“In talking to the Orthodox, I quote the Jewish Tradition;

What are the doubts which trouble a yeshiva student trying to decide whether to continue to advanced Torah studies or go out to work? What becomes of the delicate fabric of a secular family when one of its members becomes religious? Not many Orthodox writers dare to address such questions. There are surely yet fewer whose books become best-sellers within the Ultra-Orthodox community.

Rachel Pomerantz, a made-up pen-name (“I always liked the name Pomerantz, and Rachel sounds good both in English and Hebrew”) has done it. She is an Orthodox woman, a professor of mathematics, a successful author, who lives with her family in the center of one of the most religious neighborhoods in Bnei Brak. “I live between two cultures so different that one practically needs a passport to move from one to the other,” as she defines her situation.

An Orthodox Jew meeting her and trying to guess her profession from her appearance would probably bet that she is a teacher in one of the more extreme seminaries. Nothing in the outward appearance of the tall, thin, bespectacled woman wearing no make-up, with a pillbox hat perched on an unassuming wig, would indicate that she is a popular professor of mathematics in one of the Israeli universities who is invited to participate in professional conference through the world.

About her life in two cultures Pomerantz explains: “I am comfortable in both of them and am accustomed to skipping from one to the other, being careful not to mix the two. When I am talking to an Orthodox Jew I speak his language, quoting sayings from the rabbis; when conversing with a secular Jew, I bring examples from science or from Shakespeare.”

She speaks five languages fluently: Hebrew, English, Yiddish, German and French. She usually travels abroad twice a year. Because of difficulties keeping kosher in odd corners of the globe, she often survives for the trip on nuts and fruit, eggs and a few cans of tuna brought from Israel. A conference held in Japan was particularly difficult because of the scarcity of fruits and vegetables on the Japanese islands. For ten days she lived on rice and eggs, which she cooked on a portable hot-plate. She abstained from working or cooking two days in a row, Saturday and Sunday, because the Chazon Ish holds that Japan is on the far side of the Jewish international dateline and thus the Sabbath should be observed on Sunday, whereas most other rabbis have decided that it should be observed on Saturday.

“It was awful,” recalled Pomerantz, who had gotten dehydrated because she ran out of drinking water during Sunday. The only ray of light was that the Japanese, with their custom of bowing to each other, solved the problem of hand-shaking which always plagues her when she is introduced to men in the course of her work. “Normally, during refreshment breaks, I try to walk around holding a cup of soft drink with both hands. If people don’t get the hint, I explain that I don’t shake hands for religious reasons.”

Her own life is more peculiar than the six books she has written, which have become the rage in Ultra-Orthodox circles in Israel and abroad. (Several of the books have been translated from English to Hebrew or French.) Interspersed throughout the books are segments from her own life and characters based on interesting people she has known.

She called the first book she wrote A Time to Rend, A Time to Sew, the second to be translated to Hebrew. This is the story of the relationships within a family in which one of the daughters becomes religious. “First comes the rending of the fabric of the family life and later, if both sides behave wisely, the torn edges are joined by a delicate embroidery of renewed relationships and love.” Pomerantz knows what she is talking about; both she and her husband became religious as adults.

Pomerantz wrote the book for her mother. “I was born in Cleveland in the United States. I was one of those academically successful daughters who brings satisfaction to an American mother like mine, who was a college professor of home economics.” Her father, incidentally, was also a college professor, who had always dreamed of being an author.

“Mine was the typical life of a child of the suburbs, always in the best schools, and religion meant nothing to me. One could say that I was antireligious, opposed to religion in general, but not particularly knowledgeable.”

In college I met for the first time a religious Jew. She was a counselor together with me in a summer program. “I was then in the process of searching. On the one hand, I had been raised to behave ethically, with traditional values, but the philosophical basis for these values was not sufficiently strong. No one succeeded in explaining to me why it was forbidden to steal or to lie if that would be convenient.

