Occasionally when I look out my Hoboken rectory window, I notice a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses standing in a pathway of Church Square Park. Modestly dressed, they are next to a stand of Jehovah’s Witnesses’ literature, hoping to get someone to stop and listen. They belong to the Spanish Kingdom Hall around the corner on Park Avenue, next to the public library.

I have always been impressed with the dedication and fervor of Jehovah’s Witnesses. They are good living, dedicated to their denomination and always trying to evangelize.

Amber Scorah confirmed this in her riveting tell-all, “Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life,” where she also says the Witnesses operates like a cult.

According to Scorah, members are forbidden from fraternizing outside their peers, discouraged from pursuing higher education, and are unable to celebrate birthdays and major holidays like Christmas and Halloween. She also wrote that not taking blood transfusions has caused the deaths of many Jehovah’s Witnesses, including children. Women are subordinate to men, who hold all the leadership positions.

Scorah conveys a constant feeling of paranoia as a member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses from growing up as a third-generation Witness in Vancouver, Canada, to serving as a missionary in China. You never know who can be trusted, she wrote.

A common discipline for a Jehovah’s Witness who violates rules is called “disfellowshipping.” If someone is deemed guilty of an infraction, he or she is shunned, as Scorah was for sexual contact outside of marriage.

“After being disfellowshipped, you sat in the back row at the meetings, ignored by all, penitent for a number of months or years,” Scorah wrote.

After a leading a moral life, you could ask to be brought back, but in the interim, "you were treated as though you were dead,” she said.

Later in the book, when Scorah described beginning to move to leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses voluntarily, she tells the story of Dale Thomson, who was disfellowshipped.

“Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life,” by Amber Scorah; Viking, 2019; $37.

“We did not question the elders’ decisions – they were God’s appointed leaders of the flock,'' she wrote.

Witnesses could not even acknowledge Thomson in the streets, she said. One day, he was found hanging in a forest where the Jehovah’s preached.

“Having friends in the world was as forbidden as being gay was,” Scorah wrote.

And though Thomson was a Jehovah’s Witness his whole life, he was denied a funeral in the Kingdom Hall because he had committed suicide.

Throughout her time in the close-knit community, Scorah wrote, Jehovah’s Witnesses were promised eternal life when an imminent Armageddon would come. It was an idea driven into their study and beliefs.

“It was constantly on our minds,” Scorah told Trevor Noah during an interview on his “The Daily Show” in June.

Scorah moved to China to proselytize, where it is illegal, and said there was actually more freedom for a Jehovah’s Witness preaching there because the normal rules did not apply. You had to operate clandestinely.

Doubts began to build up in Scorah, and in her 30s, she left the Witnesses and her husband disowned her.

“It was like scales fell from my eyes,” she told Noah.

I spoke with Chris Perez in the Jehovah’s public information office in Wallkill, New York, twice and emailed questions in an effort to obtain a response to Scorah’s book; there was none.

But I did run into Lloyd Ramos, 49, on the streets of Hoboken. He belongs to the Park Avenue Kingdom Hall. I asked if he is able to have friends outside the Jehovah’s Witnesses and he replied, “I am talking to you now.” I said we’re not really friends. As for whether one is encouraged to pursue further studies, like going to college, he said, “It’s a personal decision.” He told me Christmas is not celebrated by the Jehovah’s Witnesses because Jesus probably died “in March or April.” And he acknowledged that “disfellowshipping” is practiced because it is included in the Bible.

He was born Catholic and converted when he was 25.

Scorah questioned the practices and teachings of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, which led to her exit, but she did not put down others who remain. In fact, she is reverential toward the Jehovah’s for shaping most of her life.

But she wanted more from life and it took a man she had an e-mail relationship with to lead her to act on her doubts and leave.

After leaving, she suffered a personal tragedy in the death of her infant son but is hopeful.

The Jehovah’s have answers to every question, she said, but now she sees “my life is in the future.” She is embracing the mysteries of life, she said, telling Noah, “There is more beauty in the world.” And in her life.

The Rev. Alexander Santora is the pastor of Our Lady of Grace and St. Joseph, 400 Willow Ave., Hoboken, 07030, FAX: 201-659-5833; Email: padrealex@yahoo.com; Twitter: @padrehoboken.

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“Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life,” by Amber Scorah; Viking, 2019; $37.