Orthodox and Anorexic

Tablet Mag  By the time Chaya Faigie Jundef was accepted into an eating-disorder treatment program in 2007, she weighed 52 pounds. Too weak to walk, she was carried in. Her hair and teeth had fallen out, and her pulse was a dangerously low 28, less than half a normal reading. Everything sounded like a shriek or a whisper to her, because the thin membrane of fat around the neurons in her ear had dissolved. Her eyesight faded in and out.   And then her heart stopped.

Jundef, an Orthodox woman whose anorexia had brought her to the brink of death, recovered after her stint in the treatment program—but her harrowing experience was far from over. Her story is not unique: The Orthodox community has begun to grapple openly with eating disorders in recent years. In 2008, the Orthodox Union released a documentary film to be shown in Jewish schools called Hungry To Be Heard, about eating disorders among observant Jews. And treatment programs that cater to Orthodox women have opened.[...]