I hung up, disturbed and confused. I’d heard a lot about the “system’s” discrimination against families from other backgrounds

As told to Shoshana Freidman

T

his is not a happy story. It’s also not an angry story. If you’re the bitter, cynical type, then sure, you can find people to blame. But I’m not sure I would point fingers here. Pain, yes. Blame, not sure.

I don’t know exactly when the story started, but the first time the alarm bells went off were when the principal called. It wasn’t the first time we were hearing from him. Yaakov had had his run-ins with the rebbeim over the years, and we’d been invited to the principal’s office more than once. But there was always the underlying assurance that he was a good kid from a good family, with solid parents and solid values. He’d be fine, he just had a few snags to iron out, like any good kid.

“Mrs. Moskowitz,” the principal said. “I noticed that your Yaakov is getting friendly with Zevy Dadon. How should I say this, how should I put it? Zevy, well, eh… let’s just say he’s not the right friend for your son. I see them together at recess, I see them talking… you don’t want this for your son, he’s a good kid.”

Stupid American immigrant that I am, trying to make sense of the Israeli system, I wasn’t exactly sure what the principal meant.

“Is he a wild boy?” I asked.

“No, that’s not it.”

“So what’s the issue?”

“Listen,” the principal said. “He’s not the right friend for your son. You have a good boy, you’re good people, this boy comes from a different type of family. Tell your son to find other friends. Believe me, Mrs. Moskowitz, you don’t want this.”

I hung up, disturbed and confused. I’d heard a lot about the “system’s” discrimination against families from other backgrounds. I know that Zevy’s parents were newcomers to frumkeit, that his father owned a store instead of learning in kollel, that his parents weren’t skilled at reading the social mores of chareidi society. But he was just a little boy. How bad could he be? Something in my American “live and let live” mentality felt very jarred by the categorical rejection of a sixth-grader, the way he was labeled and discarded before even beginning to taste life.

But what did I know? I gently tried nudging Yaakov in the direction of different friends. Maybe it worked a little, I’m not sure.

The next year was the spring of the long afternoons — long, aimless hours with not much happening outside among the chevreh. One day Yaakov asked if he could go home with Zevy. I wasn’t thrilled but wasn’t sure it was worth a fight. I said yes.

“How was it?” I asked when he got home.

“Fun!” he told me. “Zevy’s father has a store, a Judaica and souvenir store, where all these fun tourists come. He let us help out, and we saw all these interesting things and people.”

It was nice to see Yaakov so animated, describing the bright colors and whimsical curios. When he asked to go back the next day, I couldn’t really say no.

But when he came home, he added another detail. “Zevy’s father, he has this cool phone, you can see videos on it. He let us play with it while he was busy at the counter.”

Okay, so now I understood what that warning had been about. This wasn’t just a family that couldn’t read unarticulated social standards. It was a family that couldn’t be trusted to uphold our basic rules.

The rest of the week, I made a strong effort to keep Yaakov very busy after school. It was draining, but it was important. The next week, when he asked again whether he could visit the store, I realized there was only so long I could keep up the charade.

“Yaakov,” I said, “I’m going to be honest with you. I’m sure Zevy is a nice boy and a good friend. But his father has an iPhone with videos, and that’s against our rules and the rules of the school. I think it’s great that you’re so nice to him and that you’re his friend, but I’m not comfortable with his father being in charge of you when he doesn’t keep to the rules.”

I hoped that I broadcast the right mix of empathy, understanding, sensitivity, and firmness. If there were two nightmares that I had, then one was that my child would be the type of person who dismisses entire sectors of Jews just because they don’t look or act exactly like we do — and the second was that he’d lose the purity and clear priorities that we’d worked to instill in our children. This situation thrust those two nightmares on one dark battleground, in inevitable combat, and I wasn’t quite sure how to position my son so he’d emerge unscathed.

Yaakov listened. He was quiet. He thought. And he accepted. He was a good boy, like the principal had told us.

I didn’t hear too much about Zevy after that. Yaakov slowly began to talk about new boys, new names.

I

t was toward the end of the year, when the blazing heat of summer was shimmering off the Jerusalem streets, that Yaakov told me he might be late to our Shabbos meal.

“Zevy’s having his bar mitzvah this Shabbos,” he said. “He gave me an invitation, he said it’s going to be in their shul in the Bucharim neighborhood, and his father’s making a huge kiddush.”

“So you’re going? Are you still his friend?”

“Look,” Yaakov told me. He was quiet, composed. I wasn’t used to this newly mature voice. “Zevy doesn’t have too many friends. He’s… he doesn’t really fit into our class. I think I should go. It’s his bar mitzvah, he should have friends there.”

