Standing with her then-husband “Melvin” at a crosswalk in New York City shortly after moving there, Elaine Weiss pointed out a low building with a beautiful rooftop garden. “Oh, isn’t that building beautiful?” she asked her husband, eager to explore her new surroundings.
“Which one, you mean that one over there that looks exactly like every other one on the street?” he replied with a sneer.
Turning around, a woman in front of them pointed to him and said, “That building is beautiful, and you, my friend, are a horse’s a….”
With these words from a total stranger, Elaine Weiss began her escape from abuse. Having a stranger recognize her husband’s emotional and verbal abuse triggered a process that helped her realize that she did not deserve to be treated the way he treated her and that she was capable of leaving.
Several months later, after “eight years, seven months and 21 days” of a physically and emotionally abusive marriage, Weiss left her husband.
“The point isn’t that I left,” she told about 30 people gathered at Congregation Beth Israel on Sunday as part of the “Days of Awareness” program (see related story this page). “But rather that a total stranger changed my life. Never underestimate the power of one small act.”
Why were the stranger’s words so powerful? Because, Weiss explained, validation of a victim’s situation through simple acknowledgment rarely occurs.
Well-meaning friends, family, neighbors and strangers often look the other way for fear of intruding or because they assume that the abuser, especially if he is not overtly violent, is reacting with justifiable anger to an action by the victim, Weiss said.
These tendencies, however, only reinforce the abuser’s campaign to isolate the victim from family and friends and repeatably blame her for the abuse. This in turn can have devastating effects on a victim from the Jewish community, who already may feel that she must have done something to bring the abuse on because of the erroneous generalization “that abuse doesn’t happen in Jewish families.”
In Weiss’ case, her severe isolation is illustrated by an occurrence earlier in the marriage. Following surgery to repair a torn knee ligament, Weiss recalled how she was resting with her leg elevated on her living room couch. Because she was on codeine for pain management, she fell asleep while her husband was speaking to her.
“He grabbed my foot,” she said, “and twisted my injured leg with all his might. I screamed so loudly that our upstairs neighbor came running down. He saw me and he saw Melvin holding my foot. He looked at Melvin but not at me, apologized for intruding, and went back upstairs.
“Telling someone ‘I believe you’ or ‘I’m worried about you’ is a mitzvah, because the victim will remember what you said,” Weiss stressed. “And if your relationship with the victim permits you to do more, tell her she does not deserve the abuse, and that it will not go away on its own. Focus on her strengths, because she’s not feeling strong and needs to hear that she truly is. Any woman in an abusive relationship is strong; she has to be.”
‘The other side’
Weiss also pointed out that many women do escape abusive relationships, but that not much is written about them.
“I wanted to tell the other side of the story, the successful side, when I began writing my book seven years ago,” she said. “It’s hard to find the success stories, because women want to put the abuse behind them and repair their self-image.
“But I had no problem finding women to interview after I made it clear to them that I was not blaming them.”
Her book, “Surviving Domestic Violence: Voices of Women Who Broke Free,” is based on these interviews and was published almost two years ago (Agreka, 2000).
One of the most common questions women who have left abusive relationships are asked, said Weiss, is why they married the abuser in the first place, implying that they should have been “smart enough” to see what was coming.
But abuse can be subtle, she said, and one rarely sees it during courtship, when couples are on their best behavior. “If you’re dating a man who calls you every day while you’re on a business trip to ask after you, even to the point of what you’re wearing for your presentation, is that attentiveness or a pattern of control?” she asked. “How do you know?”
In Weiss’ case, a couples therapist back in the 1970s had counseled her to “grow up” and remain in the marriage. That combined with Judaism’s value on maintaining shalom bayit (peace in the home) and the lack of communal acknowledgment of the problem convinced Weiss to continue to try to alter her own behavior to please her husband.
“We have come a long way since then,” Weiss said. “The Jewish community is slowly breaking its silence. Abuse does happen here. It’s a terrible problem, but not inevitable. The cycle can be broken with education, advocacy and resources.”
To aid that effort, Weiss left the field of educational consulting after 20 years, and since 1994 has been writing and teaching about domestic violence. She has trained more than 7,000 people — business leaders, social workers, office and factory workers, and teachers and clergy.
As a clinical associate professor in the department of family and preventive medicine at the University of Utah School of Medicine, she also conducts research in the field. She can be reached at eweiss@aol.com.
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