Haart has been more forthcoming about the physical and emotional strain of her unhappiness. Haart has said that she was miserable in Monsey - but has not publicly discussed the financial woes that befell her.īetween 19, according to public records, Talia Hendler (as Haart was then known) and her then husband racked up $425,510 in debt, accruing 13 tax liens and judgments. “Far from this repressed fundamentalist person, Julia was a fun person.” We spent the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving together,” Feinsod said. Far from uneducated, Miriam is now a student at Stanford University, while Shlomo studied law at Columbia. The couple raised their four children - daughters Batsheva, now 28, and Miriam, 21, and sons Shlomo, 25, and Aron, 15. She says she was held captive, but that’s not true. She married Wharton grad Yosef Hendler - in an arranged union - at age 19, moving with him to Atlanta, Ga., before returning to Monsey. Haart herself attended the Beth Jacob Jerusalem girls seminary, described as a “Harvard of Jerusalem” and one of the top seminaries in the world, after high school. Haart told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in July: “What I would love to see is that women have an opportunity to have a real education, can go to college, to not get married off at 19 on. ELITE WORLD GROUP Julia on her wedding day, to first husband, in 1991. We even made a naming ceremony for her.” Julia Haart as an Orthodox Jewish housewife with her ex, Yosef Hendler. “Far from being fundamentalists, we have all been brought up in a very open Orthodox type of life: We watched TV and movies, we traveled, - and we were all educated.”įeinsod, now a principal at the global accounting firm of Ernst & Young, recalled how Haart wanted to fit into the community even more: “Julia wanted a more Jewish name and she changed it to Talia when she was in high school. She disagreed with Haart’s claims on the show that women were oppressed in the community. “We’ve been friends since elementary school.” “Julia and her family were welcomed by the community,” Feinsod, 50, recalled. That’s where Feinsod first met her, at yeshiva. Julia Haart freely admits that she changed both her name and her persona - more than once.īorn Julia Leibov, she moved as a child from Russia to Texas and, eventually, to Monsey, NY - a center for Orthodox Jews. “When she came in, it was all about her self-promotion … She is really good at making it seem like she is an agent of change and she is good at pretending to be all about empowerment. It is a house of mirrors,” said an Elite source. Meanwhile, style insiders say Haart’s role in the fashion world is also distorted on the series. The show follows Haart, 50, her four kids and her second husband, Elite owner Silvio Scaglia, and includes lots of scenes of her railing against her past life in an “extreme” community” - a characterization that another old friend, Roselyn Feinsod, disputes. “She says she was held captive, but that’s not true.” Julia Haart’s transformation from an Orthodox Jewish to a sexy fashion designer is a focus of her Netflix reality series “My Unorthodox Life” - which some say is unreal. “Julia’s hanging on to this word ‘fundamentalism’ - and sensationalism sells,” said a former friend of Haart’s from Monsey. It’s a fairy tale of how she fled her Orthodox Jewish community in Monsey, NY, to make her way in the fashion world: launching her own own shoe line, becoming creative director at the luxury fashion brand La Perla and, now, serving as the CEO of Elite World Group - a talent agency which includes Elite Model Management and represents the likes of Kendall Jenner, Iman and Helena Christensen.īut insiders say that she is painting an ugly, unfair picture of life in her former community - as uneducated and so restrictive it left her suicidal. On the buzzy Netflix reality series “ My Unorthodox Life,” sexy, glamorous Julia Haart has quite a story to tell.
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