What are you looking for? Okay, so everybody has their magic moment special place, right? The thing that makes you feel centered and whole. For me, it's going on a train.
It's going anywhere, put my headphones on, watching the world go by. On today's story, Snap producer Seamus Healy spoke with Esty Rose. For Esty, her place is called the Mikvah. Snapchat.
I love the concept of ritual and religious ritual. I'm serious. I love the concept of Mikvah. A mikvah is a Jewish ritual bath, like a small pool.
It's tiled, it's beautiful, it's clean. It's with pure rainwater, so it's chlorinated. Your whole body has to be immersed and not holding onto anything. So you hold your breath, go under the water, and then lift your feet from the floor and open up your fingers.
Esty grew up as an ultra-Orthodox Jew in the tight-knit ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Borough Park in Brooklyn, where married women go to the mikvah every month. You're supposed to open your toes so they're not crunched. And so the water gets basically all over your body and cleanses you. The purpose is to cleanse every part of yourself, the soul, spirit, every crevice of your body.
You sort of have this hour or two to just like mentally prepare yourself and just to like take care of your body. And I love the fact that women are stringent and do it every month. And it's just a beautiful concept. As a young girl, Esty only heard of the pure cleansing ritual.
She knew her ticket to the mikvah was marriage, and marriage is really what she wanted more than anything. It's like every religious girl's excitement. I was brought up in a very close-knit, closed, sealed community. We went to buy dresses in dress stores that only had modest dresses.
Like I didn't know that there was alternate ways. The clothing stores didn't have men walking in and out of them, and I didn't even look at a boy. It was so taboo. Only when they started talking about dating, you know, does your heart start racing and think, oh, there's something exciting out there that I don't know about.
Esty was 17 when she started dating. Here I am going out with all these fabulous, and it won't keep guys from nice families, and it was like exciting. A little testosterone, smelled good, you know? And it was fun.
I remember like coming home early from work just so I could, you know, do my hair the way I wanted to. I was this cute little, beautiful, tiny blonde thing. Every single guy seemed to be so into me on the dates, and then the next day, like, going to my mother, did you hear anything? And she's like, no, not yet.
There was only one day, don't worry. And like being really panicked, like, for, you know, the next 24 hours and saying, did you hear anything? One more day, it's nothing, wait. And after the third day, and I said, nothing, huh?
Don't worry, there's something better out there for you. And I knew that she had spoken to them, obviously, and they turned me down. And I was just like, okay, fine. Let's go.
And I was relatively resilient until I saw it became a pattern. And then I started being less resilient and more hurt. What Esty didn't know was that her dating life was being sabotaged through no fault of her own. Esty was adopted as a baby, and when her dates asked about her birth parents, Esty's adoptive mom would be insulted and refuse to answer them.
So the boys stopped calling. And two years later, she was still single. And I never knew why this was. And then one day, the matchmaker called my mother, said, we have a wonderful match.
We have for your daughter, you know. I was 19 at the time, 20. He was 28, which was nine and a half years difference between us. Was he attractive?
Were you attracted to him? He was a really hot guy, blonde haired, giant blue eyes, an older man. Came with a suit. And we sat in a hotel lobby and had like Coke.
And I was quite dressed up and coiffed and made up. It was more of an interview. Like he kept on asking me about myself and my life. And it appeared that he really liked what he heard.
But I think at that point I got home and I said, okay, let's see if he calls back. The next day, Esty's mom comes into her room with a big smile on her face. The guy had called and asked for a second date. It was exactly what I wanted.
He was good looking. He was powerful, charismatic, which was nice because all the boys I dated until then were like little boys, you know, 23 year old, little pishers, you know. He was a stockbroker in the Millionaire's Club of Shears and Lehman. I mean, I was no match for him.
He overwhelmed me in a good way because I wasn't used to that type of power. And after four weeks of that, I got engaged. To prepare for her wedding, her mom and her best friend took her to the mikvah, the ritual bath, for the first time. So they took me to the Syrian mikvah in Flatbush.
There was all these glamorous women sitting there waiting to go in. My mother was with me and my best friend was with me. This is like, it's like a rite of passage. Esty had finally found her match.
She was really excited about getting married. I think I was more excited about the big party I was going to have. So I reminded him before the wedding, don't forget, you're going to rent a limousine because that's what everyone did then. You left the wedding in a limousine.
I don't care if black, white, do whatever you feel better. Limousine. He's like, OK, I'll take care of it. Don't worry.
So the wedding is over. All the guests are leaving. I'm like, OK, where's the limo? I'm thinking, where's the limo in my head?
Where's the limo? And he's like, listen, I got something even better. My cousin Avi is going to drive us. Now, I should mention, Avi was in the fish business.
You did have a lovely car. You open the car door. It was like, oh. There I am in my gown, feeling beautiful, because it's a beautiful, it's a wedding gown.
And I have to go into a car that smells like fish. Heavy smell of fish. I mean, heavier than I can explain, smell of fish. OK.
And I get in the car. And like being really quiet, because I was really shocked. But again, I'm like, look, I'm getting married and I'm excited about it. And I'm thankful and I'm grateful.
