This essay is part of our ongoing series, Outside the Bubble: Class and Inequality in the Jewish Community. It explores the class divides in Jewish communities of all denominations, and the financial struggles belonging to these communities can incur. Please email your thoughts and essays to batya@forward.com.
More of us need to recognize that some “necessities” are, well, not.
We were two blocks from a synagogue. But we couldn’t attend. We were too poor
These Jews, many of whom are Holocaust survivors, did what they could to endure a Communist regime that discriminated relentlessly against them.
The cost of being an Orthodox Jew is famously prohibitive. For converts, the financial burden of Orthodoxy is sometimes simply too much to bear.
This essay is part of our ongoing series, Outside the Bubble: Class and Inequality in the Jewish Community. It explores the class divides in Jewish communities of all denominations, and the financial struggles belonging to these communities can incur. Please email your thoughts and essays to batya@forward.com.
As a baal teshuva first-generation Russian Jewish immigrant transplant, I felt the results of the class hierarchy I had landed in.