When Batsheva moved in with another family, she was just 16 years old. She was getting bullied at school and desperately wanted to go somewhere else for the remainder of high school, but her community only had one school. After doing some research and making some connections, Batsheva’s parents agreed to let her board with a family in the NY area. From the get-go, Batsheva didn’t feel comfortable there at all. She stayed in her room in the basement by herself most of the time; when she went upstairs to spend time with the family, it felt awkward, as if she was an intruder. She told her parents she didn’t think it would work. Her friend was boarding down the block with the Cohen family and invited Batsheva to join them for a Shabbos meal. She immediately felt at home there, and the Cohens took notice. They, too, enjoyed having her around, and by winter break she was living with them. “I was boarding, but they were so welcoming that I really became a part of the family. Mrs. Cohen had some boundaries in place, especially tzniyus-related boundaries with her husband and sons, but somehow it all felt very natural,” Batsheva explains.

The Cohens were more yeshivish than Batsheva’s family, and Batsheva felt herself being pulled in that spiritual direction. “Living with the Cohens really solidified my hashkafos because I had a firsthand view of what the type of family I wanted really looked like. Mrs. Cohen just loves being frum. She loves Yiddishkeit. I would watch her cry when lighting candles or come home after a long day and pour her heart out into her Tehillim because she’d heard that someone was unwell. She never preached to me about Yiddishkeit, but her passion and deep feeling for everything Jewish was infectious. It’s what made me want to live a more Torahdig lifestyle.”

Batsheva said she doesn’t remember her parents ever calling the Cohens, and only now as an adult understands that that wasn’t normal. “While I always had and still do have a positive relationship with my parents, I wouldn’t call them emotionally healthy,” Batsheva says.

She finished high school and went off to seminary, and it made sense afterward for her to continue to board with the Cohens. By then, Mrs. Cohen had become a second mother to Batsheva, and it was a given she would walk her through shidduchim. “I was living with the Cohens and working, and I wanted to go work in a camp that was coed over the summer. It’s funny that Mrs. Cohen encouraged me to do so because she knew it was the right thing for me, but I know she would never have let one of her kids go to a coed camp. There always was a difference with how she would guide me compared to her own kids, but I really appreciated that she always kept who I was and where I was coming from in mind. It was never like, these are the rules of this family and that’s it. Yes, there were rules and boundaries, but I didn’t need to twist myself into being a Cohen.”

That summer, Batsheva called Mrs. Cohen from camp saying, “Hi, I think I’ve met my future husband at camp. His name is Dovid.” Mrs. Cohen got right to work and checked him out. As Batsheva and Dovid were dating in camp, Mrs. Cohen decided to call Dovid’s parents. “I just called and said, ‘Hi, I think we should meet.’ Needless to say, his parents were a bit surprised and concerned. After all, why was I calling and not Batsheva’s mother? We met several times that summer. Batsheva and Dovid didn’t even know,” Mrs. Cohen recounts.

Batsheva returned from camp and was relieved and comforted that she knew Mrs. Cohen was looking out for her just like she would for one of her own kids. “That Succos, while on a trip to Israel, Rabbi and Mrs. Cohen actually met with Dovid’s rosh yeshivah to discuss the shidduch. I would say she walked me all the way to the chuppah without actually walking me to the chuppah. My own parents walked me to the chuppah. Mrs. Cohen would never dream of stepping in there, and she always encouraged me to be in contact with my parents and update them regularly.”

The engagement process, however, as well as the first year of marriage, really emphasized for Batsheva’s parents how removed they were from her life. “My parents kind of realized, albeit too late, how they’d taken a major step back, and I’d taken a major step forward without them. I think it wasn’t until the engagement that my mother realized that Mrs. Cohen was such a part of my life, and while Mrs. Cohen was super sensitive to never step on her toes, after I got engaged my parents became uber sensitive about the situation.”

