by Yaakov Langer
Divorce rarely begins with a dramatic moment.
By the time it becomes visible, something has already broken between two parents.
What follows is often a process focused on the adults: their decisions, logistics, and separation.
And somewhere in the middle of it all are the children, quietly trying to make sense of a world that no longer feels stable.
For Rechy Zolty, that fragile space between two parents is where much of her work now lives.
Through Arches for Families, the organization she founded in New Jersey, Zolty helps couples navigate one of the most painful transitions a family can face. Her goal is not to repair marriages that have already broken. Instead, she helps parents build something new: a way to move forward as co-parents, with their children at the center. But the work she does today began almost by accident.
The Boy Who Changed Everything
During the early months of COVID, a message circulated through the community about a fifteen-year-old boy who needed somewhere to go for Pesach. His father was hospitalized. His mother could not care for him. There was nowhere for him to stay. Zolty remembers the moment clearly.
“My husband came over to me and said, ‘I think we should take this boy in,’” she recalls. “And I said, ‘Oh, that’s what you think? That’s so nice. But no.’”
At the time she and her husband were already raising a large family. Bringing a teenage boy into the house during a pandemic felt overwhelming. But her husband reminded her of something from his family’s history. “He told me this story about his grandmother in Poland,” Zolty says. “She had ten kids and one small apartment. A mother and son came through the town with scarlet fever and nowhere to go. She took them in.” The mother recovered and returned home. The boy stayed with the family for nearly two years. “My husband said, ‘This is what our family does.’” So they said yes.
The boy stayed with them for four months. During that time, his father passed away.
Watching the situation unfold forced Zolty to confront a question she had never really thought about before. “What happens when kids in our community don’t have a stable place to be?” she wondered. She started asking around. “In Brooklyn we had organizations like OHEL,” she says. “They handled these kinds of situations. But when I started asking what existed here, people kept saying the same thing: nothing.”
A Problem No One Wanted to Touch
Zolty began researching the issue seriously. She met with therapists, askanim, clinics, and community leaders. The answers were discouraging. “Everyone told me the same thing,” she says. “The liability is too big. The cases are too complicated. Nobody wants to deal with it.” Some people warned her directly not to get involved. “They said, ‘If you do this, you’re going to get sued. You’re going to get killed.’” She shrugs slightly when she repeats it. “I said, okay. Then I’ll get sued and I’ll get killed. And if that happens, I’ll stop.”
Instead, she opened Bridges for Families, an organization that helps children whose homes have become unstable because of crisis, addiction, mental illness, or other severe challenges.
But as Bridges grew, something else began to emerge.
“A huge percentage of the families we were dealing with were going through divorce,” she says.
And the children were suffering.
The Hidden Crisis
Divorce itself is not new. But Zolty began noticing a pattern that deeply troubled her: high-conflict divorces where communication between parents completely broke down. “When parents are in that place, the kids fall into the cracks,” she says.
The research backed up what she was seeing. Children whose parents experience intense conflict during divorce face dramatically higher rates of anxiety and emotional distress. However, both within the frum world and beyond, there were no structured resources designed to guide couples through divorce in a healthy way. So Zolty decided to build one and started yet another organization.
Teaching People How to Divorce
Arches for Families began with a simple idea: most couples enter divorce with absolutely no preparation. “People get chassan and kallah classes before they get married,” Zolty says. “But before divorce? Nothing.” So Arches offers pre-divorce consultations. Couples who know their marriage is ending can sit down and learn what lies ahead: the legal
process, the role of beis din, the court system, mediation, and the emotional realities they will face. “People walk in completely blind,” she says. “They don’t know who the players are. They don’t know the different routes they can take.”
Zolty strongly encourages mediation whenever possible. “In mediation, someone calm sits with you and helps you figure things out,” she explains. “You’re not signing your adulthood away to courts or outside decisions.” But even when mediation isn’t an option, education helps couples make better choices before conflict spirals out of control. Still, the most difficult work often begins after the divorce itself.
