{"id":71533,"date":"2018-05-25T12:22:24","date_gmt":"2018-05-25T16:22:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=71533"},"modified":"2018-05-25T17:33:56","modified_gmt":"2018-05-25T21:33:56","slug":"nyt-when-living-your-truth-can-mean-losing-your-children","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=71533","title":{"rendered":"(NYT) When Living Your Truth Can Mean Losing Your Children"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"css-c65vdd e2kc3sl0\">The questioning went on for days. Did she allow her children to watch a Christmas video? Did she include plastic Easter eggs as part of her celebration of the Jewish holiday of Purim? Did she use English nicknames for them, instead of their Hebrew names?<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-c65vdd e2kc3sl0\">This grilling of Chavie Weisberger, 35, took place not in front of a rabbi or a religious court, but in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, during a custody battle with her ultra-Orthodox Jewish ex-husband after she came out as lesbian and decided to leave the ultra-Orthodox fold. The stakes could not have been higher. In fact, the judge, Eric I. Prus, eventually ruled that she should lose custody of her children, largely because she had lapsed in raising them according to Hasidic customs.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-c65vdd e2kc3sl0\">Ms. Weisberger\u2019s case, which was\u00a0<a class=\"css-1g7m0tk\" title=\"\" href=\"http:\/\/nycourts.gov\/reporter\/3dseries\/2017\/2017_06212.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">reversed on appeal<\/a>\u00a0in August, is still reverberating through New York courts that handle divorce and custody matters for the state\u2019s hundreds of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-c65vdd e2kc3sl0\">A New York State appellate court ruled that Justice Prus had erred in making religious observance the paramount factor when deciding custody. The court also said he had violated Ms. Weisberger\u2019s constitutional rights by requiring her to pretend to be ultra-Orthodox around her children, even though she was no longer religious, in order to spend unsupervised time with them.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-c65vdd e2kc3sl0\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2018\/05\/25\/nyregion\/orthodox-jewish-divorce-custody-ny.html\">Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The questioning went on for days. Did she allow her children to watch a Christmas video? Did she include plastic Easter eggs as part of her celebration of the Jewish holiday of Purim? Did she use English nicknames for them,<span class=\"ellipsis\">&hellip;<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=71533\">Read more &#8250;<\/a><\/div>\n<p><!-- end of .read-more --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":794,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[101,429,114,98,155,108,424],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-children","category-judaism","category-law-legal-issues","category-marriage-family","category-other-faiths","category-religion-culture","category-secularism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/794"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=71533"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71533\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71535,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71533\/revisions\/71535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=71533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=71533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=71533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}