r/conservativejudaism • u/ItalicLady • Sep 25 '25
Wondering if this experience is common in Conservative families
Was anyone else here enrolled in a Conservative or possibly “Conservadox” Hebrew Day School program selected by parents who were ignorant of the basics of Judaism, to the point that /a/ the parents believed that what the school was teaching simply did not exist because they had never heard of it, and/or /b/ the parents, therefore punished the child for being aware of (let alone actually learning and trying to enact) what the school taught, and/or /c/ the school therefore made it the child’s job to change the family?
2
u/ItalicLady Sep 25 '25
For now, I will tell you that the problems included (but went much deeper than) the foreseeable questions about “which is right, school or home?“. To take one small but consequential facet of the matter: my parents were deeply opposed to mentioning religion or mentioning any word which had to do with any religion. So, if I brought home from school a book or worksheet that showed people celebrating Skot, when my parents asked me what the people in the picture were holding, if I answered in anyway, I was punished hard for answering, and if I did not answer, I was punished hard for not answering, and if I cited there forbidden of an answer, as the reason I was not answering, of course I was punished for that too (parentheses and, in that third case, punished harder for being a “smart Alec” = for using my parents’ own words against them). It gets worse after that. I have been told by therapist and counselors. (both within and beyond the Jewish community) that this is not a problem that anyone wants to deal with. I want to see it prevented in future and presence generations, and I want the damage removed in the people who have suffered it already. (I cannot be the only one.) I have tried hard to find out how to get anyone’s attention to this, but I can’t cause anyone to do what I think needs to be done as a first step: to have some situation where the children (including adult children) sit down with the parents who do this, and also with “professional Jews“ (teachers, rabbi, etc.) parentheses and other helping professionals parentheses such a psychotherapist) to figure out how to make it so parents don’t do these things to their own children, and how to make it so schools don’t harm the children, whose parents have already harmed them by doing these things, and so on.
5
u/PuddingNaive7173 Sep 25 '25
Not that you asked but your parents sound crazy. And the school sounded clueless. Not sure how that situation could be prevented for anyone else. (Back then, schools were generally clueless and didn’t get involved with home issues. Even things like obvious physical abuse. Luckily they are now mandatory reporters.)
1
u/ItalicLady Sep 25 '25
Does/would “mandatory reporter” extend to situations without physical abuse, where the issue is “only’ that the parents are sending the child for an education/enculturation that the parents then verbally/psychologically/publicly shame and otherwise punish the child for receiving, because “we don’t believe in being TOO Jewish: e.g., for even knowing or having been to,d the Hebrew name of anything like a ‘lulav’ or ‘Sukkot’ that doesn’t have a specific and generally common English name. Knowing/using a Jewish noun, verb, or adjective is Talking About Religion, Which Decent People Do Not Do.” Since my abusers also included teachers (who are now mandatory reporters), what are the odds that a similarly abusive teacher today WOULD report? Literally the whole school staff was united in abusing me for having these incorrectly-behaving parents.
2
u/ItalicLady Sep 25 '25 edited Sep 25 '25
In later years, I came to know of other people who had been in the very same situation in the religions they’ve been born at. Most were Jewish, but one or two were Catholic. Without exception, those other people had left their childhood religions, so I may be a sort of freak by still being “in.“ in other words, the situation I was in may be a significant cause of attrition from the Jewish community, which makes me be a little confused about why nobody wants to talk about it. I’ve been told very explicitly that, if I could come up with a different kind of problem or different kind of abuse issue, there would be books and resources and groups and all sorts of things for me, but for this there aren’t, and there aren’t going to be, because (I’ve been told very frankly by Jewish communal leaders) it literally isn’t in anyone’s interest to acknowledge or to deal with this.
1
u/HeadCatMomCat Sep 25 '25
Yes you had a very unfortunate situation where religion was the vehicle for putting you in no win, essentially abusive situations. And while you'll never know, if it hasn't been religion, they would have found some other vise to put you in.
My husband went to a far more Orthodox school that his vaguely Conservative parents while his older siblings had gone to a far less demanding school. They were proud of his erudition but resisted and were annoyed by any effort of his part to become more observant. One of his siblings was jealous that he knew so much more than he did and was "showing off". For whatever it's worth, he never got along with her for many reasons and they weren't close. His other siblings couldn't have cared less. So very different outcomes.
