Young Brandeis Graduate's Suicide Highlights Pressure To Wed

The suicide of a 25-year-old Upper West Side woman, who jumped to her death a day after breaking up with a boyfriend, has brought to light the pressure put on young Orthodox Jews to marry.

Sarah Adelman, a Brandeis University graduate who managed a dental office in Midtown, on Monday afternoon leapt from an eighth-floor window of 35 W. 96th St., where she resided. Ms. Adelman left no note, police said, but was suffering from depression and had called another former boyfriend to say goodbye, the New York Post reported.

It's difficult to know what role societal preoccupation with marriage played in Adelman's suicide, but her death has initiated a conversation about the Orthodox community's premium on coupledom, a singles columnist who is an observant Jew, Esther Kustanowitz, said. "I think it's really sad that it took an incident like this to mobilize the community," she said.

Anecdotal evidence of Orthodox Jews staying single longer in recent years has prompted religious leaders to trumpet a shidduch, or matchmaking, crisis, according to Ms. Kustanowitz, 35, whose Web log, JDaters Anonymous, provides a forum for Jewish singles to discuss online dating. "Traditional Judaism, as a whole, doesn't know what to do with singles in their 20s and 30s," she said."There's a temptation to try to marry everybody off. On one hand, that's admirable, but on another it places pressure on people that they might not be ready for."

In certain Orthodox circles, unmarried women of a certain age are stigmatized, according to a 27-year-old rabbi and teacher, Chananya Weissman, who started End the Madness, a movement devoted to changing the culture of dating in the Orthodox community. The effort, Rabbi Weissman explains on the End the Madness Web site, is dedicated to a relative "who at the age of twenty was considered ‘over the hill' by her society," and died without having married. "‘Over the hill' is pretty young, especially for women," he said yesterday. "It can be 22 or 25 or 30."

Rabbi Weissman said the Upper West Side has proved a particularly competitive place for a young, observant Jews looking to find a spouse. "It's overflowing with thousands and thousands of singles, and it doesn't seem to be working for them," he said. "It tends to be hard to narrow the focus and settle on one person. The Upper West Side is loaded with pressure, and singles there tend to be more jaded and unhappy than singles elsewhere."

In light of the tragedy, the Jewish Center and Congregation Ohab Zedek — two Orthodox synagogues that are popular with young Upper West Side singles — have joined with Yeshiva University to organize a series of "healing" programs. At the Jewish Center last night, mental health professionals facilitated small-group discussions. Another such forum is planned for Tuesday, a day after a psychologist and Yeshiva University professor, David Pelcovitz, is scheduled to deliver a lecture at Ohab Zedek titled "Depression in Our Community: Recognizing, Reacting and Reaching Out to Friends."

"We wanted to show the community that we're responding in a real way," the assistant rabbi at the Jewish Center, Yosie Levine, said.

Rabbi Levine said Adelman, whom he did not know, may have been suffering from clinical depression, and that her death is not necessarily emblematic of "a problem particular to the Jewish community, or to the Orthodox community."

"What we're trying to do is help people feel more connected, and less alone," he said, referring to the discussion groups and lecture. "This is one individual, but people might be undergoing similar feelings, and we want to address those concerns."

Friends yesterday remembered Adelman, a St. Louis native, as thoughtful and bubbly. "It's a very haunting thing," a member of a Jewish youth group to which Adelman belonged, Avi Zimmerman, 25, said. "She had a lot of life in her, and always had a smile on her face — that's why it's such a big surprise."

He did not speculate on what prompted Adelman to take her life.