And Esty did what most ultra-Orthodox women do after they get married. She started covering her hair in public. Religious custom forbids married women to show their hair to any man other than their husbands. So Esty went to the store and tried on a bunch of wigs.
And they let you try in different colors and different sizes and different shapes. Listen, you have to put your hair in a super tight, tight, tight ponytail or pin it up behind you and smash your hair under not even a layer of hair, but layers and layers of hair. So it is hot and uncomfortable in the summer. It's insane.
In the winter, it's great. And like most women in her community, Esty wears modest clothes. Super long skirts and sleeves down to my elbows and very high necks. All black.
As soon as I was married, the first thing on my mind was obviously to have a baby, to have as many children as I can. I mean, the small families in my community have five, six kids. Esty had eight. So my oldest was Rebecca Simone and then came along my son, Effie, my next daughter, Diana, Dove, Moses, Aaron, Yisrael, and Ora Lee.
That's it, right? Did I get it? Is that eight? Yeah.
And in some ways, her world was everything she had hoped. I had everything a woman could imagine, including the first cell phone they ever created was like in a suitcase. But I would have to drag that with me everywhere because I had to be gotten a hold of any time he needed me. Every Saturday on the Jewish Sabbath, Esty says her husband would lock her in a room.
And I had to be his exclusively. If it was no round, just talking six, we're talking about, I have to be his. I even have a note that one time the kids wrote, Abba, will you please let Ema out of the room? We really want her.
He would back me into corners and yell at me, be like in my face a lot. He made me feel like nothing. I felt like I walked around feeling unattractive, unintelligent and unwanted, but thankful that he wanted me. Did people in your community like to see signs or signals?
No. So the problem with our community, as much as I thought there are amazing things about the community, like as far as handling people that are sick, families that are in need, families that don't have money, don't have enough food. It's amazing. But if something is out of the ordinary, they turn a blind eye.
Even it came to certain friends of mine. I said, I really think something's wrong with my marriage. Maybe I need some help. And you know what they all said?
We're afraid to get involved. You have a lot of kids. We're afraid to get involved. So Esty bottled it up.
And then out of the blue, Now last we left Esty. She had just found peace in her body, but she's got trouble in her soul. I don't belong to this thing that I thought of this giant thing that I thought I belonged to. It's a lonely feeling.
Oh my God, I'm not Jewish. This is what Esty's parents had been avoiding and why, as a teenager, boy after boy after boy walked away from her. They didn't have proof she was Jewish because she wasn't Jewish. And when she told her husband, he freaked out.
Even though she's lived her entire life as a religious Jew, he tells her, I didn't convert within three days. He was gonna take my children away from me. Usually there are a lot of steps to converting to Judaism, a lot of studying, but the rabbi says Esty and her kids can fast forward to the last step, a ritual cleanse in the mikveh. Esty prepares her body for cleansing like she's used to.
I have my makeup I have to be taken off on my nail polish. I have to cut my nails, comb my hair through. The mikveh lady, a woman who sits at the side of the pool to watch you dunk, hands Esty a white sheet. And I'm like, what do I need that for?
She says, it's on you. I'm like, why? She goes, you have to put it on you for when the rabbi's coming. I'm like, excuse me?
What do you mean? She's like, the rabbi's gonna come and watch you dunk in the water. I'm like, why? No one told Esty that her conversion had to be witnessed by rabbis.
Men. So I take the sheet and I put the sheet on me, but now, how do I feel? I'm standing in the water and I have this thing over my head and I had these four men shuffle in behind me. And I can't decide should I go forward in the water or should I go back?
Where do I stand? And you know what? I was paralyzed. I couldn't move.
I was thinking, go here, go, move. And I'm like freaking out. I'm literally freaking out. I've never freaked out in my entire life.
Like I didn't say anything. My brain was freaking out. I had a sheet over my head and they only see me from the back. And I got there with this.
Okay, fine. They go, no, you have to turn your face so we can see it's you. So I understand. So I understand they have to make sure it's not some other lady in the mikveh.
I get that. So in all my mass discomfort and I'm clutching the sheet across my chest because I'm naked and I turned around and they see my face and they're murmuring and talking to each other. And they say, could I please put down the top of my head so they could see my hair? Now I'm choked up thinking about it.
You have to understand that I had been married 20 years. I had never shown my hair to another man except for my husband for 20 years. Why could four men see my hair like that in the most vulnerable positions that a woman could be in stark naked in the middle of a thing of water with four men dressed in long black coats and hats and things and beards. And how could that be right?
How could it be right? I know I was crying because it's just wrong. It felt so bad. And they said, OK, OK, you can turn around and you can dunk yourself.
And I dunked whatever they told me to dunk. And they said to me, oh, make sure that you're dunking. They asked me, make sure that this is not forced. This is you're doing it not forced.
And I said, basically, I'm not forced. And I did feel like I was being forced. I said, basically, I'm doing this of my own free will because I want my children. What is your explanation of what happened?
