Aged six, a young Charedi Jew, Yehudis Fletcher, did something rebellious that would shape her life to come. She tried to work out whether there was actually a God.
The Charedi community is one of the most devout among the Jews and almost every one of their acts is bound by law, tradition and rules. On the Sabbath, before eating bread, there is a hand-washing ritual governed by specific instructions. Cold water is poured from a cup twice over the right hand, then twice over the left. These rules are beyond question, but Fletcher decided that rather than wash her hands, she would only pretend to, then see if God struck her down. “God was not only revered,” she says, “he was the shape of everything we did.”
Heart pounding, Fletcher “went ahead and did it anyway”. And so the die was cast for a rebellious life within a community that refuses women any personal autonomy. Now 37, an avowed lesbian and feminist, she has been disowned by her family, sexually abused by her foster father and abused by both her husbands — all devout Charedim. And yet she refuses to flee her community. Instead, Fletcher has found a way not only to remain within her Jewish faith, but also to be openly critical of practices such as forced marriage and the overlooking of the secular. Now, in a further act of rebellion, she has published Chutzpah!: A Memoir of Faith, Sexuality and Daring to Stay, a book that takes a close look at those issues she has faced.
Before Charedi girls are even out of their teens, they enter arranged marriages, where they have, on average, seven children. Driving, working outside the home, and disobeying their husbands is frowned upon, and once they are married, they are obliged to wear a wig known as a sheitel. Their clothes must cover collarbone, elbows and ankles, and sex segregation is so strictly enforced that many families don’t even allow brothers and sisters to play together.
The daughter of a rabbi, Fletcher has spent much of her life in this intensely insular world. She recalls a childhood that she spent at a Lanarkshire school wearing opaque tights. And then, aged 14, she and her younger sister — their four older siblings were already married — moved from Scotland to Israel with their parents to make aliyah (the settling of Israel by the Jewish diaspora). Life there was even stricter than in Scotland: at schools she was described by one teacher as “anthrax” — a bad influence to everyone else. Fletcher was so miserable that she overdosed on Ibuprofen, and ended up on a mental health ward for six weeks. Hospital was preferable to home. After that, she was admitted to foster care.
If anything, however, things would get even worse. After only a year in Israel she was sent back home to live in Manchester with family friends. She was 15 when she started lodging with a Jewish scholar, Todros Grynhaus. In her book, Fletcher describes him as an “authoritarian who locked his kids in their rooms for days at at a time”. Then, one night, he began sexually abusing her: “He shoved two fingers inside me. I felt no pain because I wasn’t in my body any more.” These assaults continued nightly for six months, until they were discovered by his wife and he threw her out. She moved in with another family, unable to tell her parents to whom she was virtually a stranger now. And when Fletcher eventually reported him to the local rabbi, he just told her husband to go to therapy. Her testimony was worthless without a male witness.
So she returned to Israel to learn “how to be a wife” at a seminary. By the time she was 18, a shidduch (match) had been found and she was pressured into an arranged marriage with Danny.
Right from the start, the union was marked by regressive gender attitudes, something Charedi girls are taught from childhood. Having to devote their lives to housework, children and the Sabbath, Fletcher recalls her mother saying that even doing the laundry was holy. “Fuck off,” she laughingly responds. “The laundry gets done because the laundry needs to get done. The idea that men do holy things in the synagogue and women do holy things with laundry is just patriarchy.”
Sex was framed in similar ways. “If there is an expectation that you have sex on a certain night at a particular time and if you’re not in the mood,” Fletcher explains, “it’s like you’re saying no to God, not even just your husband.” But Fletcher’s husband was also violent, and when she found him in bed with another woman, she abandoned the marriage. Barely a year in, she left. Her parents needed to get shot of the 19-year-old divorcée, and six months later, she married again, this time to Zvi, 29. As she tells me, “I knew he wasn’t going to hit me.” And though he wanted sex constantly — he started saying the prayers that were to be recited before sex in the car home after the marriage so as not to waste any time — the marriage lasted for over a decade. She left the day before her 31st birthday with her three children.
