A former Neturei Karta member who was lucky to leave

Here's an interview with the son of a Neturei Karta family who got shunned, and is lucky that's what happened:

If Moshe Avraham had been asked a decade ago what his life would look like at 22, it is unlikely he would have imagined where he is today. He has completed his high school education, trained in electrical work, holds a steady job and is in a relationship. This Sukkot, instead of searching for somewhere to sleep, he will spend the holiday with his partner and her family.

Getting there took years. Avraham grew up in Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim neighborhood in the extremist ultra-Orthodox Neturei Karta community. His parents were divorced and he had no relationship with his father. “The community was very extreme. We would throw things at police officers,” he recalled.

From childhood, he said, he was taught to be suspicious of nearly everyone outside that world: the military, state institutions and even Zionist Haredi Jews. Then, when he was 13, his own home was suddenly closed to him.

After his family moved from Mea Shearim to Jerusalem’s Romema neighborhood, Avraham began spending more time outside the house. He also secretly acquired a cellphone. “One day my family found out,” he said. “They told me, ‘From now on, neither you nor the phone are coming into this house.’ They locked the door, and that was it. I had nobody to talk to. I banged hard on the door and there was no answer. They never opened the door for me again.”

He was actually lucky. It certainly seems to be an important example of how somebody woke up to how bad a cult that could be described as comprised of the most anti-semitic "Jews" is such a bad influence. To be sure, that the dad didn't have a serious presence in his life is what enabled the Karta kreeps to exploit him so badly.

That was the beginning of a period of homelessness. Avraham slept in bomb shelters, in bathrooms at Jerusalem’s Central Bus Station, camped in a forest and occasionally stayed with friends.

When Sukkot arrived the following year, he still had no home. “I was 14 and I had nowhere to be,” he said. “I wandered the streets, and then I found a sukkah in Sacher Park. My sister and I slept there.”

Was she also kicked out? If so, she's lucky too.

The holiday has carried a painful double meaning for him ever since. “For me, Sukkot has been a trauma ever since, because it is basically the story of my whole life: I didn’t have a home. I had nowhere to be,” Avraham said. “Everyone goes out for the holiday dressed in white, dressed nicely, and you’re the only strange one. You can’t understand what that feels like.”

That same year, welfare authorities found him and assigned him a social worker. “He told me, ‘Listen, you can’t live on the street. I want you to have a warm bed,’” Avraham recalled.

That intervention eventually brought him to Otot, an Israeli nonprofit that operates shelters, homes and support programs for young people at risk. But accepting help was not easy. At Etnahta, one of the nonprofit’s programs for at-risk youth, Avraham said everything initially felt foreign and threatening because of the worldview in which he had been raised.

“But from the first moment, I was shocked,” he said. “They offered me food. They changed my sheets. I grew up being taught to hate Zionists and secular people in general. We were afraid to enter their institutions, and in the end I was treated wonderfully there.”

And this is how they proved to him they're not the menace the Neturei Karta indoctrinated their subjects into seeing them as. Thank goodness the guy was able to see the light, brought to him by saner people.