December 12, 2013 ‘“ The Jewish Daily Forward

I am a Footsteps member and supporter. I am also an observant Jew.

To the critics of Footsteps, a not-for-profit organization that helps those seeking to leave their ultra-religious communities, this statement may seem like an oxymoron. Until about a year ago, I too believed that one could not remain Orthodox and be a Footsteps member at the same time ‘” that one could not eat a plate of chulent at the Shabbos meal, completely unplugged from the world, and engage in an intelligent existentialist debate.

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By Émilie Dubreuil – Le Journal de Montreal, April 14, 2012

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(French article, can be read in English by using Google Translate)

By Shulem Deen, April 27, 2011 ‘“ The Jewish Daily Forward

A photo of a woman wrapped in phylacteries might not seem very bold after Leonard Nimoy’s ‘œShekhina’ project. But to many of the artists at the opening of a new art exhibit called ‘œAll in the Eye,’ a photograph of a woman adorned with tallit and tefillin, eye to the camera with a slight smile, represents the height of sacrilege.

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By Orli Santo, August 17, 2010 – Translated from Yediot Achronot

Children laughing, a baby’s muffled cry, the peaceful sounds of a Saturday afternoon drift through the open window. This is New York’”one of the liveliest, most turbulent cities in the world’”but here, within the boundaries of the eruv string’”the thin line separating indoors from outdoors, the community from the world’”Crown Heights lay deep in its sacred Sabbath slumber.

Malkie Schwartz didn’t join her family in the synagogue today. She stayed home, saying she wasn’t feeling well, and for the last hour she’s been staring intently at the phone, incapable of lifting the receiver. She knows that once she dials, intentionally desecrating the Sabbath for the first time in her life, it’ll be a step from which there will be no return: one that will separate her from her religion and her family, severing her past from the possible course of her future.

Read the complete article here.