When Parents Can’t Speak
Divorce may end a marriage, but it doesn’t end a family. Parents still have children to raise together. They still have school issues, schedules, holidays, and everyday decisions. And when communication has collapsed, those interactions can become explosive. “I’ve seen the most sane, normal, balanced people become completely unrecognizable during divorce,” Zolty says. She describes people forgetting basic responsibilities, repeating the same arguments endlessly, or becoming unable to communicate at all. “It turns people inside out,” she says. That is where Arches’ parental coordination program comes in.
Coordinators serve as neutral intermediaries between divorced parents, helping them manage communication and co-parent effectively. Sometimes that means helping parents schedule weekends or resolve disagreements about holidays. Sometimes it means teaching them how to write an email that won’t ignite another fight. “You’d be surprised how often we’re just helping people learn how to communicate softly again,” Zolty says.
A Small Miracle
One family that came through Arches left a lasting impression. The parents had spent years locked in conflict. Even seeing each other’s texts would trigger immediate anger. “They couldn’t even be on a three-way text,” Zolty says. “Smoke would come out of their ears.” So their coordinator started slowly. At first, she communicated with each parent separately. Eventually she introduced shared emails. Over time, the tone began to soften.
One day something unexpected happened. The mother wrote to the father thanking him for paying for their daughter’s trip to Poland after seminary. “She said the girl came back glowing and happy,” Zolty recalls. “She said it couldn’t have happened without him.” The father responded with gratitude and warmth. “It was such a beautiful exchange,” Zolty says. In Bridges staff meetings, the team shares what they call ‘miracle moments.’ “This was one of them,” she says. Not because the divorce had disappeared. But because two parents who once could not communicate had found a way to share pride in their child again.
Holding Two Truths
One of the most important lessons Zolty learned early in this work is that divorce rarely has a single clear narrative. “I remember meeting one husband and thinking, wow, this man married someone impossible,” she says. The next day she met the wife. “And I thought, wow, this woman married someone impossible.” That moment changed how she approached every case. “In divorce, both people have their truth,” she says.
The role of Arches is not to determine who is right or wrong. It is to create enough stability for parents to raise their children responsibly. “One of the biggest problems is that everyone around them takes sides,” she explains. “Friends, family, everybody becomes emotionally involved.” Arches tries to remain neutral. “We hold the space for both truths,” she says.
Finding Hope in Difficult Work
Given the stories she encounters, people often ask Zolty how she manages to keep doing this work. “People say to me all the time, ‘How do you stay sane doing this?’” she says. Her answer surprises them. “I actually feel hopeful,” she says. Part of that hope comes from the fact that she can act. “When most people hear these stories, they feel helpless,” she explains. “For me, I can do something.”
But there is also a deeper perspective guiding her. “I believe every soul comes into this world for a purpose,” she says. “Some lives have more struggle than others.” That belief helps her maintain compassion without feeling responsible for erasing every hardship. “Our job isn’t to take away all the pain,” she says. “Our job is to support people through it.”
Structure at Home
Zolty’s path into this work may seem unlikely. Before founding Bridges or Arches, she built a career as a professional organizer, training more than 150 organizers around the world. That instinct still shapes everything she does. “When I see a problem, I see how it can be fixed,” she says simply. That same clarity helps her manage a busy household as well. Zolty is the mother of eight, including a baby. “I try to run a very tight system,” she says.
Work happens while her children are in school. Evenings belong to family. Calls are filtered through her organization rather than her personal phone. Her husband, she says, plays an important role in helping her maintain those boundaries. “He gives me enough rope to hang myself,” she says with a smile. “But he also knows when to pull me back.” The structure keeps everything moving.
In many ways, the work she does for families mirrors the work she does in her own life. Looking at something that feels tangled. And slowly, patiently, helping untangle it.
Yaakov Langer is the founder of Living L’chaim and the “Inspiration for the Nation.”
To sign up for the Kol Echad Limited Series E-Magazine, click here: https://www.ou.org/kolechademail/