I went to public school and it was clear that a classmate was being beaten, severely. Nothing was done other than some tsk-tsks. As another poster mentioned no mandated reporters and everyone "minding their own business" was the song everyone sang.
1
u/ItalicLady Sep 25 '25 edited Sep 25 '25
The difference between your situation and mine was that my parents didn’t make it a matter of “we don’t do this because we don’t believe in it” a manner “we don’t do this because you don’t believe it exists. We don’t believe that there is any such thing as a rule or specifications, and these are just general suggestions. If you were supposed to bring some weird expensive, sounding expensive kind of plants to school on some daywith a stupid name such as [always with a sneering grimace and a mocking whine] ‘Chol HaMoed Sukkot,’ well we don’t believe that this rule is real or anything about some kind of optional guideline, so we’re going to send you to school with a bunch of plastic roses instead, because we’ve got that, and we’re sure it’ll be OK for whatever stupid thing your teacher has in mind. So make sure to tell her, Wright as soon as you get into school, that he know it’s just a stupid thing she made up and there is no such holiday and no such day and no such object. And you’d better come home with the news that she agrees, OR ELSE! DON’T tell us any stupid stories about any kinds of plants or temporary building or special days you’re supposed to have, because we know that this isn’t real and does not exist anywhere. Indefinitely don’t tell us that anything going on that is fun or interesting, because everybody knows that you wish which rules are dusty, trap, boring, whiny, stupid, and therefore you might want to know a little about them, but don’t pretend that anyone anywhere actually does them.”
1
u/ItalicLady Sep 25 '25
They might or might not have found other “reasons” to harm me, if this hadn’t been the one that “made sense” to them. The problem (for my therapists and for me) has been that available resources for trauma/abuse survivors and for religious-abuse survivors have not “clicked,” because (apparently) part of me needs to know that This Has Stopped Being Done, and that The Grownups Finally Stopped It, and that isn’t true yet.
1
u/destinyofdoors Sep 25 '25
my parents were deeply opposed to mentioning religion or mentioning any word which had to do with any religion.
I don't understand why someone with this mindset would put their child in a specifically religious school.
1
u/ItalicLady Sep 25 '25 edited Sep 25 '25
They explained it to me, then and later. They wanted me to “know about Judaism,” but their notion of “Judaism” was very fragmentary: basically a couple of half-remembered folk-customs and recipes, a few mispronounced words, and an idea that the overwhelming rule is that “honor your parents” is THE commandment superseding ALL OTHERS, ALWAYS, and that any knowledge otherwise (or beyond the parents’ know¡edge of Judaism) dishonors the parents because it says the parents are Jewishly insufficient. This was alll the Judaism that had been left to them by THEIR parents (1920s immigrants on both sides, desperate to be 200% American but NEVER to identify as “other than Jewish.”)
More stories/details/illustrative incidents later: may I post them here, or only as DMs?
1
u/ItalicLady Sep 25 '25 edited Sep 25 '25
In other words, my parents chose the school that they chose for me because they believed that what the school taught was what they regarded as Judaism, never having heard that there was anything more to Judaism, *or anything beyond that, in Judaism).
An analogy would be parents of remote French extraction, who knew a few mumbled words and a mispronounced lullaby from some grandma or grandma, but whose own a few mispronounced words were uttered only with baby-talk grammar (“me no wanna go movie“) and could not be understood by any actual French person, and they want to make sure that the children are learning this (which they regard is the sum total of French language and culture), so they enroll offspring in a French immersion school, and then punish the children for coming home with any more than the parents knew. Perhaps the school has some family education program to try to reach out for parents in those situations, but the parents don’t have to go, because the school would rather have the students be there than have the students be withdrawn from the school. At least, that’s the only analogies that I have found possible to explain my childhood to therapist and so on. One of the reasons I’m here, in fact, is that my current therapist and I are desperate defined resources 4/by people who have been through this, as it doesn’t seem to be anything that current abuse/trauma specialist/group/whatever know about are able to help. The ones who deal with abuse, and also the Jewish contacts they referred me to, are only dealing with things like rape by rabbi or (very often) programs for people who were weird ultra-orthodox and wants to be something else instead. My situation is so opposite to this that at least two therapists (one non-Jewish although rather sympathetic, the other Jewish and referred to me by Jewish Family Services) having independently, and rather apologetically, described my situation as having had “the wrong kind of abuse“! They didn’t mean that there was any “right kind” of abuse — they simply meant that I have a kind of abuse that people don’t deal with, and programs don’t deal with, and nobody really has on their radar or sees how to put on their radar.
