hen the yeshiva student Yigael Laloum drove his new bride to their home in the settlement of Har Bracha, he wasted no time. He was in a hurry to demonstrate the soundtrack that would henceforth accompany her life. "I was dozing, and as we drove I heard a terrible boom and got very frightened," Hani Laloum relates. "It was my husband. He pounded the car and said, "If you hear a noise like this, just bend down - that's what stone-throwing sounds like here.' A few years later I understood that was his way of telling me, 'Welcome to hell.'"

Hani Laloum left Har Bracha three years ago, after being diagnosed as suffering from a post-traumatic condition. Her story provides an intimate glimpse into the private hell she experienced while trying to be accepted as a resident of one of the most extreme settlements in Samaria at the height of the intifada. "There are women who marry junkies, there are women who marry battering husbands," she says. "I was a woman who was ideologically battered."

Now she is trying to put her life back together in Tivon, a town near Haifa. She expresses remorse: "I should have spoken out during the period of the disengagement [from Gaza]. The settlers got so much empathy and understanding for their pain then, and I wanted the empathy to be directed also at women like me, for whom the disengagement was a true redemption. I so much wanted to say that I am not the only one. I know a lot of women who are battered by fear and don't want to live in those places, but their alternative is divorce and social ostracism. Not all the women in the settlements are thick-skinned enough, as they say there, to survive the distress, the dangers and the fear."

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Like a bone in the craw

Hani Laloum, 28, grew up in Tivon in a traditional home, in a family that was on the moderate right, politically. Apart from a foray into the ultra-Orthodox Chabad movement education system in high school, she was educated in schools that espoused the national-religious brand of Zionism, both inside and across the Green Line. She was a top student in the communications department of Orot College in the settlement of Elkana, and studied photography, digital editing and script-writing alongside Jewish studies.

Concurrently, as the young women of that sector do, Hani looked for a husband. She did so, however, only after she demonstrated "responsibility and maturity" - seeking the advice of a psychologist on how she could clarify to herself the possibility of integrating her skills and openness into the restrictions of the "world of the Torah." Dreaming of self-fulfillment together with a Torah scholar, she met Yigael Laloum, a student at the Har Bracha hesder yeshiva, which combines religious studies with army service. Laloum came with the prestigious label of "unique in his generation," a state-of-the-art prodigy who attended yeshiva with a laptop, used the Internet and wrote articles and talkbacks. Mainly, he defended the controversial halakhic approach of his mentor and rabbi, Eliezer Melamed, the spiritual leader of the yeshiva and the head of the Har Bracha local council.

What drew you to Yigael?

"I was looking for a spouse who combined Torah with openness and the ability to take things in, and I felt I had found all that in Yigael. I thought he met all the criteria. The first time I saw him I was very impressed. In the context of the dating scene in the sector, where dates usually take place in public parks, our first date was unusual and promising. We left behind the girls and the yeshiva students who were sitting on benches in Sacher Park [in Jerusalem], and Yigael invited me to a restaurant. That was very unusual, because yeshiva students usually don't have any money; in first meetings, the refreshments consist of a bottle of mineral water that you bring for yourself.

"In that first meeting," she continues, "we talked about the desire for a full life of value and depth, and I was impressed by his receptivity to my ambitions, by his ability to take in feminine dominance and diversity. He didn't have the look of a classic yeshiva student, and he told me that he listened to Pink Floyd and the Beatles, which I really liked. Very quickly I decided he was the one."

And you also decided that you would share your lives in Har Bracha?

"Already in the first meeting, Yigael said that if things between us got serious, we would move to Har Bracha."

Did you know what you were committing to?

"Not entirely. I knew what living in Har Bracha would mean. I didn't know how complex it was. I identified completely with the general approaches of religious Zionism - the combination of Torah and nationalism - but I did not have clear ideas regarding the territories in which the nationalism would be realized. I did not grow up with messages of Greater Israel. I remember hearing, as girl, about the murder of Ita Tzur, from Beit El [killed with her son by Palestinian terrorists in 1996], and I thought - why are they going to live there, to be a bone in the craw of the Arabs? There is enough room in the rest of the country. But I decided to accept the condition and follow Yigael, because I loved him very much, and I did not know the price I would have to pay. I didn't know that I was literally going to be captivated by him, falling into fanatic and rigid ideological captivity."