Here was my son — the little boy who was more excited about bicycle stunts and Israeli politics than a new baby brother — now noticing and intuiting another child’s needs with adult sensitivity. My heart swelled.

“Sounds like a nice idea,” I said.

Y

aakov walked through the door to find our set Shabbos table. He was sweaty, but there was something else. His shoulders were slumped and his eyes vacant.

“Hi, Yaakov, how are you? How was the bar mitzvah? Did Zevy lein his haftarah nicely?”

“It was fine,” he said. “Let’s eat.”

After Havdalah, when the little ones were in bed and I was washing the dishes, Yaakov suddenly spoke.

“So Zevy’s father, you know he’s a chozer b’teshuvah, right? And his mother too.”

“Right, I know,” I said, focusing on the dishes.

“So his grandparents, they’re still angry at them for becoming frum, so they didn’t come to the bar mitzvah. But the father, he has this store, he davens in this shul for a long time, he lives in Bucharim, he figures a lot of people will come to the kiddush. So I was helping them set up the platters, and Mommy, you had to see. So much soda he bought. So much. And then boxes of rugelach. Boxes and boxes. So much food, you had to see. And then…”

The water kept running in the silence.

“No one came. No one from the class. Not the rebbi, not the principal. Maybe a few neighbors, I don’t know. So I stayed afterward, I was helping them put away the food. Mommy...” This time I turned to look at him, to trace the plaintive voice to the slumped shoulders and wounded eyes. “...you had to see it. So many rugelach.”

It’s been years since Zevy’s bar mitzvah and try as I might, I can’t remember how that conversation ended. I don’t know if I stumbled to come up with something intelligent, something soothing, something sympathetic to say, or if I just bleated out a series of stupid questions along the lines of “Are you sure the principal didn’t come earlier?” and “Could it be the neighbors went away for Shabbos?” or “Did Zevy make sure to tell everyone about his bar mitzvah?”

I do know that Yaakov has seen Zevy around a few times since then — wearing jeans, hanging out with a troubled pack of teens outside Jaffa Gate, smoking on Shabbos. The first time it happened, he gave me a report in a voice laced with wonder and pain.

He didn’t have to say it, but I knew we were both envisioning those boxes of uneaten rugelach and all the rejection they held in their deceptively sweet folds.

T

his is not an angry story. As many times as I reexamine the theme, the plot, the characters, I still can’t manage to find a true villain.

The principal who distanced Zevy was trying his best to make room for a child who wasn’t a great fit for his school, while making sure no students paid a spiritual price for the lower standards of his home.

The boys who felt no great urgency to attend a bar mitzvah had already been conditioned not to take these invitations too seriously — the school had a “two-friend maximum” rule for bar mitzvahs, since most students had so many cousins that a full class of guests would raise costs prohibitively for the parents. Who could blame them for failing to remember a boy who lived at the margins of their class and consciousness, a boy who likely wouldn’t have relatives at his simchah?

The rebbi might have lived outside of Yerushalayim; I don’t remember anymore.

Should I blame myself? When I’d encouraged Yaakov to break off his friendship with Zevy, I hadn’t intended for a little boy to be left friendless. I had done what a typical mother would, should do — put her child first. And I had tried to do it gently, without any acrimony or poison.

And Zevy’s father — a spiritual seeker who’d sacrificed parental support and connection in order to live a religious life — certainly didn’t mean to sentence his son to a childhood of isolation and loneliness. He likely misread the cultural map by holding on to his phone while pushing his son into a school where that branded him as an outcast. But he surely didn’t mean to breed an anger and bitterness so intense that it would push his son back to the life he’d abandoned.

If I could rewrite this story, I would have a kindly mentor advise Zevy’s parents to place him in a school where they felt comfortable. A school where their son would fit right in, wouldn’t be labeled as lesser-than. Where they could visit with pride, acknowledged and maybe even celebrated for the choice they’d made while gently clued in to the unspoken expectations of their new community. But maybe they’d grown accustomed to living among people who “got it” while they scrambled to figure things out. Maybe they thought it had to be that way.

Purity and fences, openness and acceptance. Can they ever live together, can they both be part of the legacy we give our children? Surely there must be some way we can preserve their preciously unblemished souls while teaching them never to write off another Jew. Surely there must be some system that welcomes the seekers who still bring some detritus of foreign influence, while guarding our dearest values.

Until we find it, I know two boys will walk through life forever changed by the hurt of the message they absorbed at the cusp of adulthood: If you don’t keep to our standards, you are not one of us. You are other.

Will they ever overcome it? Will the sweetness of acceptance and belonging ever erase that bitter day?

So many questions, so many rugelach.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 755)