Rockland Jewish Women's Chany Rosengarten: Author, Hasid, feminist
Rochel Leah Goldblatt
Editor's note: This article is part of a series on Orthodox Jewish women in Rockland County. The purpose of the series is to educate the public about Orthodox Jews to build understanding between the Jewish community and their non-Jewish neighbors. Over the next several weeks, six Orthodox Jewish women living in Rockland will share their stories.
ROCKLAND JEWISH WOMEN: The series
MEET THE REPORTER: Rochel Leah Goldblatt
It's important to contribute your own, unique voice to the world around you.
Chany Rosengarten believes in that: as a writer, as a woman and as someone who was born and raised in New Square, a Hasidic village in Rockland.
"There is this feeling of being misrepresented," she said. "But on the other hand, we're not doing anything about being part of the dialogue. I think it's good to be part of the dialogue. We're part of the world. We interact in some ways and so we should just get to know each other."
Her faint but noticeable Yiddish accent adds a lyrical lilt to her words as she describes the warmth and community of her hometown.
“New Square is … my favorite place. I know every nook and cranny,” she said. “It’s a very strong sense of community more than I've experienced anywhere else in the world. Very strong family, shared culture and history.”
Chany's debut novel, "Promise Me Jerusalem," published in 2017, about a Hasidic community in Israel, was aimed at a Jewish audience. She hopes her next, currently unpublished novel, about a Hasidic girl, will reach a wider, secular audience and make her a New York Times best-selling novelist.
"I definitely want to take it beyond the Jewish world that I've been writing for until now," she said.
A new graduate of Empire State College with a bachelor's degree in creative writing, Chany knows the power of words, and knows that they can change lives.
Being 'One of Us'
Chany decided to give a voice to her community after the film "One of Us" premiered in October.
"One of Us," a Netflix documentary that is critical of the Hasidic Jewish community and their treatment toward those who choose to leave, follows the lives of three former Hasidic Jews who have struggled to adjust to secular lives while battling addiction, coming to terms with losing custody or fighting to retain custody of their children.
After her husband, Pinchus Rosengarten, watched the film, they posted a response on YouTube that garnered a lot of attention. This led to a sit-down and Facebook Live with two of the subjects of the film, Luzer Twersky and Ari Hershkowitz.
"The idea behind it was let's just connect," she said. "They are 'one of us' and I respect the struggle of growing up Hasidic, coming of age, (and) basically trying to find your place in the world."
She said she is aware that the way she grew up is not perfect and does not work for everyone, but that it has been a good life for her and the people she knows. She hopes she can show that side of the story by opening up and having conversations with people in situations different from hers.
"Just respecting everyone for where they are, where they're coming from, where they're going to," she said. "Some of the people who have left have been angry themselves. That's why they left. And so it goes both ways. Like our relationships go both ways."
Life as a writer
Chany Rosengarten, née Gruber, 30, comes from a big family.
She has nine brothers and sisters and 16 nieces and nephews. Her parents and most of her siblings still live in New Square, although she has a sister in Monsey and a brother in Lakewood, where her husband's family also lives.
Chany got married at 19. Her husband studied at the Skverer yeshiva where her father taught and they were set up by a matchmaker in what is known as a shidduch. They were engaged for a year, which is slightly long but not atypical for a Skverer Hasidic engagement.
They had two sons, 18 months apart, and then shortly afterward moved to Israel, where they spent more than four years before moving back to Monsey about three years ago. She also had a daughter while living overseas.
It was in Israel that Chany discovered her passion and talent with words could translate into a career.
She said she often received compliments on her writing in school, but in Israel she met her literary heroes and began to learn from them.
"I always loved to read and I was meeting these writers who had written my favorite books," she said with a laugh. "I was like, 'You're basically God and I'm meeting you in person.' "
She started by writing articles and personal essays about her life and experiences, including her parents Passover traditions and her engagement.
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"I remember the first magazine article that came out was in a glossy magazine," she said. "I kept running to the (minimarket). Finally I got it, and I'm opening it up and there's my name and my article in print. Oh my God, it was so exciting."
She also wrote serials for different Jewish magazines and newspapers, which led to her publishing her first novel.