In her books there is not “black and white.” The secular Jews are not all deplorable characters and the Orthodox Jews are not all wonderful, as tends to occur in many Orthodox books. The secular Jews in Pomerantz’ books have their own world of ethical values and, among the Orthodox, there are many instances of indecision or tentative solutions, contests of will, jealousy.

We are sitting in her living room, the walls covered with volumes of religious texts. It looks like a typical living room for a student in an institute for advanced Torah studies, except for a large modern tapestry, the like of which will not be found in most homes in Bnei Brak. There are also books in English, among them those written by my hostess.

“I am actually both of them,” said Pomerantz with regard to the two heroines of her book A Time to Rend, A Time to Sew. Beth is the brilliant student of medicine, who becomes religious during her studies at the prestigious Harvard University and upsets the entire family. Her father is a non-religious doctor from a religious family, her mother is anti-religious, and her sister Lynn is a law student who sets off on a campaign to prove that her sister has been brainwashed.

This is a book about conflicts, between the opposing ambitions of parents and children, between sisters, between the struggle for excellence in the secular academic world and and the quest for excellence in the Ultra-Orthodox world, which requires total devotion to Torah study. Can these ambitions be reconciled? Pomerantz, in her own personal life, proves that they can.

After A Time to Rend, A Time to Sew, which has also been translated into French, she wrote Wings Above the Flames, true stories about survival and faith in the Holocaust, which she collected from residents of Bnei Brak. Another book is Wildflower about a family of ba’alei teshuva who serve as a foster parents, as do Pomerantz and her husband.

Pomerantz has two children, one a married daughter, and in addition they are raising two additional foster sons. The children have fit into the Orthodox educational network and study in “black” yeshivas. Pomerantz: “Our children were raised in Bnei Brak, but we also took them along when we went to conferences or to visit our parents. They have seen a lot of the world, have met all kinds of people, and their opinions of members of other cultures are much more open than those of people who have lived exclusively in Bnei Brak and not left it.”

“We are people who love give explanations. We explained a lot to the children and gave them basic concepts in physics and astronomy. They will decide, as adults, how exactly their lives will be structured: if they will remain exclusively in the Orthodox world or will try to combine this with a career in the secular world.”

As the graduate of a first-rate college, it was cleat to Pomerantz that she wanted to continue to graduate studies in a top graduate school. She studied algebraic geometry at Harvard, and at age twenty-three received her doctorate. During her studies she met her husband, also newly religious, now himself a university professor and currently the chairman of his department.

“Together with our acquaintance, we were also progressing in religious observance. For my husband it was easier, for although he grew up in a household that was barely traditional, his grandfather, with who he was very close, had been religious. At Harvard we discovered a Jewish community that was small but very strong. There were classes and we got answers to questions that had bothered us. This was still before the wave of young people returning to religion, just after the Six Day War. We thought we were the only people in the world who were becoming observant Jews without having been raised that way.

“In ’72 we decided to move to Israel. It seemed to be the place where important things were happening for the Jewish people and we wanted to be in the center. This required a certain amount of professional sacrifice, particularly in my field.

“My husband’s parents were proud of us. My parents were more hesitant, but accepted our decisions out of liberal principles. My mother thought that everything we were doing was very silly and we had constant arguments about kosher food, for example. In the end my mother surrendered and even bought us a set of kosher dishes which we could use when we came to visit them.

“We moved to Israel and settled in a neighborhood in Bnei Brak, in a standard Israeli apartment, but one which seemed very small to my mother when she came to visit. The first year was extremely difficult. Unlike my husband, I was not yet fluent in Hebrew and I had to teach in a foreign language. Even going on a shopping trip in a foreign tongue was hard for me.

At a certain point, as they became more religious, the couple faced a dilemma. Should they cut themselves off completely from their past, giving up their academic jobs? Her husband wanted to study in “kollel”. The couple went to ask one of the most eminent rabbis of the generation. He decided that the couple could continue in their current path. “I chose to continue to combine the two worlds, because my husband felt that I would be very unhappy if I left my career,” Pomerantz told me.

