Ex-Hasidic Woman Shares Her Coming Out Story And How She Won Back Custody Of Her Kids | PeopleTV

I have a complicated relationship with my family I think the trope is that for a Hasidic person who leaves her community that they get shunned or you know they're like blocked out of the family and nobody will ever talk to them again and it's not quite that simple it's a lot more nuanced than that I'm copy Weisberger and I'm queer I was raised in a Hasidic family when I was 12 years old my father handed me this little prayer that he wanted me to say everyday which was a way for me to ask for a perfect husband that was holy and pious and that I would raise nice good Jewish children with when I was 18 years old I was away at summer camp and my father called me and said we want you to come home and meet somebody that we want you to marry I knew this person I knew him from my community and I was like I'm not really sure and my father felt very strongly that this was right for me and so I can't I came home from camp and met my what was then to become my husband I met him twice for like an hour each time and then six months later we were married and it was really a rocky time for me I was really unhappy didn't have a way really to express that and I went to see this Hasidic therapist and I said I don't love my husband and he said how do you know what love is this is the first man you've ever been with and I said yeah but I've been in love before he looked at me quizzically and I said yeah there was this girl Sarah in high school and I loved her and he said do you think you might be a lesbian and I said what's that and then he explained it to me and it was a huge sense of relief like there was a name for the way I was feeling and I came home my mom said so how did it go and I said he told me I might be a lesbian and she said what's that and then we proceeded to have a lot of conversations about that and I spent the rest of that time in therapy trying to find the root cause of what broke me and how did I become this way that I was attracted to women so over the course of the marriage I had to be children with my ex-husband by the time I was 25 and my children were one three and five years old I got divorced it was a brand-new chapter in my life and I was just excited to take on the world and to figure out what's next for me and how do I live this life now I had a lot of different conversations with rabbis trying to process how do i reconcile my sexuality with my religious identity and the answer that I kept getting was you can't you just need to keep your head down and raise your children in a Hasidic life and the you know there is no room for expression of your sexuality in this community eventually I discovered there was this Jewish organization called a shell let's look for LGBT Jews and I went for a weekend to their retreat and saw Jewish families with two dads and two moms and all kinds of genders and all kinds of ways and just raising their children lovingly and it didn't seem confusing and it didn't seem impossible I started to come to terms more with the fact that I was no longer going to live a lie this was there was a way I was going to bring my children into my world and raise them as my full self when I came out and in my community about my sexuality I my religious identity all hell broke loose I lost my job at a like a prominent Hasidic ultra-orthodox woman's magazine which was an awesome job and but they let me go I lost the support of my family and friends and ultimately my ex-husband took me to court to fight me for custody of our children and that led to like an awful five years battle in court where I just had to prove to the court that no my children were not traumatized by my identity children are resilient and smart and can adapt beautifully and and Family Court is pretty conservative and right-wing and so it was a difficult uphill battle ultimately I lost custody of my children at first which meant that the courts ordered me to hide my identity pretend to be religious pretend to be straight and you know raise my children in the limited amount of time that they gave me access to my children and that wasn't enough for me and so I appealed that decision and I was really lucky I had a lot of support from an organization called footsteps that helps Orthodox Jews who are transitioning to mainstream society this past August I won the appeal or custody of my children and so it's been a whirlwind of new experiences and just beautiful family bonding time since then and we get to meet people of all different identities and cultures and so I am very hopeful for our future and the beginning of our brand-new life this is me at 18 years old it's at my engagement party all I remember from that time is this overwhelming like it was chaos it was this explosion of celebration but it didn't feel like my celebration I wish I could go back to my 18 year old self and tell her this is your story this is your life I don't regret my life turning out the way it did I think that it all kind of came together to create this version of me that's I'm pretty cool with but I still wish that I had a better you know it's hard to think about 18 year old me feeling so lost in that moment and feeling like I had to behave in a way that was expected of me and and without having access to the knowledge and information I have today I'm going to keep listening to my truest self and living as by what that feels like it looks like and sharing that truth with the people who are most important to me and that to me is a life worth living it's a meaningful existence that I want to keep living as as fully as I possibly can for as long as I can you

Channel: People

Views: 378,574

Rating: 4.510397 out of 5

Keywords: ex hasidic woman, coming out story, Chavie Weisberger, ex hasidic woman coming out story, jewish, hasidic, jews, gay, coming out, lgbt, hasidic woman gay, leaving faith, leaving islam, leaving believes, people magazine coming out story, people magazine coming out stories, People, people magazine, news, celebrities, rumors, interview, style, magazine, time, celebrity news, celebrity gossip, entertainment, gossip, celebrity, famous, Hollywood, celeb, celebrity (media genre)

Id: RatlM2PbI8E

Length: 6min 13sec (373 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 15 2018