A Netflix star who appeared on the reality show My Unorthodox Life has revealed she breastfed her own brother at the same time she was nursing her baby daughter.
Viewers met 52-year-old Julia Haart in the first series of the Netflix show in 2021, when she was introduced as a fashion designer living in Manhattan with her four children after leaving behind an Orthodox Jewish community.
Before running away from the community, Haart welcomed her first daughter, Batsheva, in the early 90s, when she was in her 20s.
Just a few months after Batsheva was born, Haart's mother welcomed another child of her own, a son.
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Haart and the new little boy might have been decades apart in age, but they were definitely still brother and sister - a fact that Haart drew on when she recalled the bizarre experience of breastfeeding her brother.
The Netflix star discussed the situation during an appearance on the Not Skinny But Not Fat podcast, saying: "You wanna hear a real mindf***? I nursed my brother."
Haart explained her mum had asked her to breastfeed her young brother while she was nursing Batsheva, citing her mum as she said: "Oh, you’re already nursing your daughter, take this one too."
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"So I ended up nursing my brother and my daughter. Now that’s a mindf***. I don’t think he remembers."
Haart went on to explain that wet nurses, who can be hired to breastfeed someone else's child, are still common in the Haredi Judaism religion in which she grew up.
"Go back a couple hundred years, everyone had a wet nurse, right? You didn't nurse your own baby if you had money," she said.
"That's the community I lived in. I lived in the 1800s. I always tell people I'm a time traveler. If you want to understand the world I lived in, go back to the 1800s, that's it. I lived an 18th-century existence."
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Haart decided to leave the Haredi community in 2013, when she was 42-years-old and a mum to four children; Batsheva, who is now 30, Shlomo, 27, Miriam, 23, and Aron, 15.
She shares the children with her first husband, Yosef Hendler, and has since gone on to marry, and split up from, her second husband, Silvio Scaglia.
Haart has admitted she spent her 'entire life' questioning her beliefs while living within the religion, but the 'beginning and end' of her decision to leave the faith came when her daughter Miriam revealed she was bisexual.
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"No one could convince me that she was somehow flawed," the mum said. "When she started questioning [the beliefs] that’s when I realised it’s not [only] me, it’s the system."
Topics: Parenting, TV And Film, Netflix, Pregnancy, Sex and Relationships, Celebrity
Emily Brown