“That’s what we told him, so he said if she gets therapy, the school won’t bother her. They forced us to send her to Grub, who’s a Bobelger Hasid.”

“Shaindele told me all about him.”

“The Bobelger send all their girls to him. I even asked Rav Alter before I sent her, and he said the Bobelger Rebbe himself vouched for him.”

“The Bobelger Rebbe himself, you say?” She shook her head in dismay. “He’s an old man. Maybe he doesn’t know what’s going on. But Shaindele is sure about what happened?”

“She’s sure. But even if I didn’t believe her, should I not believe my own eyes?”

“Vus is dus?”

He described his experience with the young girl.

“Rosha,” she said softly, shaking her head. “And the Bobelger close their eyes! A shandah! And their daughters the most sheltered of all the girls, except for Satmar. They’re so careful about every little thing, buttoning the last button on the shirt collar, wearing closed shoes not to show the cleavage between their toes, dark stockings, no makeup. They marry them off at seventeen after one date, that’s it.”

“We also can’t understand it. But it’s the truth.”

She shook her head. “No one will believe it, Yaakov.”

“Then we have to make them believe it, Bubbee!” Leah said passionately. “Our Shaindele got out of it before he hurt her too deeply, but what about the other girls? Hundreds of girls over the years. When is it going to stop? Who is going to stop it, if not us?”

“You’re putting a healthy head in a sickbed.”

“What does it mean, then, when God says to us, Tzedek tzedek tirdof? Justice, justice pursue it.”

Fruma Esther looked at her. “You’re a baalas teshuva. You take everything word for word. But that’s not how it works here.”

“So explain it to me, Bubbee. How does it work here? What is it exactly I don’t understand? Didn’t God say in the Torah, ‘All Israel are responsible one for the other’? And ‘Chastise your brother’? What part of this am I confused about? And aren’t people who live in this neighborhood called haredim, meaning ‘people who shake with the fear of God’? Don’t they keep the tiniest letter of the law and make up lots of extras just to put a fence around what God is asking of us, so we don’t ever even get close to sinning? And these things are written clearly for all to read. It’s HaShem’s will.”