She Died From Our Expectations

Again, it’s never the wrong time or place to ghoulishly call attention to a social problem*:

The suicide of a 25-year-old Upper West Side woman, who jumped to her death a day after breaking up with a boyfriend, has brought to light the pressure put on young Orthodox Jews to marry.

Sarah Adelman, a Brandeis University graduate who managed a dental office in Midtown, on Monday afternoon leapt from an eighth-floor window of 35 W. 96th St., where she resided. Ms. Adelman left no note, police said, but was suffering from depression and had called another former boyfriend to say goodbye, the New York Post reported.

It’s difficult to know what role societal preoccupation with marriage played in Adelman’s suicide, but her death has initiated a conversation about the Orthodox community’s premium on coupledom, a singles columnist who is an observant Jew, Esther Kustanowitz, said. “I think it’s really sad that it took an incident like this to mobilize the community,” she said.

Anecdotal evidence of Orthodox Jews staying single longer in recent years has prompted religious leaders to trumpet a shidduch, or matchmaking, crisis, according to Ms. Kustanowitz, 35, whose Web log, JDaters Anonymous, provides a forum for Jewish singles to discuss online dating. “Traditional Judaism, as a whole, doesn’t know what to do with singles in their 20s and 30s,” she said.”There’s a temptation to try to marry everybody off. On one hand, that’s admirable, but on another it places pressure on people that they might not be ready for.”

In certain Orthodox circles, unmarried women of a certain age are stigmatized, according to a 27-year-old rabbi and teacher, Chananya Weissman, who started End the Madness, a movement devoted to changing the culture of dating in the Orthodox community. The effort, Rabbi Weissman explains on the End the Madness Web site, is dedicated to a relative “who at the age of twenty was considered ‘over the hill’ by her society,” and died without having married. “‘Over the hill’ is pretty young, especially for women,” he said yesterday. “It can be 22 or 25 or 30.”

*See also: The Point Of Which Should Hit You Like A Ton Of Bricks . . .