Esty, a respected mechaneches in Brooklyn had two girls boarding in her home for close to six years, until they left her home to start homes of their own. A Brooklyn school, recognizing that something was really off in the home of one of their students — Rivka from Cincinnati who was boarding with a local family — contacted Esty and her husband (also a respected rav and mechanech) and asked if they would be willing to take her in. Rivka needed more nurturing than the family she was boarding with could provide. They agreed, but then Rivka’s parents — without speaking to them, meeting them, or giving any warning — dropped Rivka off later that day, along with her younger sister, Devorah. “We tried very hard to act natural and like we were totally expecting two girls and not one. Needless to say, we were concerned about the parents’ behavior.” They were totally checked out of their daughters’ lives.

Esty and her husband constantly sought advice and guidance from their rav on how to navigate the situation. “Questions arose constantly, such as should we really be paying for things their parents should pay for but aren’t, like seminary, clothing, and therapy? My daughter doesn’t want to be in the same class as Rivka. Should we put them in separate schools? What boundaries should we set in place regarding tzniyus in the house?” says Esty.

While Esty and her husband originally agreed to house Rivka and Devorah as boarders, over time, it became more of a fostering situation. They tried contacting Rivka and Devorah’s parents, but the parents weren’t interested in speaking.

So they raised money to send both girls to therapy, to seminary, and even marry them off. “I have kids by birth and kids by love,” says Esty. “And I think anyone would have done what we did. I always ask myself: What would I do with the girls if they were my kids by birth. In fact, I’m always checking myself to make sure I’m not doing more for them than I would for my own kids just because I feel bad for them.”

Esty and her husband feel strongly that parental alienation is a last resort and focus on teaching the girls the skill of having healthy relationships with unhealthy people. When Rivka got married, Esty made an effort to include their mother in every detail, even while she and her husband were footing the bill. “I still get hate mail and hate calls from her parents saying I stole her children from her. It was challenging because this mother, who hadn’t shown interest in her child for years, was all of a sudden interested and upset. I wanted to ask, ‘Where were you all this time?’ Instead, I’d just say, ‘That’s so hard, and I hear you’ over and over again. She’d tell me I was terrible, and then I’d encourage the girls to call their mother. It was very hard. But it was the right thing.”

Cut Off

And while Esty and her husband are happy to have Rivka and Devorah as part of the family, not all of their family members are as thrilled. When there was a family simchah, they brought them along. If a family Chol Hamoed barbecue was planned, they came, too. Some of the extended family would ask if it was really necessary and complain they wanted some time with just the “real family.”

But Esty and her husband were steadfast in their decision to treat the girls as if they were born into the family, because of their passionate belief that all of Klal Yisrael is family, and because they were consulting daas Torah every step of the way. And because so many young people who become a ben or bas bayis do so from a place of vulnerability, we have to be very careful not to add to their preexisting hurt.

For Menachem, 32, becoming a ben bayis both saved his life, but also caused him tremendous pain. “I grew up in a mainstream frum family, but with an abusive and emotionally distant father,” he says. “My mother was fine, but she grew up in a generation in which the belief was you stood by your husband no matter what, and you didn’t question his chinuch approach.”

Menachem was in his twenties and in yeshivah in a different city. At first he lived in the yeshivah dorms and became close with a chavrusa of his who lived locally. He started to go to his chavrusa’s house for Shabbos meals and pretty soon was there every week.

“I moved out of the dorms and got my own place. I was struggling in all areas of life. I wasn’t happy and didn’t want to be in yeshivah full-time, so I got a job. Suddenly, I didn’t depend on my parents for everything. No longer in my father’s firm grasp, I was able to process everything I went through as a kid. Judge me if you want, tell me how a child always has a mitzvah of kibbud av, but I stopped speaking to my father, and I stand by that decision. I was barely frum, unhappy, trying to process and heal at the same time and just make sense of everything.

“The one anchor I had in my life was going with my friend Chaim Rosen to his house every week for Shabbos. His father is a really good guy, and he took me under his wing. At the time, I also started engaging in some dangerous behaviors, and when I told Chaim’s father, Yanky Rosen, he found me a therapist, mentored me, and treated me like a son. He was the father I never had. The father I wished I’d had. Chaim’s mother was warm and caring, and it didn’t hurt that she was an excellent cook. I was putting my life back together and I felt, for the first time in my life, that I really belonged.

