Project Belies Myth That Wife-Abuse Is Limited to Gentiles

“When he’s beating me, he isn’t Jewish.”

That was how one battered woman described her abusive husband to Betsy Giller, a social worker with the Jewish Family Service’s project on family violence.

Jews and Gentiles alike have bought a stereotype of the Jewish family as a perpetually loving unit that may scream from time to time but never resorts to physical violence, said Carole Atkin, supervisor of the program.

Blinded to Pain

“Part of the myth is that the Jewish family is a verbal family. People don’t hit each other,” she said. “But sometimes they do.”

So potent is the stereotype of the warm Jewish family that it often blinds Jews to their own pain, said Ellen Ledley, the project’s Westside social worker.

“Stereotypes, positive or negative, are blinding,” she said. “They don’t allow you to see what’s in front of you.”

Ledley’s clients have included a woman whose very religious husband beat her, claiming, falsely, that he had the right to abuse her because he was the undisputed head of the household under Jewish law.

Giller said she had no idea how widespread Jewish family violence was until she surveyed local synagogues and other Jewish institutions on the all-but-taboo subject in 1980. To her amazement, 30% of those who responded said there was abuse in their own homes--roughly the same percentage as in the community at large, she said.

Today, congregations still gasp when project volunteer Jacki Addis gives her standard consciousness-raising speech and reveals that Tom, the fictional batterer of her talk, is surnamed Friedman.

More Seeking Help

But, although unhappy Jewish families remain reluctant to discuss a problem viewed as personally shameful and bad for the Jews in the eyes of the non-Jewish world, more and more are seeking help. About 130 families have joined the local project in its two years of operation, including the household of at least one abusive rabbi. Giller observes: “People hurt. I don’t know that there’s an ethnic quality to pain.”

The program, operated from an office in Van Nuys, finds emergency shelter for battered women who need both a sanctuary and a kosher kitchen, and it provides counseling and other services to families.

“Abuse ranges from a man who shoots up the house and holds a survival knife to his wife’s throat to pushing and shoving and financial control, such as giving a woman $40 and making her account for every penny of it before she gets another $40,” Giller said.

For some, being belittled hurts most of all. “A lot of women talk about the verbal abuse being the worst,” Giller said. “They say, ‘You can take a beating because you know it’s going to end.’ ”

Violence Contagious

Jewish batterers include accountants in Century City and Israeli-born cab drivers in the Fairfax district. Men who hit are often from abusive homes themselves and frequently abuse their children as well their wives. Family violence is contagious, the staff says, citing the cases of teen-agers who start beating their mothers just as their fathers do.

Watching their children suffer finally prompts many chronically abused women to cry out.

“One woman told me that, if her husband touched the kid again, she could imagine herself taking a knife and stabbing him,” Giller recalled. So far, the women in the project have only fantasized vengeance. None has burned the marital bed.

Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and nonobservant families seem equally troubled by violence. It also appears to be blind to social status, income or education. The client whose husband lashed out with a punitive budget earned a Ph.D. at an Ivy League school. The abusive husband is a doctor.

Forbidden by Jewish Law

The fact that many abused women don’t have credit cards or otherwise share the family wealth is taken into account in setting fees for services. “Instead of asking family income, we ask: ‘What access do you have to what income?’ ” Giller said.

As a Conservative rabbi in Reseda pointed out, family violence is forbidden by Jewish law, a violation of the principle of shalom bayit (literally, peace in the home). Jewish husbands are specifically enjoined against abusing their wives, explained David Vorspan of Temple Beth Ami: “The Bible says: ‘A man shall not cause his wife to weep.’ ”

Vorspan also cited the Jewish sage Maimonides: “A man shall honor his wife more than his own self and . . . constantly seek to benefit her according to his means. . . . he shall not unduly impose his authority on her and shall speak gently with her . . . he shall be neither sad nor irritable.”

Has Right to Leave

A Jewish woman whose husband batters her has the right to leave him, the rabbi said. But, no matter what her husband does, a wife cannot initiate the process that results in a religious divorce, essential if she wants to remarry under Jewish law. Only a husband can do that.

The Family Violence Project refers observant women to sympathetic rabbis when such matters are important to them. But most of their time is spent counseling the battered and batterers, trying to break the pattern of violence in the home.

“We work with the women to help them believe that they don’t deserve or are not to blame for what is being done to them,” Giller said. That often means getting out. It doesn’t necessarily mean getting a divorce.

Staffers talk a lot about weighing options, reminding the battered that life without their husbands may mean loss of social status, loneliness and poverty as well as fewer black eyes.

As Giller said: “It’s never as simple as ‘leave him or go back.’ ”