What were your first impressions of the settlement?

"Yigael wanted very much for me to see the settlement before we were engaged. I thought the place looked barren and cold, the end of the world. I remember the first time I went to the grocery store there and asked for pine nuts and Thousand Island dressing. I was told, ?Hey, this is Har Bracha. Be grateful that you have bread and vegetables. What are you, some kind of chef?'"

Gritting her teeth

Before the wedding, Laloum introduced his intended to the rabbi. "The rabbi was late for the meeting and we waited in his living room," she recalls. "When he arrived he said a frosty hello. He knew I had studied communications and asked me what I thought about [TV journalists] Ilana Dayan and Dan Shilon. 'Who do you think they vote for,' he asked me, 'for the center parties or for the extreme left?' I replied that I thought they were center. Then he asked Yigael what he thought. Yigael contradicted me and replied that Dayan and Shilon certainly voted for Meretz or Hadash. The rabbi ruled that 'he is right and you are wrong.'

"I found that peculiar. We had come to talk to him about a wedding and a union, and he sharpened the disparities between us. I felt that he had tested me and I had failed, that I had been marked. In the meeting, the rabbi also asserted that in our wedding I would wear a veil and there would be yihud" - a tradition in which immediately after the marriage ceremony the newlyweds are secluded in a room for a short time, as a sign of marital union - "even though that was completely against my will and contrary to the Sephardi tradition.

"I came out of the meeting quite frustrated, and then Yigael and I also had our first argument. But I didn't think the situation was a sign of the future. My impression was that Yigael had backbone. I didn't understand that he abnegated himself totally before the rabbi and that I was starting a process of being tamed and losing my self."

The couple was married in January 2001, a few months after the outbreak of the second intifada. At first, Hani tried to maintain her work routine as a teacher in Midreshet Amalia, a teachers college for women in Jerusalem. "I started to feel the difficulty on the roads," she says. "The bus would go from one settlement to another, and I would sometimes get back to Har Bracha at 9 o'clock at night. The intifada broke out, and after two or three months I felt I was collapsing from the tension on the roads, from the shooting and the dead all around.

"Then I decided to stop working in Jerusalem and started to work in the settlements. I stopped visiting my parents, I didn't go to buy clothes. I shrank my life - I left my job, I left my social group, I severed relations with girlfriends, I didn't attend family events - but I survived by gritting my teeth. To the school in Itamar [a nearby settlement] and back to Har Bracha - that was my world."

Were you able to stabilize your life there?

"I functioned in my miniature world. There were terrorist attacks on the roads and I traveled with the prayer that I would get to work and back alive. When I got home I felt relatively protected. Once a rock was thrown at the car I was in, and I shook all night from the power of the stone, but the next day I went to work as usual. People around me were wounded and murdered. But the biggest shock I had was when Rachel Gavish, the psychology counselor in the school I taught in, was murdered in her home in Elon Moreh - she, her husband, her son and her father [in May of 2002]. That destroyed me. She was my source of strength. I would come to her for advice, tell her about my integration difficulties in the settlement, about the sense of alienation and fear. When she was murdered in her home, I lost the feeling of security in my home, too."

The following month, Rachel Shabo and three of her children were killed in Itamar, and the men from the settlements in the area were mobilized in standby squads. Hani Laloum describes the emergency routine: "There were hardly any nights of continuous sleeping, because there was an alert almost every night. Yigael was an ambulance driver and also studied in a beit midrash until midnight. Our house was far from the front of the settlement, because Yigael wanted privacy, quiet. Quiet from whom, I asked myself at a certain stage, from the dead? When soldiers passed the house I would implore them to come in and rest. I asked every passerby on the street to come in, to check under the beds and in the cupboards if there was a terrorist. Sometimes I called up 12-year-old girls and asked them to come and sit with me in the house, for payment. Babysitters."

Did Yigael stay with you sometimes, when the fear was particularly acute?

