After She Rejected Her Strict Religious Community, Running Helped Her Build A New Life The extraordinary story of one woman’s fight for her freedom
AFTER SHE REJECTED HER STRICT RELIGIOUS COMMUNITY
Connie doesn’t have gloves or a hat. She wears black yoga pants, a cotton sweatshirt and bulky, five-year-old Nikes. The crowd around her buzzes with strange talk of Garmins and racing flats, whatever those are. At the gun, her friend says, ‘Just run. Just follow the people.’
It’s 2013, and Connie is 24. When her friend suggested she register for the Valentine’s Day 5K in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, New York, she’d asked, ‘What’s a 5K?’
‘It’s just a loop of the park,’ he said.
She thought, how hard could it be? But now she’s following a big, swarming crowd. And when they get to a hill, they keep going. Connie stops. I can’t do it, she thinks.
Running outside, let alone among hundreds of other runners on a frigid Saturday morning, is new to Connie. For years, she had to hide her runs from her husband and family. The hill before her is steep, but not nearly as steep as the one she has already climbed just to reach the starting line.
Sundays were school days when Connie was growing up. Only a few hours most Sundays, except for the first Sunday in November each year, when the New York City Marathon ran straight through the heart of South Williamsburg. That was a full day of school.
She would see only the marathon’s aftermath: an avenue strewn with paper cups, empty gel packets and police barricades. Marathoners were crazy people, she was told. They were going to break their legs, or die the moment they crossed the finish line. But most important, they were not part of the community.
Connie Allen, née Schlesinger, was raised Satmar, an ultra-Orthodox sect of Hasidic Judaism that originated in Hungary in the early 20th century but really took root in post-Second World War New York. After the Holocaust, thousands of Orthodox Jews fled Europe and established tightly knit communities throughout Brooklyn. Connie’s mother, Devorah, was born in Israel; her father, Lipa, in Brooklyn. His parents, Holocaust survivors from Hungary, had their first child on the ship from Europe.
For that first wave of Jewish émigrés, postwar Brooklyn represented a new start, but not a happy one. ‘Even in this land of safety and abundance, the pain of the Holocaust wasn’t very far from the surface,’ writes Warren Kozak in his book
The Rabbi of 84th Street. ‘One could hear it in discussions and see it on the faces of those who survived.’ They seemed to be ‘stuck in a dark void’, a state of constant mourning.
South Williamsburg measures less than one square mile, but it’s grown into one of the largest Hasidic enclaves in the world: estimates suggest it’s home to some 73,000 Hasidim of various sects. Most are Satmar, who reject modern life and maintain the customs and dress of their Hungarian ancestors. Insular and culturally conservative, the Satmar believe that through strict piety and a refusal to assimilate, they can guard against another attempt at annihilation.
As a child, Connie knew nothing of the world beyond South Williamsburg. From her third-floor apartment, she would sit at the window, staring out, and whenever she saw a non-Hasidic person, her eyes would be glued. ‘I’d just try to understand what life was out there, because the life I was living was so miserable.’
It’s spring 2002 and Connie is 13. She’s small, with big brown eyes. Her hair hangs in a single braid; her traditional black housedress leaves only her face and hands exposed.
Connie’s Satmar school is closed to girls each spring so they can help their mothers with Passover cleaning. They empty cupboards, scour surfaces and scrub walls to rid their homes of any trace of bread products. The ritual commemorates the exodus of enslaved Israelites from Egypt, when, according to the Bible, they were liberated by Moses so abruptly that their bread had no time to rise.
Today Passover is observed without leavened grain products, a tradition that honours their exile and hardship.
For those weeks, Connie’s typically silent apartment is full of commotion, and she sees opportunity. She may not be able to change her dress or her hair, but she can change her body. As her mother and sisters clean, Connie slips into her bedroom. She lays towels on the creaky wood floor to muffle the sound. She begins: first jumping jacks, then high knees, then sprinting on the spot. She repeats the cycle for 20 minutes and again the next day. And the day after that, until it’s time to go back to school.
‘I wasn’t overweight, but I wanted to lose weight,’ she says. ‘Not because I wanted to lose weight, but because I wanted people to notice that I’d lost weight. And not even that I’d lost weight, necessarily, but to notice me.’
Looking back, she realises how unhealthy that thought process was for an adolescent girl. But 13-year-old Connie, who wasn’t even allowed to wear her hair down, just wanted to be seen. By her classmates, her teachers. Anyone.
OUT OF STEP
CONNIE WAS LIPA and Devorah’s fifth child of eight. The family was severe even by Satmar standards. Lipa believed food was for nourishment alone, not pleasure. He had never tasted chocolate or ice cream. Devorah spent most days reading her prayer book. She rarely showed affection.