The Bnei Brak society in which they live accepts them. “If I had sprouted up among them and set off on a career like this perhaps they would look at it otherwise. Since we came from outside, our university careers do not bother anyone.”

How do the students accept her?

“I am very self-assured as a lecturer. I expect to get along well with my classes. When I was a young lecturer with less self-confidence, I sometimes had trouble with the students. The fact that I was Orthodox was part of the problem. I could see in their eyes that they wondered if I really was so smart, if I wasn’t a “yente” from Bnei Brak, coming to speak at the university without knowing what she was talking about. Later, as I became more confident, this stopped.”

For Beth, the heroine in her book, a senior doctor tried to block her efforts to get accepted to a prestigious surgical residency, because she was a woman. That part of the book is drawn in part from obstacles that Pomerantz had to overcome in her quest for job security and promotion. “The fact that I was a woman, a religious woman, definitely interfered with my advancement. There were some conspicuous examples of prejudice that I encountered, but I don’t want to go into that.

“No one starts arguments with me, because I am very apolitical. I have always been part of secular society, so I am not sensitive to matters like dress that might bother a person who grew up in a religious neighborhood.”

How do her friends from the past accept her or has she broken off contact?

“I haven’t cut off contact with any of my close friends. We meet, speak about the past, and try to find common grounds for discussion. My best friend from college is a step-mother, with problems which are similar to our problems with our foster children, and we speak about this topic.”

How do relatives react when they identify themselves in your books?

“I got no complaints. I was always careful to change the personalities of the parents, so that they would not be very similar to our own. The children, on the other hand, enjoy finding themselves in the books.”

She ended up writing almost by accident. When she wanted to improve her Hebrew, a friend recommended that she read novels in Hebrew and loaned her one of the famous Orthodox books. After she finished reading it, Pomerantz decided that she was capable of writing a better novel.

The book she read dealt with the question “Must a yeshiva student go out to work or can he stay in the yeshiva world?” Pomerantz: “We had many guests who were ba’alei teshuva who wanted to stay in yeshiva but were under pressure from their parents to return to their academic studies. In the yeshiva they looked at leaving as spritual suicide and the boys were torn between two worlds.”

My husband said: “You can’t write on that topic because you don’t know how men speak when there is no woman around.” I changed the book to a story about women. I identify more with Beth, who became religious but remained a doctor.

“The first draft I wrote fifteen year ago – a hundred pages which I then set aside. I returned to the book and added more, until the final version is 430 pages long.”

“The first draft I wrote in my own name, but I feared that the publicity would upset my private life, and not only in the religious community. What aroused my concern was the case of Eric Siegal, the author of ‘Love Story’. He was a successful author and also a professor of Classical Studies. He did not get tenure in the university after his book was published and sold a million copies, because is colleagues stopped considering him a serious scholar. I feared as similar dismissive attitude from my colleagues in mathematics. I asked for advice and decided to put out the book under a pen name, in order to keep my writing separated from my private life.

She has been well received as an author in the religious sector. When she arrives at a wedding, “women I don’t know come up to me and tell me until what hour of night they stayed up reading my book. I was surprised, because I didn’t think it would be accepted so well, since it contains detailed descriptions of university life and of life in a secular family and expresses rather open views.”

She writes at night. “After a certain hour, my head can no longer manage mathematics.” Currently she is writing a book about moving to Israel. This is the first time that the main characters have been raised Orthodox – two American couples who move to Israel. All her previous novels dealt only with ba’alei teshuva.

Pomerantz does not consider herself to be doing the same thing as Naomi Regan, the religious woman writer whose books have been very popular in Israel. “I presume that my approach to Ultra-Orthodox society is more positive.”

To the Secular – Shakespeare”