Roseville police chief John Gregory declined to comment on the case.
I click into Facebook and see that I have a message from someone named Dov Lowenstein.
Hi! I’m SO glad you are trying to find out what happened to Pessie! We grew up together and she was the nicest girl in the world. No WAY she killed herself. Thank you thank you thank you!
I click into Dov’s Facebook page and see that he has more than a thousand “friends.” His profile picture depicts him in short shorts, waving an Israeli flag at some kind of parade. I write back immediately.
Thanks for reaching out! I’d love to interview you about Pessie. Do you have time to chat today?
Moments later, a message pops up.
I’ll be in Brooklyn tonight speaking at a chulent on Ocean Pkway. Wanna come? We can talk after.
He includes a link to a Facebook event page. Fifty people have already RSVPed saying they will attend. According to the invitation, the event begins at 10:00 P.M. and is BYOB.
I Google “chulent” and discover that it’s a traditional Jewish stew made with beans and potatoes and onions and meat that takes twelve hours to cook. It is also the word used to describe, as the Web site NeoHasid puts it, “a drop-in lounge for folks that have traveled (or strayed) from the Chasidic world, whether in spirit, mind or body, along with their allies and friends.”
I message Dov back saying I’ll be there, then I send Iris a text asking if she’ll come with me. While I wait to hear from her, I click back to the event invite. It appears to be sponsored by a group called OTDinNYC. I click onto their Facebook page, which is open, and see that there are 978 people in the group. A long post in the “About” section lays out the rules of the group, which include refraining from personal attacks and “outing” people who have joined with fake names (“Mikveh Mouse” and “Shtetl Gretel”). The administrator is a woman named Chasi Herzog. She describes the group as a place for off-the-derech and OTD-curious to share, connect, question, and find support and advice. The most recent post is from someone named Ben Silver who asks: “Do you still plan on marrying Jewish?” He posted less than twenty minutes ago and there are already nineteen comments. Further down, a woman named Shimra Reich posted, “If you had a dollar for every person you’ve had sex with, what could you buy?” There are more than a hundred comments. One person named Yisrael Greenberg wrote: “A Ferrari!” sparking a series of comments about STDs and whether oral sex counted. Another, named Hindy Levin, wrote: “A cup of coffee-and not at Starbucks!” Her post was met with approving remarks about honesty, sexual repression in the Haredi world, and invitations to fill her wallet, so to speak. There is a post saying “Like this status if you were thrown out of yeshiva!” There are 235 likes and fifty-eight comments recounting skirmishes over skirt-length, smuggled magazines, OTD siblings, and insufficiently pious parents.
Iris texts back saying that she’s up for the chulent. I tell her I’ll try to leave work early and meet her at home, then we’ll go together. I turn on the shower and undress. For the first few days and weeks after I lost all my hair, I was surprised every time I dipped my head back into the stream of water. I felt the hair that wasn’t there. I’m getting used to it now. Iris encourages me to “play up the look” with big earrings and more makeup, but there’s something interesting about being, well, less pretty than I have been most of my life. I feel like it’s making me stronger; like that little happiness I’d get when I looked in the mirror before all this was a false, or at least a shallow, psychological bump. And now that I don’t have it, I have to find something else, something more substantial, to look for in my reflection.
Ten minutes before I have to leave for my shift I try Aviva again. Again, her number goes straight to voice maiclass="underline" This mailbox is full. The user is not accepting new messages. This time, the automated message pisses me off.
“Really, Aviva?” I actually say out loud to the empty apartment. “You’re gonna play me like that? Clean out your fucking in-box.”
It’s a slow news day, so once I plunk out my assigned stories (Staten Island state representative’s son arrested for domestic assault; another crane incident at the luxury condo going up on Fifty-seventh Street; gang-related shooting on the B31 bus in Brooklyn) I Google Dov Lowenstein. Dov, I discover, is a plaintiff in a lawsuit against a group called New Hope, an organization of unlicensed “therapists” who purport to turn gay Jews into straight Jews. The Trib actually did a story about the lawsuit last year when it was filed. Dov is quoted as saying that the people running the group are frauds who prey on Jewish parents desperate to “fix” their gay children.
Mike lets me leave early when I tell him I’m going to interview a source on the Pessie Goldin story. I get home at nine and Iris asks me what she should wear.
“If the girls are frum they’ll probably be in long skirts and long sleeves and stockings,” I say.
“From?”
“Frum. F-r-u-m. It means, like, observant.”
“Rocking the lingo,” she says, “I like it.”
“Anyway, I don’t think it matters. Clearly they’re liberal. I mean, it says BYOB.”
“BYOB! Really? This could be awesome. Are pants okay? I think I’ll wear pants.”
“I’m wearing jeans.”
“Cool. How about we get a six-pack? I’ll bring a big bag and if it’s weird, I’ll just keep it,” says Iris. I agree this is a good plan.
We leave the house at nine thirty and take the F train to Avenue I. It’s a little warmer tonight than it has been in weeks and it feels nice not to have to rush from one place to the next. I even left my hat at home. The address on Ocean Parkway, it turns out, is a synagogue.
“It’s in a church?” whispers Iris. We’re standing across the street.
“It’s a synagogue,” I say.
“I know,” says Iris, still whispering. “I just meant, you know, a house of worship. I wouldn’t have guessed they’d let them do that.”
“I don’t think they can hear you,” I say.
“Come on,” she says. “Isn’t that strange?”
“I read about two in The New York Times. One was in somebody’s home. One was in a community center basement in Manhattan. A synagogue is kind of a community center, so…”
The ornate stone building is probably at least a hundred years old. Two sets of steps come together in the front, and on them linger about a dozen people. One man is very fat, with an enormous beard and wild brown hair. A Jew-fro, I’ve heard it called. He is wearing a yellow hooded sweatshirt with a Hawaiian scene silk-screened on it, and talking to two girls about my age. Both girls are dressed in long skirts and flat shoes, their hair covered with scarves. But the skirts aren’t plain black like the ones most of the women I saw in Borough Park wore; one is denim, and one is a crinkled, fiery red-and-orange fabric. Little rebellions, I think.
Iris and I walk toward the threesome and Jew-fro greets us.
“We tend to start late,” he says, with a smile. “Welcome. There’s food and drink inside.”
Iris and I say thank you and continue inside the iron gates and up the stairs to the entrance. People are smoking and drinking from plastic cups and chatting with each other. I spot two black-hatted men. We walk into the foyer, an elegant, if worn, mosaic-tiled rotunda with a dome rising fifty feet into the sky. I look up and see a stained glass window. It’s too dark to tell whether the image is abstract or depicts some sort of scene. At my dad’s church they had a stained glass window called the Christ window. It wasn’t a terribly artful illustration-just white Jesus in a white robe with his hands out, a halo above his head-but I remember that when the sun lit the blues and yellows and pinks on the mornings when I used to go to Sunday school I couldn’t help but be a little bit mesmerized by it. Iris and I follow the noise down the hallway from the foyer to a multipurpose room big enough for a wedding or a concert. Plastic and aluminum folding chairs line the walls. There is a buffet set on tables along one side of the vast space. I see beer and wine. We set down our six-pack and Iris opens one for each of us with the flamingo bottle opener on her key chain (a holdover from college). There are probably twenty people in the room. Most of the men wear some kind of covering on their head. Many have black yarmulkes, and several wear sidecurls and black pants. But more than one wears a knit beanie, or a baseball cap. One has a hat that says COMME DES FUCKDOWN. I alert Iris and she loves it.