She was comfortable setting her novel in a Hasidic community in Israel because of her own background and heritage as a Hasid and a Hungarian European Jew.
"I was able to blend into that culture," she said. "I felt pretty comfortable. I really wanted to bring that culture to the world really."
She said people were intensely curious about that neighborhood, much like they were about her hometown.
"People don't know what it's like," she said. "People are always curious about other cultures."
She works as a freelancer now, writing magazine articles and serials for newspapers. She said she thinks she may be the only woman from New Square to write in English instead of Yiddish.
"I never even learned the Yiddish keyboard," she said, though she expressed how rich and nuanced Yiddish is and how much she loves the language. She offers commentary about the language and Yiddish culture on her Instagram account.
The life and times of New Square
Yiddish culture is a big part of growing up in New Square.
New Square is an insular Hasidic Jewish community founded by Rabbi Yaakov Twerski in 1954 along Route 45 in Rockland. His son, David Twerski, is the Grand Rebbe of Skverer, a Hasidic group which began in the former Ukraine in the 19th century.
New Square is home to nearly 8,000 Skverer Jews and was recently listed as the poorest municipality in New York, with a poverty rate at 70 percent, and a median income of $21,773 compared with the state median of $60,741. According to the analysis, 77.1 percent of households rely on SNAP benefits for food.
ANALYSIS: New Square ranked as New York's poorest municipality
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"I grew up in New Square. That was the extent of the world I knew,” Chany said. “But as I go out more into the world, I realized, just, pop culture, American culture ... we had our own culture. We had our own everything. Our own language, our own jokes, our own songs. A really rich culture."
She acknowledged that she is not a typical New Square girl who stayed within the parameters of the communities expectations, but she still loves and visits the place that she grew up.
For example, Chany drives, while many women in the community do not. She has an Instagram account, and many people eschew social media.
She said a lot of the rules in New Square are tied to the schools, and it affects the parents of the students. That gives her more latitude in matters such as driving, because her children go to school in Monsey.
She said New Square residents have choices despite an outside perception of enforced rules, especially when it comes to career and family, but those choices also have repercussions. She knew she would eventually have to move out of New Square because she married a man who was not from there, a rule born out of limited housing and space, she said.
"I was like, it's fine," she said. "That was a choice. You have to decide what you want to do."
She said many of her classmates waited to marry men from New Square because they wanted to live there.
Despite choosing to physically leave the community, Chany stays connected through her family, her culture and her love of the place.
She said she sometimes walks the hour from her Monsey home into New Square with her children on Shabbat afternoons to visit her family.
“For me, it's just a very nice community. It's a very strong community feel and a very strong culture," she said.
She said she does think that there is an underlying fear of the outside world, possibly born of the fact that the founders of New Square were holocaust survivors and that fear was part of that culture.
"On the other hand, extreme warmth and openness," she said. "When you actually talk to people in New Square, they're extremely friendly and open and willing to talk.”
She said part of the divide from the rest of the community also stems from the fact that New Square is a self-contained society.
"They have everything they need," she said, noting that they have shops, health centers and clinics and schools and childcare. "Like my mother would always say, 'from cradle to grave.' All of your needs are taken care of and there's not such a big need to be part of another culture."
That doesn’t mean it’s not important to bridge the gap, she said.
"I think there is a chance and the possibility to have conversation,” Chany said. “I just think it hasn't happened. I don't think that there's been an effort from either side."
She said one thing the Hasidic and Skverer communities are known for are their chesed (kindness) and non-profit organizations that help people in need.
Despite New Square's standing as the poorest municipality in the state, Chany said she finds that people’s needs are often defined by their priorities.
"I think it's an individual thing," she said. "I used to think nobody has money. There are people who make it a goal and they really get to their goal. Other people don't make it a goal."
She said her parents were not big earners and she surrounded herself with others of the same socio-economic background. That limited her awareness of the financial spectrum.
"I've seen both sides of the coin and I guess probably every culture has a continuum," she said. "I think that the Jewish people really have that."
After her discussion with protagonists of "One of Us," Chany said Hershkowitz reached out to her to talk about the ongoing conversation regarding the lack of secular education in yeshivas.
