they are in love?
I hope you aren’t offended by these questions. Feel free to ignore me if so and I apologize.
They cover their hair (whether with wigs or other head-coverings) after marriage because it’s a particular aspect of women’s beauty which is supposed to be reserved for her husband only. This requirement is implied in the Bible. The shaving of the head is not a universal custom among Orthodox Jews. For many Orthodox women, it’s a matter of convenience, not tradition - short hair is easier to cover, and it’s easier to manage when visiting the Mikvah (ritual purification bath) every month. (When one immerses in a Mikvah, there must be nothing between the water and any part of their body, so any unattached strands of hair are impediments to valid immersion. Long hair needs more brushing, which leads to more detached hairs than shorter hair.) But many Orthodox Jewish women will put up with the extra work of managing their long hair.
Among Hasidim, the shaving might be a traditional higher modesty stricture, but I’m not 100% certain.
That’s a sort of legalistic way of certifying that the newly-married couple has consummated their relationship. Obviously, it would not be modest for there to be witnesses to their actually having sex, but in Jewish law, there is a standing legal assumption that a man and woman who are not close blood relatives who are alone together for long enough to have sex have actually done so, so being locked up together uninterrupted for that period of time serves such a purpose. In reality rather than “legal fiction”, it’s darned unlikely that the newly-married couple will actually attempt the real thing right there in the wedding hall. As a practical measure, they are given something to eat during this time, because they have traditionally fasted the day before the wedding, and it will be quite a while of dancing before they can actually sit down and eat the formal wedding meal with the other guests.
I’ve never known a woman to wear a head covering to bed. Men wear head coverings (i.e., yarmulkes, or kippas) all the time, it’s a traditional way of symbolizing that there is always something “above” him. There’s not really a traditional requirement to wear one when sleeping, but many (myself included) are so used to wearing it that it’s not really comfortable to be without it.
Not at all. Orthodox Jewish couples get intimate in the buff like others (or at least, are ALLOWED to…I can’t speak for every couple, of course). There’s some persistent myth that Jews “do it through a hole in a sheet”. I’m pretty sure I know where in the Talmud the source for this myth is, but suffice it to say that it is not operative Jewish law.
The “vest” that the man wore is probably a “tallit katan” which all Orthodox Jewish men wear on a daily basis…but not to bed.
Arranged marriages, in the sense that the couple is betrothed to one another with no input from themselves, are absolutely not common, if they happen at all. In the wider Orthodox Jewish world, courting, dating and marriage is really what you’d expect of the same in the wider world, except without the possibility of physical contact prior to marriage. People who know a boy and girl they think would get along well together will suggest that the two date one another, and if the two of them agree, they’ll go out on dates to see if they get along well, fall in love, and get married to one another. If they don’t find themselves to be compatible, they go their separate ways and try to find someone else.
Among Hasidim, the boy and girl still meet with one another but it’s less what we’d think of as a date and more of a conversation in someone’s house, and at the same time, the boy’s and girl’s parents are meeting in the next room to discuss with one another their children and any practical aspects to their getting married, should the couple like one another. The couple certainly has the option to say no if they don’t like one another, but more likely when they say yes, it’s more a matter of not finding anything strongly negative about one another than the intense positive of “falling in love” that comes from developing a relationship over a longer time. Generally, the attitude is that if they like one another, then love can develop during marriage, and does not need to be achieved before marriage.
No one is forced into an arranged marriage. That said, there are no doubt those who when they agree to a marriage are very young and sheltered and conditioned to have absolute trust their parents and may later come to feel that they hadn’t really been given a choice.
Thank you! It’s all very interesting. I finished the series yesterday, so I have one more question for you.
At the Passover meal, everything in the kitchen was covered in tin foil. Items on the wall or on the counter were wrapped up and the countertops were totally covered. I don’t think there was anything not covered.
The Jews depicted in the series are Satmars, who are among the most extreme of the Orthodox groups. They are as far from being representative of ordinary Jews (even modern Orthodox Jews) as snake-handling sects are from ordinary Christians. In fact, even this doesn’t express the full extent of the extremism of the Satmars and other fundamentalist Orthodox sects.
The foil in the kitchen was to isolate any kosher-for-Passover food items from possible contact with non-KFP foods. During Passover, Jews are not allowed to eat any foods with leavening in them (known as chametz). As with all things, there is a range of compliance with this general principle, so very observant Jews will remove all traces of chametz from their houses as part of a very thorough spring cleaning, and less observant ones may merely collect and isolate all leavened foods in the garage, or in cabinets that are taped shut. (This is what we will be doing in our house next week.)
