“People ask me, ‘How do I speak?’ says Yehudis Fletcher of the manifold abuses she has had to overcome throughout her life. “It’s more like: ‘I can’t stay silent.’”
The 37-year-old gave evidence in court that helped convict the Talmudic scholar who was supposed to be looking after her as his family’s vulnerable lodger, but instead abused her the summer she turned 16.
She has since become a disruptor inside her own community – a charity founder consulting the Government on everything from forced marriage to the denial of secular education, and an out-and-proud lesbian who brings her partner to her Charedi shul.
And now she has written it all down, in a powerful new book – lauded by comedian David Baddiel and human rights lawyer Harriet Wistrich – Chutzpah: A Memoir of Faith, Sexuality and Daring to Stay.
Fletcher, the Glasgow-born daughter of a rabbi, was not the first person to report the abuse by Todros Grynhaus.
“His wife was,” she tells me in a kosher pizza restaurant in Golders Green. “She came in and found him in my bedroom. She’s the one who blew the whistle. She called a rabbi, who is now dead, so we can name him, Rabbi Salomon, who was the mashgiach [spiritual supervisor] at Beth Medrash Govoha [yeshiva in New Jersey] – so one of the most senior rabbis of his generation. It was very much blamed on me for tempting him, but no-one was surprised.”
Fletcher spent years trying to alert various people in two different countries. “And I haven’t shut up since.”
Initially, she did not even know the word “abuse”. It was a rabbi in Israel who “gave me the language”, she says (even though he “later refused to support the prosecution”).
The crime itself was far from the end of Fletcher’s ill treatment. She says the late Rabbi Yehuda Brodie, the registrar of the Manchester Beth Din, responded by asking: “Do you think you’re his first?” “He was like, ‘You silly girl.’ There was no denial that this man had done this before and would probably do it again.”
The Beth Din did not report the abuse to the police. And the vital evidence that Fletcher provided – including a teddy bear that Grynhaus had picked the lock of the bathroom door to hang inside while she was showering, texting her to ask if she had received his “calling card” – disappeared.
Grynhaus was jailed for 13 years and two months in 2015 for seven counts of sexual abuse against Fletcher and another girl.
She is keen to point out “there are loads of incredible people” too. When Grynhaus fled to Israel on another man’s passport, it was a member of her Manchester community who reported his appearance on a Tel Aviv passenger list so he could be arrested on arrival back in the UK.
“Charedi people do not want their own children to be sexually abused,” she says. “What we don’t have yet is enough of an alliance to create that critical mass so that, as a community, we behave differently. There’s been lots of people who’ve been very supportive in private, who probably disagree with me on the pages of Jewish News.”
Despite it all, Fletcher remains sanguine. She has a job at Nahamu, the charity she founded to combat “the harms arising from extremism in the Jewish community”
However, the succour that meant the most came from closer to home. “My grandma was the only person in my immediate family that, when I told, she got angry on my behalf.”
Her grandmother went on to reveal that the rage stemmed in part from her own experiences.
“Later the same evening, she shared with me that she had been assaulted. She was 11 and at a family wedding. She’d never told anyone else ever before.”
Despite it all, Fletcher remains sanguine. She has a job at Nahamu, the charity she founded to combat “the harms arising from extremism in the Jewish community”. It is work that is bolstered by a degree in social policy – she obtained a place on the course without any GCSEs thanks to the support of the charity Mavar.
“The theory of change is to be able to envision a future in which the community is not a haven for abusers where sexual misbehaviour is constructed as a sin – rather than harm to another person.”
And though her book ends with her having been cut off by almost her entire family after coming out as a lesbian (“Every so often, I bend over double, winded by the excruciating cost of my freedom,” she writes), Fletcher says today that relations have already begun to improve since she handed in her manuscript.
She was wed twice by the age of 20 – the first marriage ending swiftly in divorce after her husband throttled her on her wedding night and she walked in on him and his middle-aged “mentor” in her marital bedroom.
She has since discarded her sheitel and long skirt, but continues sending her three children to Charedi schools and resolutely remains a member of the community, whether they like it or not.
She was wed twice by the age of 20 – the first marriage ending swiftly in divorce after her husband throttled her on her wedding night and she walked in on him and his middle-aged “mentor” in her marital bedroom
It is a philosophy informed by Maureen Kender, the late London School of Jewish Studies teaching fellow. “’Threatening to stay, not threatening to leave’ was her brilliant sort of throwaway line at the end of a presentation. It has driven me. The act of staying in is an act of resistance.”
To those who fear that her campaigning serves to fuel negative views of Jews, she has this to say: “If you leave a black hole of information, that allows other people to fill the gaps. The fact that we don’t have statistics on sexual abuse within our community doesn’t mean that there’s no abuse.
“I think what I offer in Chutzpah is not a tell-all tale that’s going to produce a kind of fetishised version of horrible things that happen within a closed community. On the contrary, it’s a critical and honest portrayal of the real impact of the harms that are systemic. It’s a response. It’s a hopeful response.”
It is also perhaps Fletcher’s final act of casting off the dishonour repeatedly attached to her by the community she refuses to reject.
“I was taught to be ashamed,” she says. “But shame isn’t holy.”
Chutzpah: A Memoir of Faith, Sexuality and Daring to Stay, by Yehudis Fletcher, is published by Penguin on May 22.
