Ex-hasid who committed suicide had mental issues, says family

In an interview with 'The Daily Mail,'Finette Lerman-Russak said that her cousin Faigy Mayer, 30, had exaggerated her isolation from former friends and family.

By SAM SOKOL
Updated: JULY 31, 2015 03:47
Faigy Mayer (photo credit: TWITTER)
Faigy Mayer
(photo credit: TWITTER)
A family member alleged on Monday that the ex-hassidic woman who committed suicide last week was not that isolated from her from her former community and suffered from mental health issues.
In an interview with The Daily Mail, Finette Lerman- Russak said her cousin Faigy Mayer, 30, had cut off contact with family members herself and exaggerated the degree of her isolation – and that she had long suffered from “borderline personality disorder with paranoid tendencies and a secondary diagnosis of bi-polar disorder.”
Prior to her death, Mayer wrote to a friend complaining of the minimal secular education and limited horizons available to those who grew up as she did, asserting that “hassidic Judaism shouldn’t exist at all.”
“If people were allowed to think, they would not be religious,” she wrote.
“Thinking analytically when it comes to basic life decisions is something new to me and something I still struggle with, five years after leaving.”
But her cousin, who is not religious, claimed that “she ran from those people in her family who wanted to help her and then said ‘I have been cut off, no one cares.”
“Faigy’s facts kept changing,” Lerman-Russak said in reference to Meyer’s claim that family members had kept her childhood photos from her, adding that she believed that her cousin had “invented the fact that she felt no connection with hassidism as a child.”


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