“Then one day, it was over. I asked Chaim’s father, Yanky, if we were still going to watch the Yankee game together as we’d planned, but he didn’t reply. The next day he sent me a message saying he was busy and that they weren’t going to be around for Shabbos. I came over the following week, but he hardly spoke to me. The cutoff was pretty extreme and instantaneous, and I couldn’t figure out what I’d done. At the time, the hurt, combined with the insecurity that I’d done something wrong or that, like my father used to tell me, I wasn’t good enough, was suffocating.

“A few years after that, Yanky’s father died. I still had hakaros hatov, so I went to be menachem avel. I went every day of shivah to be mashlim the minyan, still wondering what happened.

“Years later, I found out what happened. Chaim’s brother dropped a pretty big secret he was hiding from the family. Like, the massive type of secret that jolts everyone. And he ended his secret-revealing speech by saying that it would be nice if his father would give him half as much time as he gave me.”

While he was relieved to find out it really didn’t have anything to do with him, Menachem struggled to understand why Yanky Rosen didn’t just tell him the truth, or at least part of it. “I totally get why he did it,” said Menachem. “In fact, I would say he did the right thing. Of course you put your own kids first. But he didn’t do it in the right way.”

Menachem continued to mature and figure his life out. And while he went for therapy to help him deal with the pain of his difficult relationship with his father, he couldn’t bring up the topic of the Rosens. He felt so torn because they’d helped him so much and was uncomfortable to discuss how much their abandonment had hurt him.

Shortly after Menachem got married, he attended a barbecue he knew the Rosens would be attending. “He was very happy to see me and, according to my wife, his wife did a quick scan of her. She said when they saw my wife fit the bill of a frum, tzanuah wife, she could literally see them exhale in relief, as if to say, okay, we didn’t totally mess this guy up. They looked at her like the get-out-of-the-guilt-jail-free card they so desperately wanted.

“I didn’t know how to feel. Do they get the credit that I turned out frum? Well, yes and also no. On the one hand, it’s like, the guy saved me. On the other hand, he totally abandoned me with no warning or explanation. So I’m stuck in this weird place holding hakaras hatov and resentment in the same hand.”

Michal, a mother of four, had a milder experience with this. “Both of my parents died in a tragic accident when I was 19. My best friend’s family really took me in. They made sure I understood I was always welcome. The ironic part was that people assumed I was a bas bayis there because my parents had died, and while that was true, no one really knew how much my parents fought with each other. My whole family was always fighting with each other. So while I could have gone to my aunts or cousins, I really liked being in a calm, normal, and happy home.”

The Zimmerman family, in whose home Michal was a bas bayis, would often make a point to make sure she knew they considered her family. They would often tell her things like, “Family is always welcome” or “We don’t say no to family.”

“They meant well, but telling someone who doesn’t have a family that you’re their family is a big deal. When they weren’t there for me in the same way they would be for their own kids, I felt confused. For example, they couldn’t attend my son’s shalom zachar, and I felt really disappointed, not just that they couldn’t make it, but also foolish because I really believed them when they said I was family. But family would never miss their grandson’s shalom zachar.

“I also have an uncomfortable feeling at being hurt and confused over that because they owe me nothing and did so much for me.”

Repeat Performance

Would he consider having a ben or bas bayis in his own home? Menachem is hesitant and feels he would need to be absolutely sure he could establish really clear boundaries about what the relationship is and isn’t, and that he was super on top of how his children felt about it.

Chana is much more enthusiastic about the idea, and says it’s her “dream” to be able to give to someone the way the Rubins gave to her.

Esty, who took the idea of having a bas bayis and went above and beyond, becoming a second mother to two girls, feels that one of the most important things to ask yourself before having a ben or bas bayis is if you can really truly do it. She also recommends being cautious, not with warmth, but with boundaries.

But at the end of the day, she emphasizes again, “Klal Yisrael is one big family. We’re all Hashem’s children.”

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 864)