But not allowing him to see his children at all?
Who thinks up these things?
My parents divorced when I was nine. At the time, we were not frum. Shortly after they separated, my mother became frum and my sister and I joined her.
My mother tried to find a yeshiva for me to attend. For two years, I attended Ohel Moshe, in Bensonhurst, a school that catered largely to Russian immigrants. There were a handful of frum students there, butthe vast majority of the school was not. After two years, she tried to get me into a more mainstream yeshiva.
One well-known prominent yeshiva told her that they’d be willing to take me, provided that I have absolutely no contact with my (still not-frum) father. Even having no other options, she turned them down flat.
The irony of it all is that not too long after that, I ended up estranged from my father for about three years anyway. We eventually reconciled when he remarried and we have a very good relationship now. But that separation (and the ability to especially now, as a father, look back on it and understand it how it affected me as a child and him as a father) gave me a much better understanding of what that yeshiva demanded of my mother.
It’s probably a good thing that I don’t know the name of the administrator that my mother met with that day. It’s bad enough that I robbed myself (and my father) of three years of our relationship. For a yeshiva to demand that, as a condition of attendance, we cut ourselves off from him for six years (the amount of time I had left in school) plus however many years afterwards (who says we would have reconciled after that long?) for the rest of our lives, is simply monstrous.
We’re not talking about a man who beat or abused his kids. We’re not even talking about a man who would deliberately force his kids to violate halacha against their will. He was just a man who grew up in a non-observant home and continued in that as an adult. But, apparently, they felt that he would be so corrupting, so polluting of his childrens’ souls, that it would be better to cut off the relationship and sever a man from his children. How horrible is it to suggest that a man is so harmful to his kids that he shouldn’t have any contact at all? When I think about it as a father, the very idea makes me both sad and angry.
My sister and I are both shomrei Torah U’Mitzvos today. We both raised families where Yiddishkeit is important and central, and we did it while maintaining a healthy relationship with our father. I’m normally the sort of person who avoids “I told you sos,” but I would *love* to be able to go back to this administrator and show him just how wrong he was.
The Wolf