"I never dared ask him to miss a lesson in the beit midrash. I hoped that the rabbi would say something to him, but that didn't happen. On the evenings when I was alone in the house, I would sit on the sofa and wonder whether to put on music to reduce the tension, but I didn't dare, because if there should be a terrorist next to the house I wouldn't hear him. I would tell myself, ?Okay, I will go take a shower,' but then change my mind, because if I showered I would not hear an alert about a terrorist. When I spoke on the phone, I would stop every few minutes to check if there was some unusual noise.

"Evening after evening I sat frozen on the sofa, watching the hands of the clock. I got used to sleeping with a pistol under the pillow, a rifle under the bed and a protective vest on the chair."

Was there any way you could get rid of the fear, talk to your husband, to the rabbi?

"Absolutely not. It was totally illegitimate to be afraid, and it was impossible to speak frankly. When Gilad Zar was murdered [in a terrorist ambush in 2001], Rabbi Melamed said that it was the greatest mitzva to die a martyr's death, that there was no greater commandment than giving one's life for the Land of Israel. The rabbi has a huge influence on Yigael, who always tries to please him and adopts his views. I could cry for hours and he was silent. He demonstrated a tremendous ability to be silent. He never came over to calm me, never embraced or caressed me. In a coldly quiet voice he would say, 'You have to strengthen your faith and understand what holiness is - the holiness of the Land of Israel.' The arguments we had at home were also usually conducted with terrible coldness, with a quiet that could kill you. A kind of echo of the rabbi's manner of speech. Even I was trained to speak with a sangfroid that is really not my character."

All the cowardly women

On August 31, 2002, a terrorist infiltrated Har Bracha, and Hani Laloum, worn down from anxiety, found herself alone in the house. "I heard a few shots and the phone rang. Yigael's sister from Hebron was on the line. ?Lock yourself in,' she told me, ?there is a terrorist in the settlement.' The door was open, the blinds were open, and I started to scream. I called my parents and said I couldn't take it. I called all kinds of people in the settlement to come and take me. I begged, I humiliated myself, but no one was willing to come out to me. In the end I closed the doors and windows, because I realized that I was absolutely not functioning properly.

"After about five hours, a soldier knocked on the door. I refused to open it. ?How do I know you are a soldier and not a terrorist,' I asked him. The soldier said that the incident with the terrorist had ended after 20 minutes. No one on the settlement, it turned out, had bothered to inform me. Not even my husband, who went off comfortably to wash the ambulance after the incident ended."

Was there no solidarity among the women?

"There was actually a social meeting point of all the cowardly women. There were other women whose husbands stayed in the beit midrash until late at night, and sometimes they came to my place until their husbands returned and took them with the weapon. It was clear that we were scared, that we got together because we didn't want to be alone, but that was never said aloud. There was a feeling that there was something wrong with you if you were afraid. The proper settler woman has to be cool and collected. Composure is one of the most admired traits in the settlement.

"The fear was silenced in all kinds of ways. My fears even became the subject of a skit at Purim, in which I bring a tray of cookies and a drink to a soldier who is actually a mannequin. The culture committee asked me to perform the skit about myself, but I wasn't capable of making a joke about it. A week after the terrorist infiltrated I met one of the women, whose husband is the number 1 follower of Rabbi Melamed. She asked me how I was and I told her that it had been very hard for me to be without my husband on the evening when the terrorist had entered the settlement.

"A month later, at Rosh Hashanah, Yigael came back from the synagogue gloomily and said that Rabbi Melamed had wanted to know whether I had asked for forgiveness from him. What for? I asked. ?For talking about a yeshiva student in public,' he said."

Do you think this silencing is deliberate and systematic?

"Yes. It is part of the delegitimization of everything that contradicts the commandment to live in Har Bracha willingly and with joy. They have a clear model there of the ideal woman, for whom it must be clear that the best place to live is Har Bracha. The woman who is worthy of his students is filled with devotion, ready and willing to give her life for the land, and harbors no opinions that contradict the collective ideology.

"I think what was even harder for me than the fear of the terrorists was the submission, the self-abnegation and the intervention in private life. Maybe not harder, but that was another acute difficulty."

What intervention do you mean?

