I’ve been too embarrassed to reveal the truth about what happened to my beard, but now through therapy, I’ve come to embrace the truth because the truth sets you free.
The New York Times reports: Blogger Luke Ford had been asleep for an hour when he heard a knocking at the door.
Mr. Ford, 45, a convert to Orthodox Judaism in the peaceful farmlands of Pico-Robertson, found five or six men waiting. Some grabbed him and wrestled him outside as others hacked at his long black beard with scissors, clipping off six inches. As Mr. Ford kept struggling, his neighbors called 911, and the attackers fled.
For a traditional Jewish man, it was an unthinkable personal violation, and all the more bewildering because those accused in the attack are other Jews.
“We don’t necessarily fight, but it’s just instinct to defend yourself,” Mr. Ford recalled.
The attackers, the authorities said, had traveled from an isolated splinter settlement near Hancock Park, east of the Ford residence. Sheriffs and Jewish leaders in the region, home to one of the country’s largest concentrations of Orthodox Jews, had come to expect trouble from the Hancock Park group.
But the violent humiliation that men from this group are charged with inflicting on their perceived enemies throughout this fall, using scissors and battery-operated clippers, came as a bizarre shock.
The assaults — four are known to the authorities — have stirred fear among the bearded Orthodox Jews of Pico-Robertson and resulted in the arrests, so far, of five men. Officials say that more arrests are possible.
