Sarah Wizman’s turn to stricter religious observance

Sarah Wizman’s turn to stricter religious observance recasts the household’s routines, her relationship with Adam Wizman, and the religious environment in which their daughters grow up. It is not presented as a single conversion scene but as an accumulation of choices—changing her name, clothing, and observances—that reshapes domestic life. For Adam, whose Jewish identity is bound to historical vulnerability and communal survival but also to a humanist political conscience, Sarah’s increasingly demanding religious practice becomes one part of a family transformation he cannot reconcile with his own sense of desire and freedom.

Background and Turn

Before this change, Sarah was known as Valérie Berdah. She and Adam had met in Toulouse, married six months later, and raised two daughters. Their family’s experience of antisemitic violence became a decisive backdrop to their later life: after the 2012 attack on the Jewish school their daughters attended, the family left France for Israel. The move to Ra’anana proved disastrous for Adam, who felt unable to integrate without distorting himself; the family returned to France, where he took a teaching post at a Jewish school and they lived within a largely communal world.

It was after their return that Sarah became much more religiously observant. She gave up the name Valérie and asked to be called Sarah. She replaced trousers with skirts that nearly reached the ground, low-cut T-shirts with loose, long-sleeved sweaters, and began covering her head with a scarf. She also told Adam that she wished to observe the dietary restrictions, Shabbat, and the rules of family purity more strictly. The change was enacted through visible choices and recurring household practices, not merely stated as an abstract belief.

Religious Practice in the Household

The rules of family purity had specific consequences for the couple’s physical life. From the first day of menstruation through the twelfth day afterward, Sarah was not to have contact with Adam; after that period, at nightfall, she was to immerse herself in a ritual bath filled with spring water. During these intervals, they did not sleep together. Sarah slept on a mattress directly on the floor, an arrangement Adam opposed because he could not bear seeing his wife’s body placed almost at ground level. The rule thus entered the bedroom as a repeated, material circumstance, making religious observance part of the couple’s intimate daily negotiation.

Religious practice also continued in Adam’s later home with Claire Farel. When Alexandre Farel first visited, he noticed a small transparent case beside the apartment’s entrance. Claire explained that it was a mezuzah, traditionally understood as protecting the home. She had not been required by Adam to adopt Jewish practice, but out of respect for him she accepted a household rhythm marked by major festivals and the consumption of foods permitted by Judaism. The detail shows a form of accommodation distinct from Sarah’s stricter observance: religious customs remained present in Adam’s domestic life, but were practiced within a relationship shaped by negotiation rather than identical commitment.

Marriage, Desire, and Separation

Sarah had supported Adam’s professional projects and taken responsibility for much of their daughters’ education. For nearly twenty years he remained faithful to her, and at her request he sang a traditional Friday-night song, “The Virtuous Woman,” celebrating the kind of steadfast wife praised in Jewish tradition. Yet he eventually felt that he was living with a stranger, without desire or a future. At forty-two, he began a relationship with Claire, whose presence made him recognize what he experienced as the cost of his placid marriage.

Adam’s hesitation about leaving was not reducible to religious observance alone. He feared breaking up a Jewish household, losing daily contact with his daughters, and becoming an outcast from his community. He understood Jewish identity as a burden of duties and obligations, intensified by a history of threatened survival. The 2012 school attack and the 2015 killings at Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher sharpened that sense of collective vulnerability. For three days after the 2015 attacks, Adam stayed home with Sarah and their daughters, the family’s shared fear binding them together even as his relationship with Claire pulled him elsewhere.

After a year of parallel life with Claire, Adam finally told his family he was leaving permanently. He also understood that Sarah would need a religious divorce if she wished to remarry. His departure ended the household that had combined family loyalty, communal continuity, and religious practice, but it did not erase the obligations he felt toward the woman who had raised their daughters and supported him through periods of professional doubt and emotional distress.

Consequences for the Daughters

The family’s religious and geographical changes continued to shape the daughters’ lives after the separation. A few weeks after Adam and Claire began their new life together, Sarah announced that she would move with the girls to Brooklyn, to Crown Heights, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. Adam did not object. He preferred the distance, and Claire did not imagine sharing alternate weeks with his daughters when she was no longer responsible for her own son. Their choice to withdraw into their relationship coincided with the daughters’ removal from the household and family life Adam had built with Sarah.

The older daughter, Mila Wizman, later arrived at Adam and Claire’s apartment with a suitcase. She said she could not endure life in New York or the religious community in which her mother now lived. She described pressure over how she dressed, walked, and thought: Sarah was requiring her to wear increasingly long skirts and black stockings regardless of the season. Shops in the neighborhood sold goods conforming to Jewish law, and even toy shops offered gendered kits—cooking sets for girls and prayer kits for boys. When Sarah told Mila that at eighteen she was old enough to marry and that she might ask the community rabbi to find her a prospective husband, Mila decided to return to France. She was an adult preparing for her baccalaureate as an independent candidate, and Adam agreed that she could live with him.

At trial, a psychologist’s account placed this conflict within a longer history of disruption. Mila’s childhood had been happy until the attack on her school; the family’s hurried move to Israel failed, and the later migration to Brooklyn accompanied her mother’s religious turn and departure from France. Mila felt abandoned by her mother and guilty because Sarah told her that, had she stayed in the United States, the assault against her would not have happened. The narrative therefore connects religious observance to family belonging and discipline without presenting it as the sole cause of the family’s fractures: displacement, antisemitic violence, parental separation, and Mila’s own traumatic experience all bear on the consequences.

Significance

Sarah’s stricter observance stands in contrast with Adam’s more conflicted relation to Jewish identity. He sees communal belonging as a source of continuity and protection, especially against the threat of antisemitism, yet he also objects to what he regards as moral retreat when concern for security eclipses political responsibility. His failed attempt to settle in Israel and his eventual departure from Sarah’s household expose the limits of treating religious or national belonging as a complete answer to fear and alienation.

The household details keep that tension concrete. A scarf, long skirts, a mattress on the floor, food rules, Shabbat, a mezuzah at a doorway, and the prospect of a rabbinically arranged marriage each mark a different encounter between religious practice and ordinary life. Sarah’s choices establish a more observant domestic order; Adam’s objections and Claire’s partial accommodation show that Jewish identity within the family is neither uniform nor static. For Mila, the rules become especially immediate as restrictions on clothing, gender, and marriage, while her return to France is also a response to the wider history of upheaval that preceded them. The religious turn thus matters not as a detached background fact but as a change lived through bodies, rooms, family arrangements, and the daughters’ contested sense of where they can belong.