"The rabbi has great influence over some of the resident's economic decisions. Immediately after our wedding, Yigael took a tithe of the money we received and transferred it to the yeshiva. I asked him, why only to the yeshiva? He said that this was the loftiest expression of charity. At Simhat Torah, there is organized fundraising for the settlement. There is tremendous social pressure to donate large amounts, which are set by the rabbi. He instructs the families how much to donate: You will donate 5,000 shekels, he tells one family, and another family must donate 3,000. One year he even told my husband that we were to donate 10,000 - 5,000 from us and the identical amount from our families. I remember asking myself how it was possible to make us pledge a donation in the name of our families, who were not even present.

"People from outside who came to celebrate Simhat Torah with us were astounded at the amounts. Someone from the settlement told me on one Simhat Torah that it might be better if people from the outside didn't come for the holiday, because not everyone understands our customs.

"Rabbi Melamed puts massive pressure on the residents to buy a home in the settlement. He told us to buy a house there, too. At first I really didn't want to invest money in a place where I had no desire to stay, but Yigael said that it would only cost us pennies, with the grants the state gives, so we bought a house.

"Rabbi Melamed also has a very particular attitude toward the soldiers and the army. There are settlements where it is usual for the women to prepare food for the soldiers, do their laundry, give them a feeling of being at home. But Rabbi Melamed said that we should not feed the soldiers, that this is the army's job, and that the soldiers are not doing us any favor by guarding the settlement."

Yoni Hayisraeli, chairman of the Har Bracha secretariat, stated in response: "We are proud to be a Torah settlement, with the yeshiva at its center, and the rabbi does not serve as an adornment but as a very influential spiritual leader of the community. The allegation that families in the settlement treat IDF soldiers indifferently is a lie and a slander. It should be noted that all the settlement's inhabitants did army service. True, the regular and reserve soldiers refused to take part in the expulsion" - referring to the evacuation of settlements - "but despite the pain they continue to report for reserve duty. Moreover, even in the difficult days after the expulsion, when many were furious at the IDF and the soldiers, the residents, at the rabbi's instruction, continued to host in their homes soldiers who wanted this. The rabbi himself set a personal example by hosting soldiers.

"We will note in addition," the statement continues, "that Yigael Laloum, as a former combat medic, is one of the most prominent of those who bear the burden of the rescue forces in the area. As an ambulance driver, he gave first aid to people injured in road accidents, Jews and Arabs. But to our regret, at the rabbi's recommendation he stopped this activity for a significant period, because his wife was afraid to remain alone."

According to Hani Laloum, this was not her husband's only motive. "One of the main reasons that Yigael stopped volunteering for Magen David Adom is that the calls made him stop learning Torah and on top of it he had ?to treat some Arab,' as he put it."

A big mistake

Occasionally during the interview, Laloum broke her flow of speech. She would freeze for a moment, and then admit that although she had left Har Bracha, Har Bracha had not entirely left her. Then she would take a deep breath and continue. "I will never forget my last meeting with Rabbi Melamed. I went to him with my husband and told him that I was no longer capable of living there. I told the rabbi that my fears were growing, that I spent hours at night alone and that my husband showed no sympathy. The rabbi replied, ?I have already told you that if you want your husband to respect you, you have to do his will, as it is written, ?How proper is a woman who does her husband's will.'

"In that conversation I stood my ground. I replied that I was providing properly and behaving modestly, and there was no reason I should not be shown respect and understanding. The rabbi told me that this was not enough, that I also must do my husband's will - for example, if my husband wants me to dress like a settler woman, then I must dress like a settler woman. When I insisted that this was not the way to gain respect and understanding, the rabbi stated that I was suffering from depression and sent me to a psychiatrist."

And did you do as he commanded?

"I expected my husband to tell the rabbi that I was completely healthy - after all, we both knew that I had come to the settlement as a healthy, happy person - but my husband quickly set up an appointment with a psychiatrist, and came with me to the meeting. Yigael told the psychiatrist that I was sick, that my perception of reality was defective. The psychiatrist sat with us for about five hours and afterward told Yigael: Your wife is actually a very strong woman who is surviving in an unbelievable situation. She is simply afraid, and she must not be left alone in the house.