At sundown on Fridays, Devorah would light Shabbos candles, Connie and her sisters would queue up and one by one, Devorah would kiss them on the forehead; in return, they would kiss her hand. Connie says she didn’t feel any particular affinity for Judaism or God. But she cherished those moments of closeness with her mother.
The family spoke only Yiddish and dressed in dark colours. The girls wore their hair in braids; the boys, in traditional payos, or ‘side curls’. Connie and her sisters were forbidden from talking to other girls who styled their hair
IT’S R ACE DAY – AND IT’S FREEZING.
differently, or wore colourful clothing. Her brothers were forbidden from talking to girls at all.
When Connie and her sisters turned 12, their father stopped looking at them or speaking to them directly. When he chastised them, it was through Devorah. Connie got chastised a lot. She was rebellious. She liked to listen to the radio; sometimes she brushed her teeth on Shabbos.
‘I know a lot of people who grew up better than I did,’ says Connie. ‘They had more freedom and more love. I always feel like things would have been different if I’d had that love.’ By 16, she decided she was done. Or rather, the decision was made for her. The sequence is a little murky, but of this she’s certain: in the summer of 2005, Connie was told not to return to school. She had made a friend at Satmar sleepaway camp who’d acquired a reputation for hanging around with boys. The school disapproved. Connie was fine with this. She’d never felt like she fit in.
She got a job at another school, where she befriended the janitor. He was the first non-Jewish person Connie had ever known. And though nothing ever happened between them, Connie considered him her boyfriend. What else to call a man she talked to in private?
Devorah had reached her limit. She demanded Connie talk to her uncle, ‘who supposedly knew about stuff’. Connie agreed, on the condition that her mother find her a match by the time she turned 17. It’s not uncommon for young ultra-Orthodox Jews to get married to escape their parents’ homes, says Yael Reisman from Footsteps, a nonprofit organisation that provides assistance to ultra-Orthodox Jews transitioning out of the community. But getting married further cements them in the community. ‘Once you’re married, it becomes much harder to leave,’ says Reisman.
Connie’s parents found her an eligible Satmar boy. The couple had a 15-minute meeting and were married 12 weeks•
‘W HEN CONNIE AND HER SISTERS TURNED 12, THEIR FATHER STOPPED LOOKING AT THEM OR SPEAKING TO THEM DIRECTLY’
later. Once married, Connie cut off her hair and began wearing a wig; only a woman’s husband should see her natural hair, according to ultra-Orthodox custom. They moved into a small apartment close to where they’d both been raised, and began building a life. In the Orthodox community, that meant starting a family.
Every month after her wedding, Connie walked to an unmarked brick building. Connie hated the mikvah, a ritual bath that dates to at least the first century BC, but she had no choice. Married Orthodox women are expected to go to the mikvah at the end of their menstrual cycles to ensure they are ‘pure’.
She would descend a set of stairs to a damp basement. An older woman would lead her into a private room, where Connie undressed, showered, clipped her nails and combed what remained of her hair. Then she would go to a room with a small pool. Connie would submerge herself entirely six times as the older woman watched. After each submersion the older woman would offer a simple affirmation: ‘Kosher.’
GROWING APART
CONNIE AND HER husband had little in common, but they shared a rebellious streak. Unlike most Satmar men, he didn’t shun the secular world. He had a job. He had a car. He introduced Connie to movies. These became an escape, however brief. But they also made her sad. Her heart sank during ‘the love parts’ – any scene depicting a deep, affectionate relationship between the characters. ‘I didn’t have that,’ she says.
Connie got pregnant the first time she and her husband had sex. Within weeks, she was so ill she could barely get out of bed. She never saw a doctor. Instead, her husband called a rabbi.
‘You have to take care of your husband, you have to support your family,’ the rabbi told her. ‘You can’t just lie in bed all day.’ Connie seethed. She realised her husband thought she’d been faking. A week later she had a miscarriage.
After nearly two more years of trying to get pregnant, Connie gave birth to a son, Chaimy, in August 2008. She was 19. She joined a nearby YMCA gym, where she began walking on the treadmill to lose some pregnancy weight.
Connie went to the YMCA a few times a week, after she put her son to bed. She wore a long-sleeved T-shirt, black leggings and a long skirt, and covered her hair. On her feet she wore the Nikes she’d lace up five years later for that Valentine’s Day 5K. Gradually, she learned to pick up the pace for brief intervals, jogging for up to three minutes.
During her pregnancy, Connie had been able to avoid the mikvah because she wasn’t menstruating, but eventually she was expected to go back. She realised that once a month, during the time she would normally allocate to the mikvah, she could disappear for two and a half hours without drawing suspicion. This gave her the idea of heading to the gym to ‘make my own mikvah’.
She learned to use the weight machines, to do crunches on a Pilates ball and climb the stair machine. Afterwards she’d take a quick shower, clip her nails and go home. Her husband had no idea.