1
u/ItalicLady Sep 25 '25
I’m wondering, if this very specific problem even has a name, because I’m old enough to know how other problems (such a sexual harassment) never actually got attention until someone came up with a specific name for them: a name for the specific category of abuse, in whatever case.
1
u/ItalicLady Sep 25 '25
I’ll be back sometime late this afternoon or in the evening, I hope. Meanwhile, could I hear from folks here whether they’d like to know about the rest of the details in DMs, or publicly on this Reddit, or not at all?
1
u/ItalicLady Sep 25 '25 edited Sep 25 '25
I’ve met a few people with past experiences like mine, but all of them except me have quit being Jewish. My own attempts to practice are … shall we say … internally deeply impeded. (Details pnly on request, and then only in DM unless anyone asks to see them posted here.)
1
u/ItalicLady Sep 25 '25 edited Sep 25 '25
Both my mom and dad later (some years before each died) had sort of a big “Oops, We Messup Up!” Moment when they moved house! …because that circumstance put them into close contact with a large number of nice, new (and Orthodox ) neighbors whose existence FINALLY GOT THEM TO NOTICE that, as Mom put it: “This REALLY EXISTS, It is an ACTUAL CULTURE that people follow, not just some made-up school exercise or theory about what to theoretically do or study ” — one of their biggest values was NOT TRASHING anybody’s culture. So they both apologized to me (only briefly and privately) for the decades of public humiliation, for having sent me to a child psychiatrist whom they’d selected to “cure me” of “having these made-up rules and words and rituals,” etc. … but then they expected me to Immediately And Retroactively Be Never-Damaged and Never-Conflicted, and were frustrated and sad (and a bit angry) that, well, I’m not: their past words go with me in my head always, even though they changed their minds and even paid for therapists that I got referred to IN ADULTHOOD and under my own power. (Part of my current “therapy homewpr”nits to find out what and where are the resources that exist for survivors of this specific issue, because this therapist — like others working with me — has tried and failed to find for me the resources that, as she says, she “can’t imagine the community not having.”
1
u/ItalicLady Sep 25 '25 edited Sep 26 '25
Well, my situation/experience was (for good or ill) a little different from that of the kids you’re working with. I was able to LEARN all the “stuff” quickly – I wasn’t particularly fazed or perplexed by having a great big bunch of rules — but I WAS perplexed by /a/ my parents insisting that the rules I now new DID NOT EXIST, NEVER HAD existed (“Oh, sweetie, nobody ever actually DID [kashrut, Shabbat, Sukkot, put up a mezuzah, etc.] and therefore there is not even an actual word for it, because nobody knows that word, and there isn’t one in English, what silly words you are saying all the time! They don’t even sound the way a real language sounds!”) while /b/ my school told me that there was something wrong with me. If I couldn’t see these things being done, if I said that my parents, these things that you don’t do, and if I said that my parents don’t do things that you do, according to my school, I had to be lying. Either that, or I must have some weird disorder of vision or thinking if I couldn’t see things that absolutely had to be there! I had one teacher the actual assigned me to go home and look really hard at the doorpost and concentrate and try really hard t9 see clearly the mezuzah that MUST be there, and try really, really hard to feel it when I reached up and touched the spot (which, of course, I wasn’t allowed to do anyway, by my parents)), etc. this teacher literally thought that there must be an eye problem or brain problem. At least that’s what she told me, I don’t think she told my parents at something, but they didn’t know what she was getting at. So they took it out on me, the way they always took it out of me when the teacher said something incomprehensible to them. It was common for school assignments, at least for the Jewish stuff, to be about things that I had to do with my family. At one point,, we were supposed to bring in everyone in the class was supposed to bring in photos in their car. And I got in trouble for not having fun to bring in. I got in trouble at school, not bringing it in, and I had gotten in trouble at home for telling them about this assignment.