"In his opinion, he wrote that I was in a post-traumatic condition, that I had lived under stress, with powerful fears, for years, and that we should consider leaving the settlement. When we got back to Har Bracha I felt a huge relief: I had received validation for my very natural feeling about this place - fear. I hoped that now Yigael and the rabbi would recognize my fears. Not an illness - fear. God, in your world you created emotion and feeling, too."

And did you receive confirmation of your fear?

"Absolutely not. The next day, Yigael returned from the Shabbat eve prayer in a very dark mood. When he came home like that, it was clear he had spoken with the rabbi about me again. He told me that the rabbi had said I had to see a different psychiatrist, who would offer a different diagnosis and prescribe the right drugs."

Others also had a part in Hani's decision to leave Har Bracha for good. When she exercised her right to rest in her parents' home, she discovered to her surprise that by the next day, she was already considered a rebellious wife.

Hani Laloum's feeling today is that she is not wanted in the settlement. "When I realized that they had started a process of separation from my husband for me, I went back to Har Bracha to pick up clothes and other items," she relates. "When I arrived, Yigael started to call up a lot of people. He told his friends from the beit midrash that he was in distress and asked them to drop everything and come over. More than 15 of his friends came, yeshiva students. He took out a package of pills and told the large crowd that had gathered, 'Look, she takes pills. I married a mentally ill woman. I made a great mistake.' No one stopped him; they all stood and watched the spectacle.

"I made an effort not to cry, not to show him that I was cracking. I called Rabbi Melamed and said, 'He is your pupil. Tell him to give me a few clothes and let me go.' -I am not intervening,' he told me.

"But to tell me to see a psychiatrist - that you were able to do? I asked him. And to declare me a rebel - that you could do? Then the line went dead. Yigael, his friends and his rabbi would do well to understand that coping with fear and taking responsibility and taking steps in life that contradict social cohesion do not constitute illness, but are an expression of enlightenment, progress and courage."

Flowing with people

Rabbi Eliezer Melamed, 46, a graduate of the Merkaz Harav yeshiva in Jerusalem, is the rabbi of Har Bracha and its hesder yeshiva. His father, Rabbi Zalman Melamed, is chair of the Rabbinical Council of Judea and Samaria and the rabbi of Beit El Bet. He is a leading figure in the "Hardalim" movement, of nationalist Haredim. He is in the forefront of the process of religious extremism that the national-religious public is undergoing, and a founder both of Arutz Sheva, the settlers' pirate radio station, and the newspaper Sheva. During the disengagement, father and son issued a ruling that IDF soldiers must refuse orders to evacuate settlements. Some of the students in the Har Bracha hesder yeshiva refused to take part in the evacuation and were prosecuted.

Rabbi Eliezer Melamed is an acerbic man who speaks in a cold, quiet tone of voice. In 1995, about nine months before the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, Melamed was one of three rabbis who signed a "clarification" letter that was sent to the country's leading rabbis, asking "whether it is not proper to warn the prime minister and his ministers that if they continue to hand over the residents of Yesha [Judea, Samaria, Gaza] to a government of murderers, according to halakha it will be necessary to place them on public trial and punish them as stipulated for a moser" - a Jew who turns other Jews over to non-Jewish authorities. After the assassination, Melamed brought into his circle Rabbi Shmuel Dvir, from the settlement of Karmei Tzur. Three of Dvir's students reported that he told them Rabin should be punished as a rodef, a Jew who puts the life of another Jew in jeopardy. After this was reported in the media, Melamed hired Dvir as a teacher in the Har Bracha yeshiva and he moved to the settlement.

Melamed is a prolific writer on religious topics, expressing clear positions on matters of halakha and current events. For example, on the question of the "transfer" of Arabs, his view is that the Palestinians - "whether inside the Green Line or outside it" - should be offered the "true choice": to live here with the status of ger toshav - the biblical notion of a "resident alien" - or emigrate. But in wartime, he argues, the rules change: "The entire population must be expelled, and only those who are known to have supported us in practice should remain."

He omits the section of the blessing for the state that prays for the well-being of its leaders; the High Court of Justice is "an institution that is entirely a provocation against the Torah," the media is almost always the "cheatdia." In an article he published on the Internet site of the Hebron settlers, he condemned the Yesha Council for "adopting a conciliatory approach regarding the expulsion and the destruction of Gush Katif" - the former settlement bloc in the Gaza Strip. In another article, in 2004, he wrote that in cases of disagreement between a couple, one of whom is afraid and wants to leave a settlement, halakha sides with the partner who insists on staying. "In any event," he wrote, "if he comes to ask, it is right to recommend that he move elsewhere."

Rabbi Melamed declined to respond to Hani Laloum's allegations, saying: "The article was written in advance on the basis of a hostile approach, and a person like me (settler, religious, rabbi, male) has no chance of obtaining any measure of justice in it. Any cooperation by me will be considered legitimization of the article." However, he did suggest that I speak to Dudi Finkler, a former student of the Har Bracha hesder yeshiva and today sales manager of Sheva.

"Two months after the start of the second intifada, we left Har Bracha," Finkler says. "There was definitely a certain fear. My wife worked in Ra'anana and had to travel there every day. I can testify only about us, but we received full support from the rabbi. He even came to the dedication of our new home in Givat Shmuel, and to this day I am in touch with him and with other people from the settlement."

According to Finkler, Rabbi Melamed is a "liberal person, who flows with people." "He does not think that everything is suitable for every person. For example, he does not think that everyone should study in a yeshiva, and he exempts whoever is not suitable. For example, a few friends of mine, who studied at the yeshiva but did not actually study, if you get my drift, asked him if they could act as army emissaries abroad for a year. You're not studying? he told them - then go. The way he flows with people is incredible."

Identifying with the victims

The political environment in Har Bracha affected Hani Laloum differently from what she had expected, and living there brought about ideological changes in her worldview. "The greater the pressure on me became, the more I identified with the Palestinians," she says. "I learned how to look them in the eye."

Didn't the political atmosphere intensify your nationalist outlook?

"On the contrary: when I was traveling with people from the settlement and we passed Arabs in Hawara, and some of the settlers cursed them, I would look and see human beings - living men, women and children. Whenever I saw the suffering, the poverty, how they waited hours at checkpoints, their difficulty in managing their lives, getting out of Nablus, entering Nablus, I completely stopped identifying with the messages of the settlers, with the glorification of killing. The more I saw our control, the power, I understood that when you frustrate a whole nation, there is no way anything sane will come out of it.

"I don't know which political settlement is best - don't talk to me about politics. I only know that when I drove in an air-conditioned car and saw a woman waiting for hours in the broiling sun at a checkpoint, I couldn't bear it. Today I know that the extremist settlers do not own religious Zionism. Anyone who constructs his Zionism solely on the basis of occupied territories has a problem with his Zionism."

With more compassion from her surroundings, Laloum says, she might have survived and remained in Har Bracha to this day. She is happy, she says, that she reached a post-traumatic state and left for "a normative life in a normal place." She talks seriously about the need to establish a hot line for women in the settlements in distress.

"Women there live in fear, and that fear is paralyzing. I want to say to those women that it is impossible to live like that. I know that you have neither day nor night. You exist, you breathe, but you are not living. You have to know that with all the pain and difficulty of shattering frameworks, sometimes there is no choice - if not for you, then for your children."

She doesn't yet feel that the story is completely behind her, but she has built a new life in Tivon, working as the coordinator of the communications track in the religious youth village of Kfar Hasidim, and assisting the mentally ill. "I like it very much in Tivon. Everyone is accepted here - there are religious, secular, Sephardim, Ashkenazim, left-wingers, right-wingers, and the Arab village of Bosmat Tabun is nearby. I have some very right-wing girlfriends and I have girlfriends who are part of the radical left. I have a very high regard for the directors of the religious youth village in Kfar Hasidim, where I work. They are women who are right-wing in their political views, but who possess tolerance and an extraordinary ability to accept the other. For me, Greater Israel is not the territorial wholeness that annuls every other moral value. Greater Israel for me is a place that can contain different viewpoints and different people. Yes, the Arabs too."