‘I am a proud Jewish lesbian living in the heart of the strictly Orthodox community’

One rainy summer morning in 2021, I had a terrible argument with my brother. I started it: I demanded he explain what felt like my family’s cold treatment of me, a single mother, and my three children. I was struggling. Where was their support?

“It’s, it’s… that you’ve decided you’re a lesbian,” he replied.  He stammered over the word “lesbian” but he’d said it. He also said that he and my siblings were united in their position, and that they were acting under our father’s instructions and with rabbinic guidance.

“I never decided to be a lesbian,” I replied. I mean, who would choose the rejection I was suffering?

When I arrived home hours later, still heaving with pain and tears, I phoned a journalist friend and asked her to write about what had happened.

“No, Yehudis,” she said, “you write it.” She stayed on the phone with me as I sat down, blew my nose, opened my laptop, and began to type. I wrote down what had happened that day, marvelling at the double-edged wonder of what I had done: I’d laid things out in the open and nothing would ever be the same again.

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That piece of writing, got me an agent, and then a contract with Penguin, to publish Chutzpah: A Memoir of Faith, Sexuality, and Daring to Stay. I thought of it as a story about my journey to embrace my identity as a lesbian in the Charedi community, about my struggle to be myself. But as the words flowed, it became clear that my story was about more than sexual identity. It was about how I had learnt to confront a system that demands silence and compliance, and punishes those who dissent.

For as long as I can remember, I had understood that a woman’s greatest responsibility was to keep men comfortable, that that was how we earned our share in the world to come. As little girls, we were told we were higher, holier than men, and didn’t need material reminders to bring us closer to God. I learnt this from my father, a pulpit rabbi, and my mother, who sat upstairs in shul and who taught Rosh Chodesh groups and bridal classes and took women to the mikveh. I learnt this in what I shall loosely refer to as “school”, in the small, unregulated groups of children taught in a variety of settings including a cloakroom, a boiler cupboard, and people’s dining rooms. We belonged at home: the nappies and the laundry were holy.

Later, when I was married and living in London’s Stamford Hill with three little children, I remember talking to a rebetzin about struggling to get to shul, and she replied: “Your children are your sifrei Torah.” But I wanted to sing in community, as well as at home with my children. The next morning, I invited a friend round with her children. We cleared the toys and breakfast paraphernalia off the dining room table, and carefully erected my husband’s folding wooden shtender (book stand designed for prayer). We stood together, and sang the morning prayers while the children tugged at our skirts. Our voices harmonised and it was holy, but for me, it wasn’t enough.

Does my living and loving in the heart of Manchester’s shtetl cause some discomfort? Sure it does. But that’s OK. Sometimes I feel uncomfortable too

A decade earlier, staying quiet had also been a way of keeping myself safe. At the age of 15, my parents sent me back from Israel, where we were living, to attend school in Manchester. I lived with a well-respected frum family who my parents paid to look after me. The father, Todros Grynhaus, sexually abused me. He also pulled me out of school, and when no one around me protested, he knew he had free rein. I had to keep quiet to keep a roof over my head. I had nowhere else to go. Eventually, it was his wife who walked in on him in my bedroom who sounded the alarm. But to her, and the rabbi she telephoned in the middle of the night, I wasn’t a child who needed to be kept safe: I was a woman, past the age of bat mitzvah, who had tempted a married man into sin.

This way of looking at things in the Charedi community goes beyond my experience of sexual abuse. It is systemic. When I was three, I was expected to wear tights at the beach so as not to expose my little legs to men. When I was 15, I was abused by a man who was in loco parentis. When I was 18, I was married off even though when I was 17 I had told my parents I was a lesbian. When I became a single mother, I was quietly shunned. The opprobrium was not directed at those who abused their power, but towards those of us who dared to defy expectations.

In Chutzpah, I tell the story of finding the courage not to be liked, of finding the power to rebel and the strength to stay. I live and love right in the heart of Prestwich’s Charedi community. My children attend frum schools. I shop in a kosher supermarket, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Merely licentious”. I host megila leynings and Friday night dinners for people who are also staying in my community but who also want something different from it. I am a proud lesbian who brings my partner to shul. I choose to remain in a world that is mine, where my roots are buried deep. Why? Because I love it and because I shouldn’t have to choose between the different parts of myself.

I also hold up a mirror to our community’s leadership. I say what can feel unsayable, I point out what others might prefer to ignore. And I co-founded the charity Nahamu to combat the harms that arise from extremism in the Charedi community. We have challenged forced marriage, defended Charedi children’s right to a secular education – and we have already seen progress. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill is now at committee stage in the House of Lords. When enacted, it will finally bring yeshivot into regulation, improve Charedi access to education and hopefully end the false narrative that Charedi boys are home schooled in secular subjects. The Home Office policy on forced marriage has shifted firmly to include Charedi marriages where girls say yes in the absence of any reasonable possibility of saying no. And despite efforts from some, frum online spaces now entertain lively debate on topics where there was none: Peggy Greenfeld, a Satmar relationship and intimacy coach, has 15,000 followers on Instagram, where she discusses developing safety and consent in marriages that were not entered into by choice and which have previously included marital rape. Chutzpah was published a few days ago, and the feedback has been pouring in: my favourite so far is a photo of the book, lying open on the desk of a teacher in a Charedi school in Stamford Hill.

This is precisely why I feel staying put matters: it helps force accountability, it helps deny those in powerful positions the comfort of dismissing inconvenient truths. I remain in the heart of the shtetl, not despite its discomforts, but because I love this world too deeply to abandon it.

I know that parents want yeshivah education, and the dignity that secular education brings. Families want their children to be safe and they fear involving secular authorities in safeguarding, because of the social consequences and impact on shidduchim.

Does my living and loving in the heart of Manchester’s shtetl make some feel uncomfortable? Sure it does. But that’s OK. Sometimes I’m uncomfortable, too. Why should choosing this Jewish life mean an absence of discomfort? What matters is choosing wisely and being courageous in how I live my Judaism.

What I’m doing is not for everyone. I know that it is not always safe for people to make the decisions I have made. But for those who can remain, staying visibly, authentically and unapologetically, is how we make change happen.

Counting down from our Exodus at Pesach, and now, readying ourselves for Shavuot when when we affirm, once again, that we are saying a resounding yes to being Jewish, I think my experiences mean that I do this with that with a rich and developed understanding of what freedom means. I have learnt the hard way that freedom is something you build. Freedom is starting the day with my partner and I taking turns to say amen to each other’s recital of the morning blessings, freedom is hosting a Shabbat meal for LGBT people who sing zemiros and debate the Torah portion and argue together for the sake of heaven, creating magical, Jewish spaces where we don’t have to choose between staying, and staying safe.

This Shavuot, I’ll be standing at Sinai, with everyone else. Without asking for permission to be there. ​

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​Chutzpah: A Memoir of Faith, Sexuality and Daring to Stay, by Yehudis Fletcher, is published by Penguin