It’s a beautiful, sunny Saturday lunchtime – the Sabbath – when 10-year-old Sara Sherbill senses something is very wrong with her father.
A beloved rabbi in an Orthodox community in Chicago, he has just come home from synagogue in a foul temper – something that has been happening more and more regularly lately – and the violence rises slowly and with a terrifying inevitability.
In her searing new memoir, There Was Night and There Was Morning, Sherbill describes her father’s dark double life and how, once he was no longer able to abuse his own family, he descended into a spiral of depraved drug abuse, preying on vulnerable young girls in his congregation.
The flare-up had started with a cruel complaint about the food on the table.
‘Is it too much to ask for a warm meal when I get home?’ fumes the rabbi to his wife. ‘You can’t do that for me?’
Sherbill’s father was a beloved rabbi in an Orthodox community in Chicago
Sherbill’s mom, as usual, tries to defuse the situation.
‘“Danny, stop it,” my mother says quietly, and he throws a piece of bread at her – bread she baked with her own hands. It is, after all, the Sabbath.
‘My mother says nothing.’
Sherbill has witnessed the scene – not this one specifically but many more like it – too often to hold her tongue. It’s as if the abuses over her previous ten years explode in that single moment and she starts to scream.
‘Do not yell at her, do not yell at her. Stop being mean.
‘Now chairs are being thrown back, and people are standing up and yelling, and now my mother is yelling too, and my father hits her, and I run,’ Sherbill writes.
Terrified, she races to reach her room before her father, slamming the door behind her and fumbling with the lock, but her 10-year-old fingers are not quite quick enough.
‘My father’s blows rain down on me. Now there is less fear, which is mostly about anticipation of what is unknown, and there is pain instead, but I notice that less. Primarily, I feel I am losing my mind, which is what I scream now. Soon my father will go to his room… and return with a belt, to finish the job.’
The abuse continues for years, Sherbill writes. She learns to cover her arms with long sleeves; to wear pants instead of shorts in the summer. She probably also learns to run faster.
When she’s 17, she remembers being woken by shouts from the kitchen to find her mom cowering in a corner, her father throwing chairs at her.
She says her father threatened to kill his wife as he warned her: ‘The next time you leave this house will be in a body bag’
The author writes: ‘Decades from now, when I learn the worst things a daughter can learn about a father, I will think of all the people my father brought back to God’
‘She looks afraid, more afraid than I’ve ever seen her look, and I have seen her look afraid many times,’ she writes.
‘My father is screaming too… “You frigid, sexless bitch. You cold, frigid bitch.”’
That night, Sherbill sneaks out, shoeless, and drives to the police station to report her father for domestic violence.
But still it doesn’t stop.
On more than one occasion he warns his wife: ‘The next time you leave this house will be in a body bag.’
She writes: ‘The fact that my father wants to kill my mother is something I have always known, but now he is saying it out loud… The more he says it, the more I believe it.’
The family – including Sherbill and her four siblings – move to Israel in the hope of a fresh start, but even there, she says her father’s raging tempers explode into appalling cruelty and violence.
Driving home from a day trip, she describes her terror as he almost kills them all in a blind fury.
‘As we begin our ascent to Jerusalem, the steep sandstone cliffs rising up on either side, my father accelerates,’ writes Sherbill. ‘He doesn’t just accelerate, he floors it. He is not just exceeding the speed limit; he is trying to see how fast a car can go. Not just this car, but any car.
Sherbill (pictured as a baby with her parents) provides a vivid account of the chaos and violence that allegedly erupted in their home
As a child, Sherbill learns to cover her arms with long sleeves; to wear pants instead of shorts in the summer to cover the bruises
Sherbill’s account presents her father as a man whose private life was in stark contrast to his public persona
‘Every time we hit a sharp curve, he speeds up. We are all sitting in the back seat, one on top of the other. We begin to scream. We begin to cry. We scream for him to stop. But he doesn’t stop.
‘I can feel a cramped, frozen feeling in my legs, my body bracing itself for what is coming.
‘The car rushing toward the edge. The car rushing toward the abyss.
‘I think, not for the first or the last time, that my father is trying to kill us.’
They survive. And, in the years that follow, the family scatters to lick their wounds and build new lives.
‘Some of us would move back to America, some of us would leave God behind, some of us would be so angry, we would try to set ourselves on fire.’
The abuse drives Sherbill to self-harm, her brother to drugs and a suicide attempt, while another sibling battles depression.