The Satmars in Unorthodox undoubtedly cleaned that communal kitchen very thoroughly in preparation for Passover, but still covered everything in foil to be absolutely certain that no trace of chametz that might not have been cleaned away could come in contact with the Passover meal.
You may also be interested in reading about the eruv, which was shown as broken in the very first shot of the first episode, and is the reason why all the women were waiting around inside the building and why Esty couldn’t walk out with the small packet she had been holding, and had to go back upstairs and hide the few things she wanted to carry inside her clothes.
FYI, Shabbat begins on the east coast of the U.S. in a couple of hours, so do not expect any further replies from cmkeller or any other Orthodox Jews until sometime on Saturday evening, their local time, when Shabbat ends.
I am not that observant, so if I can, I may reply within the next 26 hours. But I’m nowhere near as well-informed on Judaism as cmkeller and the other Orthodox Dopers.
I did computer work for a Haredi group that produced Shabbaton, so every weekend from Thursday evening until Sunday morning, for the better part of 2005, I was Haredi.
I got so used to wearing skirts and 3/4 sleeves and covering my hair, that I dressed that way most of the time, because it felt weird not to be. I found myself keeping a lot of the customs at home. Not all, but many.
I also went to many of the workshops at the shabbaton where the customs were elaborated.
I’ll reiterate what everyone else has said, just so you know it’s not only one opinion.
I do not know an Orthodox couple, including Haredi (albeit, I do not know much about Chasidim, and I know only American families), and Chabad, who did not in some way, “broker” the marriage. No one has a “meet cute” story. Few couples met by happenstance, courted, then married. Many were introduced by a marriage broker because they were interested in marrying. Some were introduced by people who said “I thought you would make a good couple.” Some people’s parents brokered their marriage.
No couple ever had their marriage brokered without their input, even young couples, and no person I know ever married who did not feel ready for marriage for some reason, albeit, young marriages are common-- but people get lots of support early in a marriage. They get financial support from both sides of the family, and lots of support from the community. Older people help by sometimes renting them homes with a rent-to-own option, or rent them cheaply, or sometimes let them move in during an escrow period. Rabbis sometimes help young couples find co-signers for their first homes and cars from the community if their parents are not living, or are otherwise unable to do so.
When young couples have five children in their first seven years of marriage, they get lots of help from the community with childcare.
So many of the young marriages are successful, because a lot of the stressors that cause young marriages to fail are not present in Orthodox communities.
Women do not always shave their heads, albeit, I have known some who did right before a wedding, but then let it grow back. It marked a new start, and meant that the hair she shared with her husband had truly never been seen by anyone else, because she began covering her head from the time she shaved it. She does not repeatedly shave it.
I have not met an Orthodox couple in a successful marriage (nearly all of them) who did not appear to be in love. Orthodox couples do not generally touch one another in public, but you can still tell there is much affection between them.
My aunt, who did not come from an Orthodox family, just a typical old-world one had parents who had a brokered marriage. Her parents met several times before their marriage, although the first meetings were chaperones, and the ones that were not, were in the open (at restaurants, for example). After a couple of months, and several meetings, they agreed to the marriage. It survived their separation during the Holocaust, and losing two children. It survived resettling in the US, and restarting here, and they were married almost 60 years before her mother died. Her father was never the same after he lost his wife. Really. He had always been a very strong, and in-control person, who, it seemed, could do anything, even when he was old. In the first year after his wife died, he seemed to age about ten years. He couldn’t seem to find pleasure in anything, except to a small extent, in his grandchildren. After maybe three tears, he was doing a little better. Three years after that, he died, and everyone was a little relieved for him.
So, brokered marriages are not like the one in Fiddler, where the couple did not meet until their wedding day. Those kind of marriages did happen, but they happened in the days of the shtetl, when Jews needed to get permission from the gentile government to travel, so sometimes it was not possible to meet until the wedding day.
Wow, that’s a timely question! Passover is next week, and such preparations have been going on for weeks.
On Passover, Jews are not allowed to eat leavened grain products. It is a general rule of Kosher food (and the same applies to the food laws that are specific to Passover) that a) if a Kosher food absorbs flavor of a non-Kosher food, that renders it not Kosher (I’m over-simplifying, but this will do for a quick explanation), and that b) such a flavor transfer can be effected by the application of heat. So let’s say someone has a frying pan in which they fried a pancake. The pan then absorbs some flavor from the pancake. Later, someone fries an omelette in the pan. The heat causes the pan to expel the pancake’s flavor and the omelette to absorb it from the pan. Therefore, the omelette (not inherently a grain product) has absorbed the flavor of the pancake, rendering it unfit for eating on Passover.