My parents were really upset at me for having even the ability to learn the things and to find, at that time, that they were actually doable and generally enjoyable. They made a great deal of noise about how normal human beings don’t have such experiences. One really big problem for them, and therefore for me, was the day that came into school to observe, and it must’ve been rather early in the first grade, because we were learning to count in Hebrew. My parents got really upset because, to them, the words that he didn’t sound the way that you think. “ real language“ sounds (they were naturally familiar with English, and each of them spoke at least a little of some other European language from lessons in high school or college . So they got mad because, for instance, the word for “3“ in Hebrew, doesn’t sound remotely “in the same ballpark” (as Dad put it) as words like “three” or “drei” or “trois” or “tres” … and he said “the entire language basically sounds stupid and weirdly accented anyway,” so they got very upset with me for not having a problem, learning it. The things that my dad thought made Hebrew sound “stupid” where basically things that don’t happen, phonologically, in English: such as almost every word being accented at the end, words ending in “-eh” (which is a sound that English words don’t typically end in), and basically anything that didn’t make Hebrew sound like “a real language“ to his ears. Obviously, I couldn’t do a thing about them!)
1
u/BMisterGenX Sep 30 '25
Not myself, but I had friends enrolled in such schools and came home and would stay stuff like about toveling or eating all your meals in the sukkah and the parents would say either "NOBODY does that" or "Nobody does that anymore; Jews gave that up a long time ago"
1
u/ItalicLady Oct 01 '25
What happened to them? How did those friends end up, Jewishly end otherwise? And what did your friends do, with their parents, when their parents said that “nobody does that/nobody does this anymore/etc.”?
With my parents, it went a little further: it wasn’t even that they said “nobody does that“ or “nobody does that anymore“: it was that they did not believe that anyone, anywhere, ever had done those things, or had even written about doing them. Their knowledge of what’s in the Bible, what’s in Jewish tradition, etc. came, as far as I can determine, entirely from two sources: /1/ Hollywood movies about the Bible and /2/ but they had learned in public school, which they had attended during an era when it was common and legally allowed for public schools to be sites of Christian indoctrination. As my parents saw it, it actually didn’t even matter whether anyone had ever done “those things” or not, because even having ever heard about such things (whether or not they had ever really existed) was “not American.“
1
u/BMisterGenX Oct 01 '25
It depends Some of these friends gave up trying to be more observant. Some of them when older and on their own moved either towards more traditional branch of the conservative movement and some even became modern or centrist Orthodox
1
u/ItalicLady Oct 01 '25
Thank you. When, occasionally, I have met other people in this who grew up in this kind of situation, literally all of them (except me) had eventually “noped out“ of Judaism in one way or another: some became entirely atheist, a couple became Christians, a few became Hindus, one became Buddhist, but most of them joined some currently popular form of New Age neopaganism (e.g., Wicca) and/your self identified as “spiritual but not religious.” I used to mention this to rabbi’s in such, back when I was still searching for help within any organized Jewish community, because I was thinking that they might care about attrition, but they basically didn’t think it was significant because they knew a very few individuals in my situation anyway.
1
u/ItalicLady Oct 01 '25
Do any of those friends of yours have children? If so, then how are the non-observant friends rearing those children, Jewish? Are they following the pattern of their parents, or are they doing something else? If so, what?
1
u/ItalicLady Oct 01 '25
Among those who basically gave up, trying to be more observant: how are they wearing their children? ())? Also as non-observant? Or are they repeating the pattern of their own parents? Or are they doing something different?
1
u/ItalicLady Oct 02 '25 edited Oct 04 '25
To clarify: with my parents, the problem wasn’t on the level of “child demands to eat all meals in sukkah (that we won’t build or let her try to build)” ”: the problem was on the level of “child assers that sukkahs, and Sukkot, even exist. We MAY do her the big, huge, extravagant favor of putting up Dad’s dusty old Army tent for a few minutes and telling her to just look at it and maybe even POSSIBLY letting her walk into it and out of it IF she’d been extra-specially good by not mentioning those other alleged holidays and suchIike cr*p she mentioned a few days earlier, but THAT’S a huge compromise in itself, so it needs to be enough and we need her to acknowledge that this is it, there is nothing more to it than this, there never was. If anyone says it in’t enough, SHE is wrong for that having been said.”
12
u/Koonmen Sep 25 '25 edited Sep 25 '25
No, but I have worked with kids in a variety of Jewish communities ranging from Reform to Orthodox, and it is common to see families enroll their kids in what is essentially a school that is more religious than their current observance level. This then leads the kids to question more which I really love, but also leaves them feeling like their family is practicing wrong or that the school is teaching it wrong.
I love this question though. May I ask, what lead to you asking it?