Thursday, February 15, 2018
Why I went from Catholic schoolgirl to Hasidic Jewish wife
Growing up in a Catholic family in East New York in the '90s, Yehudit Chervony, nee Yomaira Tamayo, didn't even know what a Jew was. Now, she belongs to a strict Hasidic sect in New York.
"I would drive through Williamsburg and I remember thinking, 'What language is that?' I thought they were Amish," says Chervony, 34.
As the daughter of two immigrants from Latin America, she dutifully attended Catholic church every Sunday, although, by age 10, she had stopped considering herself Catholic. Inside the family's two-bedroom railroad-style apartment, only Spanish was spoken.
At her parochial school, she excelled academically. Through an organization for gifted black and Latino students, she scored a full-ride scholarship to Choate Rosemary Hall, a prestigious Connecticut prep school. Ivanka Trump was a classmate, and her scholarship was funded by billionaire businessman Carl Icahn.
She headed to the University of Pennsylvania for college, double-majoring in international relations and Russian, and started experimenting with drugs and sex, including dating women.
"I was a very experimental, over-the-top person — it was out of control," she says.
She also struggled with an eating disorder, until a dose of LSD changed her course.
"This acid trip was the place where I said, 'How did I get to this twisted place? This isn't the body that God created and I want to be close to God.' [It] was a realization that I had to change my life."
She stayed at Penn for grad school, studying nonprofit management, and found that she couldn't deny what was building for years: She wanted to convert to Judaism.
Reading "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Judaism," she realized that she was interested in the strictest form of the religion.
"I was searching for the Judaism that's 3,000 years old, and I thought the [ultra-]Orthodox are the only ones who seem to have rules," she says.
She wanted something very different from her old life, and she found that in a campus group for the Litvish movement, a rigorous form of Orthodox Judaism.
Breaking the news to her family was difficult.
"You're going to speak a different language, wear different clothes and celebrate different things," her dad told her. But ultimately both parents accepted her decision.
Her extended family in South America wasn't so understanding, and she stopped her annual visits there.
Rabbis warned her that she wouldn't be accepted in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community — much less find a husband and have kids — but she had faith it would work out.
"God had split the sea. He will figure out the rest," she recalls thinking.
After studying for a year and a half, her fast-track conversion was complete. At age 25, she became an Orthodox Jew.
"I went from the call-me-to-find-a-party girl to the Shabbos girl," she says, referring to the Jewish day of rest that commences on Fridays at sundown. While she doesn't label herself a feminist, Chervony believes Judaism supports women.
"I feel much more empowered as a woman [now]," she says. "Who I am isn't tied to my sexuality, and that's incredibly empowering. I see myself as a much more dignified person as an Orthodox woman."
But, she admits that she sometimes struggles connecting with other Hasidic women.
"There's some huge gaps," she says. "We're educated in different ways, but I find other ways to relate to them."
Finding an ultra-Orthodox husband also wasn't easy.
Unlike her unmarried peers in the community, she says, "I wasn't a virgin and I wasn't 18."
But in 2011 she met fellow Hasid Yisroel Chervony, a Ukrainian immigrant from Odessa who'd grown up as a secular Jew. His arms were covered in tattoos — a transgression against Jewish religious law — and he had a checkered past. But at age 27, after a stint in jail, he'd devoted himself to living an ultra-Orthodox life.
They were engaged after a three-week courtship in which they never touched each other. A month later, the pair wed in front of 300 exuberant well-wishers in a Flatbush wedding hall. Her mom, who was traveling, didn't attend, though her father was there on the sidelines. Chervony's rabbi and the rabbi's wife walked the bride down the aisle instead.
"I was fine with it," she says. "Whoever walks you down, that's how you're starting your life off."
After the wedding, she dutifully shaved her head and began wearing a wig, as is customary for Hasidic women. In 2014, she gave birth to twins: son Moshe and daughter Esther.
Life was good — with her husband studying during the day and working at night while she took care of the kids — until one day in May 2015, when she discovered her lifeless husband slumped on the floor. EMTs declared him dead on the scene.
Though the official cause of death was a heart attack, she believes he relapsed and had succumbed to the heroin addiction that had plagued him years earlier. "They saw a needle in him," she says.
She's now a single mother living in Crown Heights and working for a credit-card processing company. Chervony remains deeply religious and has tried to date other Hasidic men, though she has little time for romance.
Her apartment is just a 15-minute drive from the one she grew up in, but it's also worlds away.
"I'm all these things and it makes up who I am," says Chervony, who's writing a memoir. "Even the parts that are seemingly contradictory."
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