There are ways of purging residual flavor from pots and pans made of metal. However, other materials are more problematic in this regard, and that includes the plastics that many countertops are made from. In order to use on Passover the same kitchen surfaces that are used throughout the year which have likely absorbed some flavor from hot leavened foods throughout the year, the best solution is to cover the counters and surfaces so that the Passover food is not touching the surfaces that actually absorbed those flavors.
Thank you, everyone. This is all very interesting. I vaguely knew about some of the customs but did not have any real details.
As cmkeller suggested, the rules about kashrut (keeping kosher) are much more complicated than he’s described, and have led to quite an extensive set of rules and practices. As I mentioned above, the levels of compliance with these rules vary significantly, depending on which Jewish movement (Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, etc.) and subgroup one belongs to.
You can read about them at great length here.
The Netflix show is centered on the Brooklyn Hasidic group, which is a bit more extreme than what is usually meant by “Orthodox Jew”, or at least as the term was used when I was growing up.
I finished watching it yesterday along with “The making of Unorthodox “ short. Turns out the actor playing Moishe actually grew up a Satmar in Jerusalem before leaving the group.
It’s worth noting that there really isn’t a “Brooklyn Hasidic group.” There are a bunch of Hasidic sects in Brooklyn (among them the Satmar, mentioned upthread) and, while they obviously have much in common, they sometimes don’t get along all that well with each other, for reasons I do not know and am hardly qualified to discuss.
What a fascinating series. Last night I popped a melatonin and barely skimmed the description. “Oh a documentary on Orthodox Jews. That should lull me to sleep”. Five hours later I was watching the “behind the scenes” and looking up more information on the subject. I wondered if the whole matchmaking thing was standard. It was so odd how they had to go to the market and let the mother of the potential groom look the girl over like she’s checking to see if she has solid child-bearing hips. I was curious about all that foil too!
My limited information is that for that community it is. While a lot of Jewish groups use matchmakers the role isn’t quite the same in all groups.
Basically… yes. This sort of traditional marriage has nothing to do romance, passion, or love. Production of children is enormously important and inquiries about the health of both parties happens. Brooklyn is the site of the headquarters of Dor Yeshorim, which seeks to avoid genetic disorders in the children of Jewish couples. It is credited for reducing the actual incidence of Tay-Sachs among the New York Ultra-Orthodox Jews to near zero by avoiding marriage between carriers. Currently, it screens for 10 different recessive traits that lead to genetic disorders and utilizing the service has become a standard part of match-matching in such communities. I wish to make clear that having such a recessive trait does not take one out of the marriage pool - the emphasis in on compatibility. Those with matching undesirable genetic traits are not paired together, they are paired with someone whose genes will not cause problems in potential offspring.
In addition, with all the emphasis on Esty being “normal”, the desire is to pair one’s children with others who are equally immersed in the insular community and devoted to doing his or her duty in regards to the culture. Eccentricity is not a desirable trait. It can be tolerated if it does not interfere with duty and production of children - the problem Esty’s in-laws had with her was 1) the fear that her mother leaving the community might lead to Esty doing the same and 2) the lack of children. If Esty had not had problems consummating the marriage and popped out a half dozen kids all the while keeping a proper kosher household everything would have been fine (well, as fine as any family gets).
For someone who fits into the community, who finds comfort in the ritual, customs, and traditions, it can be a wonderful thing. Square pegs for the round holes, though, can wind up miserable which is why some people leave and because it’s usually some horrible situation that prompts this departure these stories read as tragedies.
It’s unfortunate, because it can result in people outside the community getting only one side of the story. Some people are very happy in the community. I know of one woman (my best friend’s husband’s sister) who converted from mainstream American Baptist to an Ultra-Orthodox community (a different one, in another state), including an arranged marriage and a pile of kids, and has had a happy lifetime in that community. She is thoroughly enjoying being the matriarch of her little clan at this point. It’s not the life I would choose - but she definitely chose that life.
It’s a Passover thing - if you can’t remove appliances or cabinets that might contain a teeny fragment of leavening you cover them with foil to make absolutely sure your Passover food does not come into contact with it.
The Satmar - the group shown in this series - is one obsessed with following Jewish law to the letter no matter how inconvenient it may be. It helps to understand them if you keep in mind that for them religion is not about faith, it’s about careful ritual observance.
In other communities, Ultra-Orthodox Jews will actually physically remove things like stoves or refrigerators from their kitchens and replace them with an appliance that is reserved solely for Passover.
This is not a universal practice among Jews.
The last Passover seder I attended in person was in a kosher-keeping household, but a more mainstream one. The kitchen was thoroughly scrubbed and the traditional chametz hunt conducted, but no foil encasement.
Gentile here. I’ve heard that some ultra-strict Catholics used to do that (in the context of marriage), the idea being that sex is meant for procreation, not pleasure. I have no idea if it’s true.