‘Even when we thought more life could not come from us, it did. We had no choice. We believed in God, and God had commanded us to live.’
It takes an astonishing 40 years for her mother to finally divorce her husband, saying of him: ‘The totality of his being was evil.’
And by the time she is raising her own children, Sherbill thinks her father has finally lost his power over her – only to learn that he has transferred his abuse and is now ‘victimizing young women and underage girls’.
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One of those girls she calls Leah.
In the story Leah tells her, she passes out after her father plies her with drugs. When she wakes up, her dress is hiked up around her hips. She’s been raped.
Leah is sometimes homeless, often penniless. She has nowhere to go so has few options. Which means she becomes dependent on the rabbi – who is by now himself jobless, living in a ‘fetid studio apartment’ in Miami, and is dying from cancer.
Sherbill’s brother walks in on them one time.
‘Our father was lying naked on the bed. He was sick with cancer, yes, but apparently still very much alive. Next to him was… Leah… She had once been a congregant, a member of my father’s synagogue in Miami before he was fired.
‘Now she was 22 and lying on the bed, naked except for a pair of shorts and a bra. A copy of the Bible was open, as though they were engaged in study, which, in a sense, they were.
‘My father was explaining to her the value of tzedaka – strictly translated as charity, yes, but that is only the most basic way of understanding the word. It encompasses so much more than that: the divine imperative to help someone in need.
‘They had just finished snorting heroin, or they were about to go do more.’
Her brother sees Leah at the apartment often. Sometimes she’s high. Other times, she’s hysterical.
‘Sometimes she throws herself on the floor and starts screaming, and the thing she screams is always the same, the refrain of a song, and the refrain goes like this: Your father belongs in jail / Your father belongs in jail.
‘Sometimes the song has other words, words that show she understands how bad things actually are.
When she’s 17, she remembers being woken by shouts from the kitchen to find her mom cowering in a corner, her father throwing chairs at her
It takes an astonishing 40 years for her mother to finally divorce her husband, saying of him: ‘The totality of his being was evil’
‘“Her last two boyfriends beat her up,” my brother tells me. “And the one before that went to jail.”
‘“So now Dad’s her boyfriend?” I ask, and my brother looks at me with pity.
‘“You don’t understand,” he tells me. “Dad’s not her boyfriend. He’s her rabbi.”’
Sherbill says Leah later signed a release form with the temple, in exchange for a cash payout, ensuring she could never take legal action against him.
But she wasn’t the only woman her father hurt, she says.
‘By the time of his death, he had also been abusing girls for an indeterminate amount of time.’
He had been suffering from a myriad of complaints: an advanced form of cancer that had spread to his bladder, a perforated tumor, all complicated by Covid.
‘That would have been enough. But he had also been ingesting opioids for many years, consuming regular and, on some occasions, near-fatal doses of heroin, fentanyl, morphine, oxycodone, whatever was on hand.’
After he dies, along with the usual glowing obituaries, other, stranger stories start to emerge.
‘Like when a former congregant named Sheldon Winestock showed up at the funeral, and my mother says how strange that it is, that he, of all people, would turn up after all these years, since he had called my mother on the phone 35 years ago to tell her he had seen the rabbi late one night in a car in the synagogue parking lot with a young woman, a former student, and he thought my mother should know.’
Despite the years of abuse, however, Sherbill admits her memories of her father are not all bad.
Sherbill recounts how the abuse drove her brother to drugs and a suicide attempt, while another sibling battled depression
She told The Forward: ‘There was the physical violence, yes, which sometimes resulted in bruises, but that was not the worst part. The worst part was trying to understand why my father, who was so kind to so many, was doing this to us.’
And, while not denying his horrific abuses, she also remembers all the people he helped.
One former congregant referred to him as ‘the kindest of all men’, describing how he had sat with him on the phone for hours as his father had died.
‘He had a heart as big as the sun,’ the person said.
‘I did not recognize the name of the person who had penned this message, but I did not doubt its veracity,’ writes Sherbill.
‘My entire life people had approached me – in the corridors of the synagogue, over fruit punch and crumbly sprinkle cookies following services – to tell me how much my father had helped them when their loved one passed.
‘He was there the whole time, holding their hands, talking them through it.
‘That was my father’s gift. He had always been better at death than at life.’
She adds: ‘I will think of the holiness he brought into their lives and wonder if this will help him in the heavenly court, if his good deeds will outweigh the bad.’
There Was Night and There Was Morning: A Memoir of Trauma and Redemption by Sara Sherbill is published by Union Square & Co