State law requires that private schools offer "substantially equivalent" instruction, compared to public schools, but many Orthodox and Hasidic yeshivas ignore that law. Public school superintendents are responsible for monitoring the academics of private schools in their district, but this is often not feasible due to time and resources.
State Sen. Simcha Felder held up the state budget in March to push for measures that would exempt state oversight. He didn't get an exemption, instead the senate agreed that the state or representative visiting private schools consider the entire curriculum, not just academics.
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YAFFED, a non-profit organization founded by Naftuli Moster, advocates for the state to uphold the law so more secular education is taught in yeshivas, positing that the lack of effective instruction in English, math and other subjects leads to limited career opportunities and an increase in poverty within some Hasidic and Orthodox communities.
Chany said that most Hasidic men do not attend college, but despite that, there are wealthy and successful Hasidic men.
"I think that all parents, every parent wants their child to have opportunity in life," Chany said. "That's what it boils down to. I want my kids to have an open door to whatever they want to do."
She said that could mean a college education, a career or a family life. She said she gives her children a well-rounded education because that is what is important to her.
"I think that all Hasidic parents feel the same," she said. "The question is how do we get there?"
She said she and her husband both studied at Hasidic schools and still have been able to accomplish what they have wanted in life. Pinchus is a manager in a community outreach center in Monsey.
"If you want to call that limited, you might," she said. “Then again, I'm a writer. I'm in the career that I love. I believe that I will get to my vision of the New York Times bestseller book. I believe that I'll get there and nothing has stood in the way."
She said part of the problem with the dialogue surrounding education, which limits its effectiveness, is the anger she has encountered from people advocating for secular education.
Chany, like many parents, believes that it is the parents' choice where to send their children. Many of the advocates are students who went to yeshivas and struggled with their lack of secular knowledge when they finished school and entered college or the workforce.
"I felt very attacked when I spoke about (education)," she said. "I felt that the people who are representing that idea of education are extremely angry. That's why I kind of disengaged from the conversation."
Chany said she is currently training and working with an organization that coaches people in the community about business.
"There's definitely that desire to help people succeed," she said.
Women, feminism and Hasidism
Chany said one of the biggest misperceptions regarding New Square is about women.
“We’re like girl bosses on a very high level,” she said with a laugh. “There’s a strong sense of ownership or choice.”
She said men are often the face of the community and therefore many people believe that women are forced to stay at home and raise children, but that is not the case in her experience.
"Women work," she said. "They have the choice if they want to work or not. Some women choose just to focus on motherhood."
Her mother chose to do both, combining her work and family life, transitioning from a school teacher to a matchmaker (shadchan) to a birthing class instructor.
She said the women are the decision-makers in the community, and often the primary breadwinners. They are also the ones who decide on family size.
"(Society's) idea of feminism is protecting women from having babies, right? But some women want to have babies," she said. "A lot of women are making the decision to have babies."
She said that upon reflecting on feminism and Hasidic life, she perceives Hasidic women as advanced on the feminist scale, especially compared to secular culture.
"I'm really wondering if the secular community has had as much choice," she said. "The women are the ones who make all the decisions. We're just very important people in our society."
She said women fostered deep friendships and support each other in all endeavors. They hold the power in the community and their decisions affect everyone around them.
"Our women are so fierce and know how to take care of themselves," she said.
She said the women are empowered from a very young age, and have such a ... sisterhood that she has yet to find anything like it outside of her community.
"For any life cycle event, the whole community gets together in a way that I haven't seen in other places," she said. "I thought ... when I moved to Monsey, I (was) moving back to the same exact thing. Totally not."
Chany said her experiences may have differed from those of others, and she didn't want to speak for all women or minimize the struggles of women who have had issues with the community.
"I think that many of the women who leave wanted something other than what the community had to offer," she said. "That's probably the voice that's being heard, but within the community, the people who are doing what they wanted to do, whether in their career or with their family or with their homes or with their community or community leadership. There's a lot of opportunity. Women are very expressed."
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Tune in as Chany joins lohud reporter Rochel Leah Goldblatt for a Facebook live discussion about the series and Rockland at 3:30 p.m. on Thursday.