Hella Winston

“Large Hasidic families can often benefit from more square footage than many of these dwellings originally possessed, and some people have found architecturally creative ways to add rooms to their typically overcrowded homes. Yossi claims that some people who run out of money before the additions are completed have developed creative solutions to that problem as well—like the man who dealt with his inability to pay his mortgage by changing his name, putting his house in the new name, and then obtaining a death certificate for his old self. He was reborn a few days later with a new Social Security number, but without his old financial troubles. Some people who are pressed financially will legally designate their basements or other parts of their houses as shtieblech, or small synagogues, and receive tax breaks because their homes are houses of worship. Someone who temporarily moves in with a friend whose home is designated a shtiebl can claim that he himself is homeless and sleeping in a synagogue, thus becoming eligible for Section 8 housing vouchers from the government.”
― Hella Winston, Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels

“Yitzchak remembers once asking his father why, on Shabbos, he always cut off the end of the challah and gave it to his mother. Assuming that it was probably because his mother liked crusty bread, he was horrified to learn that there is actually a superstition that eating the edge of the challah causes people to become forgetful. Yitzchak interpreted his father’s act as an implicit endorsement of the view that, while a man surely cannot risk forgetting all that he has learned, there is little serious harm that could come to a woman from losing a bit of her memory. “After all, what does a woman know?” Yitzchak asks me, rolling his eyes, “A few recipes, maybe, or how to wash the floor?”
― Hella Winston, Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels