Posted: June 18, 2010 in Israel
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The blue of the Israeli flag was a good match for the sky during the outdoor Shabbat morning service. The service, the day before our departure, was a welcome respite to the busy week. It was held on the roof of the Hebrew Union College campus, with a view of modern Jerusalem in one direction and the wall of the Temple Mount in another. The city below was hushed enough so that the songs of at least four birds could be heard; the scent of the roof flower garden sporadically perfumed the air.
Franci Blassberg, Ellen Cogut and Susan Hirschhorn, three of 36 Central Synagogue women to travel to Israel in April, read from the Torah. Under Orthodox law, which is the law in Israel, this is something denied to many women.
Led by Cantor Angela Buchdahl and Senior Director Livia Thompson, the week of travel was both exhausting and over-scheduled while still fascinating and worthwhile.. As a group, we became closer with every early morning departure and long bus ride.
We saw flags everywhere during our stay - on cars, on buildings, in windows. Poles were at half-mast when we first arrived to mark Yom HaZikaron, a day that honors Israeli war veterans. It was a contemplative moment for us, as Americans, to realize that our country marks similar holidays with shopping sales, parades and barbecues. Yet in Israel, a much smaller land mass for which war and violence are everyday occurrences, a day of remembrance is truly a somber and serious time. In Israel, everyone knows someone who has perished - the price of Israel’s independence is high.
The observance begins as the Hebrew date begins - at sunset. A siren sounds and for one full minute the cities are still. Everyone pauses, traffic halts and pedestrians freeze. At 11 o’clock the next morning another siren marks the opening of memorial services and again all motion stops. Yom HaZikaron ends as the light fades and the country shifts gears, not back to normalcy but to Yom HaAtzma-ut, Israel Independence Day. The flags are raised, official mourning ends and a celebration begins.
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An intrepid group from Central walked to Rabin Square to join the festivities. A large, boisterous crowd watched folk dancing while teenagers foamed each other with shaving cream and children attacked each other with silly inflatable hammers. Babies stayed up late and everyone had a rousing time before returning safely to the hotel. The square was formerly known as Zion Square, the site where Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin was notoriously assassinated in 1995.
Nothing in Israel is ever simple and every place has a myriad of stories and meanings. The Arab word for the holiday of Yom HaAtzma-ut is al-Nakba, the catastrophe. For Israelis this day is a joyous celebration of their existence; their neighbors mark it as a tragedy. Nevertheless, the scene on the Tel Aviv beach on Yom HaAtzma-ut could have been a scene from a commercial or movie - both Arab and Jewish families barbecued, played soccer, and played on giant swings that dotted the beach playground.
The theme of our trip was Women and Minority Rights. We heard over a dozen speakers during our stay. One of the most meaningful was Anat Hoffman, executive director of the Israel Religious Action Center (IRAC). This institution is the advocacy arm of the Reform movement in Israel and they advance civic equality. Ms. Hoffman was born in Israel but lived for several years in California where she attended UCLA on a swimming scholarship. Her time in Los Angeles introduced her to Reform Judaism, which she did not know existed until she came to the US. It came to be an important part of her education.
We were schooled about the status of women in Israeli society. North Americans generally revere former Prime Minister Golda Meir (in office 1969-1974) as an example of women’s power in Israel. But today the late Meir is considered an anomaly, blamed for the country’s losses in the Yom Kippur War. Women in Israel do not have any real power in the government. They make up just 16% of the Knesset, as opposed to 50% of the parliaments in Scandinavia. Likewise, the United States has only 17 women senators with congresswomen comprising just 17% of the House of Representatives. Both the United States and Israel have a long way to go.
Many members of the Knesset are rabbis or rise up thru the army, and since only Orthodox rabbis are completely “legal” in Israel, this is a door closed to women. Conscription into the army, which Israel is famous for, has not led to equal opportunity. Miri Eisen, a colonel until she retired while pregnant with her third child, was one of our most absorbing speakers. There has been only one female Brigadier General - most women do not rise above colonel. Our guide Michaela, who was so confident, knowledgeable and intelligent, told us of her own sexual harassment in the army.
Women have fared better in civil society. By law, every corporate board must have a woman. In the non-profit center they dominate the job market, though these tend to be low-paying jobs.
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The issue of divorce was a recurring theme throughout the week. It is an important women’s rights issue. All divorce in Israel is controlled by the Orthodox rabbinate. A couple may be divorced only if the husband agrees to give his wife a get, a Jewish divorce document. If he does not, there is no legal divorce. A man may be jailed for beating his wife, yet without his consent, the woman is not permitted to divorce or remarry. A woman in this situation is called agunah, literally a chained woman. Many are in this limbo for years, unable to move on with their lives. They cannot remarry and if they do in another country, the marriage will not be recognized by Israel. Without the get, any children they bear will be momzers, bastards who are stigmatized socially and legally.
The Orthodox have political power in Israel. In some neighborhoods, women are forced to ride in the back of the bus. The reading of Torah by women is not permitted. In fact, the management at our upscale hotel had to “look the other way” when our entirely female group read from the Torah.
Other religious rights issues are not so easily evaded. We met with Susan Weiss, a lawyer who represented a woman arrested for praying at the Western Wall while wearing a tallit, a prayer shawl. Many women on the trip bought decorative tallitot to show solidarity for this cause though it will be a long time until this right is realized.
The Reform movement in Israel is tiny. The only Jews involved with synagogues in any number are Orthodox. It became clear to us that if the Reform movement were to be recognized and permitted to flourish, many of Israel’s problems regarding civil and women’s rights, could be solved. We presume the country would become more of a democracy, which is the most important reason for the United States to be its strong ally.
Other highlights of our week-long journey included a bumpy jeep ride along the Burma Road, a makeshift artery built to link Tel Aviv and Jerusalem for transporting emergency water and supplies during Israel’s War of Independence. We saw a new archeological dig that may turn out to be a fortress of King David. We roamed the narrow alleys of Old Jerusalem, where one can buy a kippa, a crucifix and a hookah pipe in the same tiny store.
Our time there passed quickly and all too soon, we were having a Havdalah service on the eve of our departure outside on a hill overlooking Jerusalem. The spices we used were sprigs of fresh rosemary pinched from nearby bushes. Lillian Beacham, Nadine Brozan, Susan Oppenheim and Rita Weingarten, all daughters of Holocaust survivors said blessings. Their presence in Israel on the country’s 62nd birthday is extraordinary. The real Havdalah, the separation of the sacred from the profane, the marvelous from the ordinary, should have perhaps been held at the airport as we left. For the whole week, as tiring and demanding as it was, was a holy and wholly Jewish experience that left the group wanting to improve the lives and rights of women in Israel.
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Our trip was not designed to be a sightseeing expedition nor was it to be a survey of the country’s storied history though there were numerous sights to be seen and an abundance of history to be learned. Rather the purpose of our tour through Israel, led by Cantor Angela Buchdahl and Senior Director Livia Thompson, was to examine gender and minority rights.
In short, our eight-day stay was a crash course on the complexities of life in a minuscule country that is home to a multitude of religious, secular, national, ethnic, cultural and political groups living side by side but not truly together.
Traveling as a group of 36 Central Synagogue women, we heard residents of Sderot, a beleaguered town overlooking Gaza, describe the challenge of raising children to be constantly vigilant for rocket attacks and show us how they persevere there despite such grievous injuries as loss of sight and use of limbs.
We met with a former New York social worker who had made aliyah and accepted the ways of Orthodox Judaism in her marriage and lifestyle. She challenged us with such assertions as, “a woman’s power is seen in her ability to raise a family and allow men to study Torah,” and we challenged her right back.
We spent an hour with Sheikh Abdul Aziz Bukhari, a Sufi sheikh and leader of the Uzbeke community in Jerusalem. And we had dinner with Dr. Rami Nasrallah, a Palestinian from the Jerusalem Center for Peace and Cooperation on Israeli Arabs and Palestinians who described what it is like for his people to work with Israelis.
We visited social service agencies and a children’s hospital and listened to journalists, military figures and academicians. From many speakers we learned how the country has yet to successfully accommodate the enormous influx of Russian immigrants.
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From young people at the Gay and Lesbian Youth Club in Tel Aviv, we heard devastating descriptions of the hate-crime murder of two of its members last August. At the same session, we listened to Zehorit Sorek, a 34-year-old mother of two describe her painful journey out of a traditional heterosexual marriage and into one with a woman partner and how she gradually overcame the objections of her Orthodox parents to her new marriage.
But if Israel is a land where divisions between people run deep and often seem intractable, it is also one in which inhabitants share mutual interests, even in the most improbable of ways.
For example, it is unlikely that 83-year-old Alice Shalvi, an internationally revered Cambridge educated feminist leader and Na’ama Elsana, a 28-year-old Bedouin woman ever crossed paths, but they followed the same path to a common goal: breaking the constraints that limit women in all spheres of society.
Alice Shalvi, who established the English department at Ben Gurion University but was rejected for its deanship on the grounds of gender, founded the Israel Women’s Network which was instrumental in fostering equality in the workplace and which tackled such issues as women’s health, battered women and rape. At one point, she was threatened with the loss of accreditation at an experimental school for Orthodox girls that she headed because she worked with Palestinian women.
The message of her activism: “Be informed, do not conform, prepare to be ostracized. Be bold, don’t be afraid to do something and accept opposition.”
Certainly that describes the approach taken by Na’ama Elsana who was raised in the insular world of a Bedouin tribe in Lakia, a village in the Negev, when she began teaching women to break the yoke of their servitude.
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“The power of men was so ingrained,’’ she told us as we sat in a tent that is the meeting place for the Association for the Improvement of Women’s Status.
“A grandmother was a woman of no honor and a lot of work, tending sheep, fetching water from the well, farming the land, making the cheese, baking the bread and repairing the tent at least once a year,’’ she said.
In addition, the average woman was expected to bear and raise between 12 and 14 children. Though it seems unlikely that Na’ama was exposed to the writing of Western feminists who might have influenced her, she said, “We decided it was time to talk about having fewer children. Some women were afraid of what their husbands would say when they found out what the lecture was about.”
In 1988, shortly after the Bedouins in Lakia began moving out of tents and into houses, several women established a day camp and one of them organized a library to circulate through the community with a wagon and donkey. Today that library contains more than 5,000 books and the women have a thriving commercial business: a shop called the Lakia Weaving Project where bags, pillows, clothing, jewelry and decorative objects based on the ancient Bedouin art of fine embroidery are sold.
“Ultimately 160 women earned money from this enterprise,” Na’ama said, “but we didn’t accept women who only wanted to do it for the money. They had to want to learn more about the world.”
If we learned a great deal about the world of Israel in our journey, so too did we learn a great deal about our own little community and about how profound friendships can be forged in a few days. Though many of us were strangers when we came together, by the end of the week we were a sisterhood, marked by the circles we formed in a variety of sacred places and in which, led by Cantor Buchdahl and her guitar, we linked arms to sing, pray, read Torah and share laughter and tears.
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