Like, what was that about? Very simple. According to Jewish law, I was not a Jew. If I'm not a Jew, I can show them my hair.
That's where the religious people lost me because I was living as a religious woman. If they would have told me to belly flop into the mikveh, it wouldn't have been as absurd as they told me to expose my hair. To Esty, this feels like a total betrayal. As I dunked each time, I said, I just don't accept this.
I said, OK, so I didn't stop covering my hair that day, but I did it slowly, slowly, slowly. But I just knew that was it. That's where my faith was shaken, shook, and it took me a while to get it back. Esty went home back to the same life, taking care of the kids, escaping to exercise class.
But something inside changed. One day at the Y, as she was changing back into her skirt and long sleeves, one of the instructors asked her, she's like, I don't get why aren't you an instructor? I don't get it. And I said, I'm not allowed to be.
She's like, what the fuck? She says, you hear what you're saying? You're not allowed to be an instructor. Who can tell you what you're allowed to be?
And like, all of a sudden you hear it in someone else's mouth. It sounds ludicrous all of a sudden. But that's the point where, to me, all the things that I was tolerating with a big smile and said, OK, it'll be better tomorrow. All of a sudden it didn't feel like it would be better tomorrow.
Esty decided that not only would she become an instructor, but that she'd ask her husband to leave. I was clutching with this thing. I'll just do it, just do it, just do it, just do it. I walked over to him.
I said, you have to leave the house. You just have to leave the house. It's time for me to leave. You told me to leave.
I'm like, now I'm asking you nicely. Will you please leave the house? It's time for you to go. And it was very hard for me to say.
I was not the person I am today. I wasn't strong. I was meek. I was frightened of him, physically frightened of him, psychologically frightened of him.
He walked out of the house and left Esty with no money. Women from exercise class would stop by and drop off boxes of food for the kids. They collected money so Esty could pay her gas bill. You can't do it.
How can a person with eight children get divorced without someone holding their hands? And even though things got really bad, Esty trained to be an exercise instructor. Her signature class, Zumba. What's up, love?
I go by my gut, my gut feeling. Like, if this makes me feel like I should shimmy, this makes me feel like I should whip my hair around, this makes me feel like I have to kick. And I listen to a song, like, OK, not a hundred times, but I'll listen to a song, like, 8, 10, 12, 15 times before I choreograph it. This is probably one of the sexiest dances I ever choreographed.
And it's super sexy and super athletic. I'm a boss. I'm a boss. I'm a leader of the pack.
So I hate to use the word Zumba because it's not Zumba, okay? It's my classes. Zumba is Latino and I barely use it. I make my own choreographies.
I wish we could end the story here and say Esty's classes simply saved her from an oppressive marriage and she dances her way to happily independent. But from here, Esty's Zumba classes become a kind of double-edged sword. Her husband hires detectives to follow her into Zumba. And when she shows up for the divorce proceedings, there are pictures of her dancing around in class.
He took a picture of me hugging and kissing every single person I know and basically said I was having affairs with all of them. I'm a whore. I am muznakh at tzipur yodzim, which means I neglected the care of my children. They were just talking about taking my children away from me.
On the Jewish festival Purim, a day when people typically dress up in crazy outfits, Esty dressed up for her Zumba class. That song was Lady Gaga, so I put on my pink hair or whatever. But every song had its own thing. Now there's one song by Pitbull that's called Levantate that starts, Ay, ay, ay, yo, yo, yo.
And it sounds really Hasidic the first few seconds. So it says, Ay, ay, ay, yo, yo, yo. Get up, get up, Levantate. Everybody get up.
It has a little Hasidic vibe to it. It's a great song. So I bought in the store in Harnov across the street from my house, this cute little tiny kovachasidi, a little like that fur Hasidic hat. When I finished the song, sorry, I put it on and I danced.
To my chagrin, there was a private detective in the classroom who took pictures of me. These fur hats are normally only worn by religious men. And the next day there was an emergency call to the Beit Din, to the rabbinic court. And what was the whole emergency?
That I'm against the Torah and I dance around half naked with a kobachasidi on my head. And there was pictures to prove it. I stop Esty here because she's laughing and it's a funny story, but the stakes were high. Her husband wanted custody of the kids and spent thousands of dollars on lawyers, psychologists and detectives.
He launched a campaign to prove that she was unfit to raise her kids. This kobachasidi I definitely felt happy. It was a happy feeling. That's for sure, because now I'm thinking about it, and I feel like my cheeks, like the apples of my cheeks, I feel it when I'm thinking it.
And I felt it was the right thing to do. Did you feel like Jewish again? You know? I think what I felt, or what I feel, is I belong to something bigger than myself.
I belong to something larger. And you guys do it side to side. Push. Shove it.
Hop, hop, hop. Four, four, three, two, pop that chest. Pop, pop, pop. Again, four.
And side to side. Pop that chest and go. Thank you. Club.
Love it. Snap judgment.org. Additional thanks to the Jerusalem International YMCA, and the Dorot Foundation. The original score was by Renzel Gorio, and it's produced by Shana Sheely.
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