At home, Connie continued to rebel. She wore jeans and put on a skirt only when she left the house. She grew her hair and wore it down, donning her wig only in public. She listened to the radio. ‘It was just me in the house doing what I wanted and if my husband didn’t like it, we’d fight. I didn’t even care,’ she says.
Besides, he could be loose with the rules, too. But now they had a son. They had to think about where he’d go to school, what kind of clothes he’d wear, whether he’d have side curls. They fought. ‘He wanted to keep living that double life,’ she says. For Connie, that was unacceptable. ‘I thought, you can watch TV but your child can’t? That’s not how I want to raise my kid. That’s not honest, not truthful.’
She told her husband she wanted to leave the community. He tried to dissuade her. Then he said they’d do it together. ‘But he didn’t have it in him,’ she says.
Reisman says that for people who leave the community, the repercussions extend far beyond those who go. Leaving ‘tarnishes the entire family’, she says. ‘Your siblings might not be selected for certain marriages, your father might be ostracised at shul (synagogue).’
As oppressive as life in the community might appear, Reisman says it can also be one of great warmth and beauty. ‘Everyone looks out for you,’ she says. ‘Almost every need is taken care of. If you leave that, not only are you going out on your own, but you’re losing your whole safety net.’
For many in the ultra-Orthodox community, this presents the biggest risk. ‘Because of the way you were brought up, you don’t know how to function in the world,’ says Reisman. ‘You may not even speak English. The ultra-Orthodox are essentially immigrants in the place where they were born.’
No one in Connie’s life supported her decision. They told her of people who’d left and committed suicide, or who tried to return but were never accepted back into the fold. That there was nothing out there for her. That she’d lose her•
son. ‘She had everything to lose,’ says Reisman. But Connie could see no other way. She had to leave for her son’s sake.
Connie met another young single mother who was also leaving the community, and they got an apartment in central Brooklyn, several miles from South Williamsburg. She got the bus to her old neighbourhood every day to her job at a tech support company.
Connie was 21, with limited education and an 18-monthold to support. She had only begun to learn English four years earlier. She had little money and almost no time for herself, let alone for working out, one of the few things that brought her joy. She stopped going.
‘Everything just fell apart,’ she says. ‘Just so much chaos.’ To alleviate stress, Connie and her flatmate partied whenever their kids were with their dads. They drank. They went to clubs with other disillusioned Hasidim. One day, when things were especially rough, Connie called her mother. ‘Why couldn’t we have further education after high school, so we can support our families?’ she asked. Her mother replied: ‘Why are you questioning the way of life?’
Reisman says that for Satmar Jews, questioning the way of life is tantamount to forgetting the past, and forgetting the past is tantamount to extinction. ‘Everything the Satmar community does is because of the Holocaust,’ she says. ‘They suffered incredible loss.’
For those who leave, this inherited trauma compounds the challenges of adjusting to the secular world. A lot of people fall into destructive habits as a way to cope. ‘I could have easily become a drug addict,’ says Connie. One morning, after a night of partying, she woke up and couldn’t remember the previous 12 hours. ‘I thought, “I’m done.”’
MOVING FORWARD
IT’S THE BEGINNING of 2013, and Connie has been on her own for three years. She hasn’t seen her family since 2011, when she was asked to leave her sister’s wedding for not wearing an appropriately modest dress. She no longer has the friends she partied with when she left the community. She has only her son and when he’s at his dad’s, she has no one.
So she returns to the thing that gave her solace in her old life. She spends up to five hours at a time in the gym, in the weights room and running on the treadmill. Bodybuilders and yoga instructors become her new friends. Gradually, she meets other runners, too. When one invites her to race the Valentine’s Day 5K, she doesn’t hesitate.
But Connie has never run outside in winter. She isn’t prepared for the cold or the hills. As she squeezes into the crowd behind the starting line, a friend loans her his hat. Just one loop of the park, she says to herself. I can do this.
At the gun, Connie gets swept into the current of the crowd. At that first hill she stops, looks up at the incline and starts to walk. When she reaches the top, she starts to run again. She finishes as the clock ticks past the 27-minute mark and signs up for another race the next weekend.
By mid-March 2013, Connie has run a handful of 5Ks and four-milers and wants to try something longer. That April, she runs a 15km in Central Park in 1:22. ‘Everything was hurting, but I loved it,’ she says. ‘When it was over, I thought, how do I train for something like this in the future?’
She joins a club, North Brooklyn Runners, and begins training with another runner on the team, Hershy, who also grew up Orthodox. With him, Connie starts to do regular runs at a 7:30 pace and ‘crazy track workouts’.
