Healing Hasidic Masturbators and Adulterers — With Psychiatric Drugs

They admitted to religious taboos ranging from same-sex attraction to extramarital affairs. The treatment they received was alarmingly severe.

Photos by Pearl Gabel | Edited by Brendan Spiegel

Joseph, a thin man with a delicate bearing and soft gray eyes, has a mellifluous accent that is hard to place – evidence of growing up in the United States but in a world apart. Until 2009, he was living in a religious enclave of upstate New York as a Belzer Hasidic Jew. He worked as a travel agent, spending his days arranging flights to far flung places, often for people with more freedom than he could ever dream of.

Like many Hasidim, Joseph (who, like several of the people interviewed for this article, requested that his real name not be used here) married at twenty. His wife was the first woman he had ever touched, and she got pregnant soon after their wedding. But their sex life left much to be desired for both partners, and then petered out altogether. Joseph says his wife would sometimes decide not to go to the mikvah, the ritual bath required of Hasidic women after they menstruate to “purify” them, making them once again sexually…