Dov says something to the man in Yiddish. The man says something back and the room becomes agitated, people whisper to each other, shift broadly in their seats.
“What did he say?” asks Iris.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“We will talk later,” says Dov to the man. “But see? See?” He is trying to bring the crowd’s attention back to the front of the room. “And that is why I said it is a cult. Not Judaism. No. But the way we grew up. You know. In Williamsburg and Monsey and Roseville. It is a cult because you cannot get out without being damaged. You cannot get out without losing your family. It is a cult because you are isolated and insulated. The problem isn’t the religion. Judaism is a beautiful thing. Community is a beautiful thing. The problem is that the people who are born into it have no choice. And the cult, it is not about Hashem. It is about fear. Everybody thinks their neighbor is spying on them! Your parents, maybe, your sisters and brothers, they believe what the rebbe tells them. If the rebbe says send your son to this place, they have doctors, they will make him well. What do they do?”
Under their breaths, people respond. In the row behind me, the woman who asked us if we were married whispers, “You send him.”
“Yes! You send him! Because the rebbe knows best. But they are not doctors! They are frauds! Everyone knows this. Everyone outside. But your parents, and your brothers and sisters, they do not know this. Because they are in a cult! They may be wonderful people. They may be kind and they may mean well. But they are in a cult! Their minds have been abducted by the wrong priorities. Their priorities are appearances. And if you make a different choice-if you dare to choose something else-pack your bags!”
Dov is a riveting presence. I’ve never seen someone speak so viscerally from the heart. His remarks seem both prepared and completely spontaneous; eloquent and clunky. He gestures wildly, waving his arms as he tells stories, his voice up and down-practically shrieking at points, then mumbling and making little jokes with his friends who are gathered at the side of the room. Like so many of the ultra-Orthodox I’ve met, he has an accent, and for the first time it strikes me as quite beautiful. Iris’s mouth is slightly open; she looks hypnotized. Dov talks for the next forty minutes. He says he was born in Brooklyn and moved to Roseville when he was a child. He says he was never sexually attracted to girls and at age fifteen his sister caught him kissing another Haredi boy. When his mother confronted him he told her he was gay. He said he found the word on the Internet when he rode his bike to the public library and looked up “boys who want to kiss boys.” (Everyone laughs at this.) A year later, his parents sent him to New Hope, and when he ran away from the program, they cut him off and he lived on the street and with friends and people he met on Facebook. I wonder if he ever stayed at the Coney Island house. He says he started speaking out when one of the boys he knew from New Hope committed suicide. And then, he says, he was approached by the lawyers. He stops speaking abruptly.
“I have been talking a long time. Thank you for coming. If you would like to get more information about the lawsuit you can talk to me.”
He steps back from the mic and the room fills with applause. The front two rows are on their feet. Dov suddenly looks shy. He smiles and puts his head down, then grabs a friend from the front row and drags him to the buffet table.
People stop clapping and immediately start talking.
“Did you know about any of that?” Iris asks.
“I knew gay people weren’t accepted. But, I mean, they’re barely accepted at my dad’s church.”
“I’ve read about gay conversion therapy,” says Iris. “There have definitely been articles about it. You know Brice’s sister is gay.” Brice is the nice young man that Iris has been dating for a few months. I don’t really get the attraction-he doesn’t seem terribly interesting. He works in men’s fashion, which is one strike against him in my book. And he has highlights, which is two. Iris hasn’t brought him around much. But I guess I haven’t been very fun lately.
“I didn’t know,” I say. “You never told me.”
“You never asked.”
True. “So did she go through gay conversion therapy?”
“No, but he said her girlfriend did. She’s from Utah and her family was Mormon. Anyway, in California, I think they actually outlawed it. Or maybe they tried to.”
“They should,” I say.
Iris nods. “That guy was amazing,” she says. Dov is surrounded by people; everyone seems to have a question or a story to share. “Are you gonna talk to him?”
“Yeah,” I say, “but it looks like it might be a wait.”
“So we wait. I’m getting another beer. I have cottonmouth. I’m calling in sick tomorrow.”
Iris goes to the buffet, and I lean against a covered piano in the corner of the room, watching. It’s almost midnight on a weekday, but the event shows no sign of slowing down. A group of young men in black hats brings in a case of beer. Three frum girls are bent over an iPhone, laughing. A teenage boy in Borough Park black is challenging a man maybe ten years his senior to explain why, if it’s okay to be gay, it isn’t okay to be a heroin addict or a prostitute or a murderer?
“If there are no rules, where do you stop?” he asks.
After about twenty minutes, I see an opening and approach Dov by the buffet table.
“Hi,” I say, “I’m Rebekah. From the Trib.”
“Rebekah!” he says, opening his arms for a hug. I oblige. “Thank you for coming.” He looks to his friends and says, “This is the reporter I was telling you about. She found out who killed Rivka Mendelssohn. She’s writing about Pessie.”
Dov’s friends nod and say hello.
“Do you have time to talk?” I ask.
“Of course,” he says. “Let me finish here. There is a diner nearby. Can we meet there in half an hour?”
“Sure,” I say. Dov gives me directions and Iris and I step out of the noisy, overheated synagogue and into the nearly still late night. Ocean Parkway is a four-lane highway with wide pedestrian and bicycle promenades leading to the beach at Coney Island on either side. It’s a mix of residential and commercial here. Big prewar apartment buildings next to doctors’ offices and day care centers, many with Hebrew lettering on the signs. We pass a Haredi man sitting alone on a bench, talking on his cell phone. He turns away from us as we pass.
“You seem a lot better,” Iris says as we walk. “Do you think the medication is helping?”
“I guess it must be,” I say. And then: “Thanks. For, you know. Taking care of me. I know I’ve been a pain in the ass. I just…” Just what? Just everything.
“It’s okay,” she says. “So you called your mom.”
“Yeah. I can’t help but think she, like, sees my number and is purposely ignoring me.”
“That’s dumb. She’s the one that called you.”
“And now she’s disappeared again.”
“You’re the most ridiculous pessimist I know. She probably forgot to pay her bill or something.”
“Maybe.”
“Have you told your dad she called?”
“No,” I say. “I thought I’d wait until I actually talk to her.”
Dov and his friend Frannie get to the diner about twenty minutes after we do.
Frannie tells us she was also frum, but grew up in Baltimore. She and Dov met through Facebook, and now they’re roommates, along with four other people, in a house near Poughkeepsie. The rent is cheap, and none of them like the big city. Dov says that they’ve both applied to the community college there, but won’t hear whether they’ve been accepted until the summer.
“Pessie’s sister Rachel told me that Pessie had a bad reaction to her medication, passed out, and drowned,” says Dov. “But when I asked what medication she wouldn’t tell me.”
“Her husband said she’d been on antidepressants since after the baby was born,” I say. “But you can’t, like, OD on those.”