‘I didn’t have a Garmin, I’d just follow him and he’d time me,’ she says. ‘We’d do hill repeats on the Williamsburg Bridge. Then we’d do a 20-minute cool-down. One day, on the way home, I passed Prospect Park and did another loop.’
Soon she buys a Garmin. Then she buys new shoes. She starts running to and from work, eight miles each way.
Connie doesn’t know her best distance, she just knows she loves to run. She applies to the 2013 New York City Marathon, but doesn’t get a place, so she registers for Philadelphia instead. Then she gets a spot in New York through Team for Kids and decides to do both. So just nine
‘SHE’D BEEN ON THAT ROAD COUNTLESS TIMES, BUT NEVER LIKE THIS. SHE DIDN’T FEEL INVISIBLE THIS TIME’
months after her first road race, Connie finishes two marathons just two weeks apart.
FINDING REDEMPTION
IT’S 2020 NOW. Connie is 31. She carries herself like an athlete, confident and strong. When she speaks, she’s direct; when she listens, she does so with intent. Her eyes are alert.
She lives in New Jersey with her new husband, their two-year-old daughter and her son. He turned 12 in August. Her husband, Ken, is a runner, too. Like most of her new friends, she met him through NBR.
Over the past seven years, Connie has completed four marathons and has a PB of 3:31. But where she truly excels is on the track. Through NBR, she met James Chu, a certified coach who saw immediately that she had the explosive speed for shorter distances. Chu began coaching Connie in late 2013 and they set their sights on the 5th Avenue Mile the following September.
Connie and her coach met regularly at the McCarren track in North Williamsburg for speed sessions and to develop Connie’s form. She learned to drive her knees forward, to use her arms, to run tall. It paid off. In September 2014, Connie finished 5th Avenue in 5:53. The following year she brought her time down to 5:35. Last year, she posted a 2:35 800m.
She kept working on the longer distances, too, clocking a half-marathon PB of 1:32. Like any runner, she’s had her share of injuries and slumps. The 2016 Boston Marathon left her exhausted and she struggled all summer to train for 5th Avenue in September. She made it to the start but dropped out at the three-quarter mark. She needed a break. She hung up her shoes and focused on her family. She had just married Ken and was trying to get pregnant.
In July 2017, her mother called. It was the first time they’d spoken in six years. She saw it as a chance to ask some questions, to understand her mother better, to find a path toward reconciliation.
‘Why didn’t you give us kids any love?’ Connie asked. ‘Why was there no affection in our house?’ Finally, her mother answered, ‘I just did what my parents did.’
Two months later, just before Connie’s daughter was born, her mother called again. This time, Connie didn’t pick up; the pain of the previous call was still fresh. Her mother left a voicemail.
‘Chumy,’ she began, using Connie’s Yiddish name. ‘It’s Mommy. I didn’t forget about you. My heart is open for you.’
Her mother was crying and for a moment, Connie thought she might finally be ready to accept her for who she is, to give her the love she had always craved, to be the mother she had always longed for her to be.
But she wasn’t calling to offer any of that, or because Connie was about to have a baby. ‘God is waiting for you to return to him,’ her mother said, her voice muffled by tears. ‘He loves you. God is never going to leave a Jewish child. You can always return.’
‘That voicemail started out well,’ says Connie, ‘but it took a turn when she mentioned God. They will only accept me if I return to God’s ways.’ These days, Connie identifies as an atheist. ‘Holidays we still celebrate because of the history. I believe in history. But I don’t believe there is a God or a higher power.’ Her mother hasn’t called since.
Today, Connie is at once forgiving and resolute when she speaks of her parents and her ex-husband. After all, they didn’t make the rules. But she also can’t abide a life that was so unbearable and so lonely. She wants her children to know something different.
After a nearly three-year hiatus, Connie resumed training in May 2019. Last spring, she ran a 30-second 200m PB. She had hoped to break 65 in the 400m last summer, but then races were cancelled due to the pandemic.
These are much shorter distances than the New York City Marathon that captured her imagination as a child, but the journey to get there has taken a lifetime. She thinks back to those bulky white Nikes, that first 5K in Prospect Park and the friends who helped her train for her first 26.2-miler through the city’s five boroughs in 2013. She remembers the thrill of descending the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge into Brooklyn, the only place she’d ever called home, and crossing the finish line at Tavern on the Green. But most of all, she remembers running through South Williamsburg.
‘Just going through that one mile, the feeling of redemption,’ she says of racing up Bedford Avenue, the same stretch of road that took her to the mikvah and, later, home from the YMCA. She’d been on that road countless times, but never like this. She didn’t feel invisible this time. She didn’t feel lost. She felt like a marathoner.
As she ran, the few Hasidic spectators stared at her like she was crazy, or was going to break her legs, or would die the moment she crossed the finish line. Connie just smiled back at them. She couldn’t stop smiling.