By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
This is the second in a series on domestic violence in Seattle’s Jewish community. This article focuses on ways survivors of abuse have successfully gotten out of their situations.
Deborah DeDonaldo is a survivor of domestic violence. Several years ago she was stuck and mostly alone in a small Pennsylvania town, left without a car when her husband went to work, and happier when he was in jail than when he was at home. Today, she has a good job with a temporary employment agency near Seattle. Her daughter is a happy and well-adjusted nine-year-old, and she is engaged to be married to a man she is certain will never subject her to the kind of abuse she once lived with.
“It’s almost like brainwashing,” she says. “Somebody tells you that you’re worthless; somebody tells you that you can’t do any better. I got so down on myself that I honestly thought that this was what I was born to be.”
Domestic violence is first and foremost about control. Seth Ellner, a counselor who works with abusive men, says the essence of the problem is a belief that the other person in the relationship is his property — that he has the right to control his significant other’s life — what she wears, who she sees and where she goes — even whether she works outside the home.
Deborah finally reached a point where she could not accept it anymore. Encouraged by a woman in New York City she met in an Internet chat room, she contacted Jewish Family Service.
“[They] helped me pay some bills off and sent me grocery money. I was able to make the car payment and change the car over into my name,” Deborah says. JFS even helped her the security deposit to rent a home and with the actual move.
That was all about four years ago. Shortly after that, Project DVORA, JFS’s domestic violence program was started and Deborah became one of their first clients.
Michelle Lifton, the director of Project DVORA came to where Deborah was living to meet with her and provide the personal support that had been missing in her life before then.
“She’s great,” Deborah says of Michelle. “She never tells me what to do but she always listens and she reassures me that what I’m doing is okay, that how I’m feeling is okay.”
Lifton says she had been involved in “the secular domestic violence world” for a number of years before she took on the job of heading up Project DVORA. Here, she says, she has four goals, all deeply in tune with providing a service that is particularly molded to the needs of the Jewish community, or as she puts it, “the many diverse Jewish communities” in this area.
The four objectives are to provide direct, culturally specific services to victims of domestic violence; to educate the Jewish community and work within the community to respond to domestic violence in ways that are rooted in Jewish history and faith; to help secular domestic violence service providers be sensitive to the needs of Jewish families; and to ensure domestic violence can be identified and responded to appropriately within the range of JFS programs.
Some of those programs include Rosh Chodesh, “which is specifically for Jewish women,” Lifton says, and the Passover seder they recently celebrated, which is sponsored by a number of groups within the community. In addition, even in the support groups they host, there are themes and ways that the women relate to one another that are uniquely Jewish.
“I will sometimes bring Jewish themes to the group to play with, and I know the other facilitator does the same thing,” Lifton says. “Today, someone was talking about Passover and the concept ‘dayenu — enough’ so we did a writing exercise on ‘What is Enough?’ What does that mean to you? That was something that would never come up in a secular group.”
Along with Project DVORA, which provides the support group and a variety of outreach services — from having Lifton come to synagogues and Jewish schools throughout the area to talk about the signs of domestic violence and do trainings on dating abuse — they can provide referrals to one-on-one or group counseling and to shelters and emergency services through the King County Coalition Against Domestic Violence.
Another project centered in the Jewish community, Shalom Bayit, has been giving concrete assistance to survivors since Sept. 2001. A project of the Seattle section of the National Council of Jewish Women, they provide household items, from large furniture pieces to pots and pans, dishes, and linens, free of charge, to women starting new homes for themselves.
NCJW’s Jennifer Cohen says the all-volunteer effort is unique in the area, in that they provide pick-up services for the donations of “new and gently used furniture items” from community members, and deliver them free to their new homes, two Sundays a month. She says there are only about a dozen programs of this type for domestic violence survivors anywhere in the country. A team of professional movers are led along confidentially produced routes for the deliveries and do pick-ups on the same days.
“We always leave with a full truck and come back to the warehouse with a full truck,” she says.“It’s all been word-of-mouth, really,” Cohen says. “We’ve had to do no advertising.”
Families connect with Shalom Bayit through the domestic violence advocates in dozen-plus agencies throughout King and parts of neighboring Pierce counties. They come along with their advocates to the Shalom Bayit warehouse, by appointment, where they can pick out the things they want and need.
“For our Jewish clients, we give them a mezuzah and candle sticks,” Cohen says. “It’s a kind of nice extra thing we can do.”
In March, NCJW hosted a training session on domestic violence that involved providers from the various agencies to give everything from presentations on myths and stereotypes about domestic violence to a role-playing game called “In Her Shoes.”
“You are given an identity as a woman who’s being abused and you make choices,” Cohen says. “You have two different options on these card and you make a choice, get the next card. It tells you, ‘Go to the police,’ and see what will happen. You do different choices through this person’s life…whether it’s family and friends not believing you or the police not believing you.”
She says the game was a powerful learning tool for the participants to see how hard it is to go through the process of getting out of a violent situation.
“The best thing,” says Deborah, “is just to know that there is a light at the end of that tunnel. People don’t have to be treated that way.”