At this point, Fletcher had known for a long time that she was a lesbian. She had suspected as much at school in Israel and came out to a rabbi at 17. His response: “All the girls are doing it but it goes away when you get married.” Ironically enough, all that sex segregation provided ample opportunities for experimentation.
Her coming-out story is also bound up with her discovery of feminism. In her early 20s, she stumbled upon a feminist book, Harriet Harman’s autobiography. “I read it on the train, and by the end of the journey I’d signed up as a member of the Labour Party. I went into work after I read it and started rabble rousing and talking to the other women in the office about, like there’s a thing called maternity pay. And this is how it works.”
In 2019 Fletcher enrolled for a degree at the University of Salford. “I had been taught that they were forbidden spaces for us,” she says, but nevertheless went ahead without seeking permission to do so.
When she wrote a paper on forced marriage, it was covered on Radio 4, as well as on TV in America and India. At that point, though, she was careful not to talk about her lesbianism for fear her critics would claim it informed her critique of forced marriage.
When she eventually came out to her family, in 2021, she was roundly rejected. As Fletcher continues, leaving the Charedim is like being a refugee in your own country, with many members ultimately put off by how hard it is. Remarkably, though, leaving her husband wasn’t followed by departure from the Charedi community more generally. She calls staying a “revolutionary” act, arguing that “My existence is resistance. I feel that it is an act of service to the future of this community for it to include visible feminist lesbians.” No one, she adds, “should have to choose between staying and staying safe.”
Describing life in the Chasidic community, she tells me, “Every single moment of the day is mapped out. So as soon as you get out of bed there are rules that you follow before you even walk and, for many people, what that does is give a freedom or absolution.” But this has a terrible downside for girls and women as Fletcher explains: “Personal autonomy is dictated, particularly sex when sex is so ritualised and dictated by external authority. Not only does it diminish it, but it pretty much removes capacity for consent.”
Fletcher’s decision to stand and fight, to show how women are harmed within her culture, has already led to material change. Her campaign against forced marriage led her to co-found Nahamu, the first UK think-tank to tackle religious extremism in the Jewish community. “It’s not about burning down the house,” she says, “it’s about infusing a community with informed consent, with knowledge of what we’re entitled to as women.”
You might say the same about Fletcher personally. She once worried about being spotted in public with a partner and was terrified of putting anything on the record; she lived a public life in which she was campaigning as a feminist but hiding her sexuality.
“When she eventually came out to her family, in 2021, she was roundly rejected.”
But wanting a more integrated life, she came out and now lives with a partner openly. Fletcher has also been gratified to discover that though some people “will take offence on seeing me in the kosher shops, especially if I’m wearing one of my rude t-shirts”, others “have capacity for it”.
Perhaps that helps explain why, despite everything, Fletcher has always loved her culture and could never leave it behind. Most Friday nights, she hosts dinners for up to 25 lesbians, gay men and trans people, all from the Charedi community, all around a single table in the heart of Manchester’s Orthodox community. “For me,” she says, “to live a Charedi life — it’s the food that I like to eat and it’s the songs that I sing and it’s where I feel comfortable. It’s my heritage.”
It has helped, too, that Fletcher has fought to reclaim her own past. The code of mesirah prohibits Jews from handing over other Jews to secular authorities, and usually prevents anyone from reporting crimes against women and children. But, in 2015, Fletcher helped convict Todros Grynhaus for sexual assault against her and another girl, waiving her right to anonymity. The case led the Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, to state that sexual abuse must always be reported to the police, with Fletcher herself continuing to condemn those Charedis who actively cover up abuse within the community.
As for the future, Fletcher is clear about what must happen. Like most Charedi women, she received effectively no education until she went to university. With that in mind, and at risk of “sounding neoliberal”, Fletcher argues that “education, education, education is what makes a difference.” And rather than turn her back on her community, she is striving to make it a better place. “No one,” she adds, “gets to throw me out”. Given everything she’s achieved so far, we should probably take her at her word.
