For a while, it appeared that Simon Taub’s money would never stop flowing. When the Taubs decided their large home wasn’t large enough, they rented their next-door neighbor’s first-floor apartment and opened a door in the wall, integrating into their house two more bedrooms, a bathroom and a second kitchen to deal with the overflow demands of the Shabbos meal.

But in 1997, as competition from Chinese manufacturers intensified, Simon’s company filed for bankruptcy. By 2003, it closed its doors — none of which he told Chana, fearing, he now says, that she would divorce him if the money dried up. So unbeknown to her, they lived mostly on income from their commercial and residential properties — some of which he owned before their marriage and some of which he, like many businessmen, had put in his wife’s name to keep from potential creditors. Only in 2005, after he’d had a heart attack, he said in divorce papers, did he tell Chana of the stress he’d been under.

Chana and their children would later testify that Simon had become increasingly testy during those last few years. When Chana was home, they said, he was angry she wasn’t out doing his errands. When she was out, he was angry she wasn’t home. When the Shabbos stew was too watery for his taste, they said, he shoved his bowl to the floor. He threw pots of food off the stove and Chana’s plants out the window. He heaved Chana’s books, vases and mail into the trash and covered them with dirt so she couldn’t salvage them. The children testified that their father, a heavy-set man, treated their mother like a slave, ordering her to put his shoes and socks on every morning. None of the children ever saw him hit her, but they testified that he threw a Rolodex and a dollhouse toward her, though they missed. Simon has more favorable interpretations of these events; for example, he says he threw away only mail that was many years old and only with Chana’s permission. Nonsense, Chana says: ‘‘It wasn’t a marriage. It was a terror.’’

In 2005, Chana won an order of protection that included banning Simon from the house. But Simon pressed the court to let him move back, saying that living at his sister’s house taxed his health. At the time, he expressed shock at Chana’s claims, saying that he had always treated her ‘‘like a queen,’’ taking her to high-class restaurants and providing her with a full-time staff of three. ‘‘My wife was therefore never a slave but instead had people tending to her every need.’’

It was Simon who proposed dividing the house with a makeshift wall, each side with its own first-floor entrance, a proposal that he hoped would allow him to move back in without breaching the order of protection. Chana and three of their children would get the whole third floor — five bedrooms and two bathrooms. They would get the huge kitchen, bathroom and enclosed porch on the second floor, and the library and indoor garage on the first. Simon and their youngest son, then 14 and preferring to live with his father, would keep the dining room on the second floor and the living room, bathroom and second garage on the ground level. The judge agreed to Simon’s Solomonic plan. Chana hated it, but her appeals failed.

And so, in December 2006, Simon waved in workers to erect the patchwork divider, as neighbors gathered outside to watch. Chana installed a $2,000 alarm system on her side of the partition. And in the corner where the wall met her front door, she taped an excerpt from Genesis in which angels blind the wicked Sodomites trying to break into a house to harm the innocent family inside.