It’s a women’s thing

How the gender gap is playing out in Jerusalem’s public life.

By PEGGY CIDOR
Women in Jerusalem (photo credit: ILLUSTRATIVE: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)
Women in Jerusalem
(photo credit: ILLUSTRATIVE: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)
On March 19, 1911, over a million people in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland marked the first International Women’s Day. They demanded that women receive the right to vote and hold public office, and protested against gender discrimination in the workplace.
Over a century later, with the approach of this year’s International Women’s Day on March 8, these issues have yet to be fully resolved. However, new voices have been coming from some of Israel’s most conservative religious sectors, heralding a deep change in the way women in those societies shape their lives.
One example is Dr. Jennie Rosenfeld, whom Efrat Chief Rabbi Shlomo Riskin recently appointed to serve as a communal spiritual leader for the town’s residents – the first appointment of its kind in the Israeli Orthodox world. Residents will now be able to approach her with questions concerning Jewish law and ask for advice on matters in religious life.
There is also Prof. Tamar Ross, an Orthodox scholar who, through her research and writings, has long exemplified the woman who is deeply rooted in Jewish tradition and is an innovator in talmudic studies and Jewish thought. Ross, who lit one of the torches for Independence Day in 2013, is receiving the title of Distinguished Citizen of Jerusalem this year. Regarding the changes that have occurred over the years, she recently declared to Hebrew newspaper Makor Rishon that not so long ago, “when a woman would get on a bus holding a Gemara [Talmud] in her hands, people were in shock.”
In the capital’s Pelech Orthodox girls’ school, which has long been a beacon of the halachic feminist approach, a woman was recently appointed as the school’s first rabbi. Though she is not addressed by the title, Hana Godinger (Dreyfuss) is the first woman to hold the position of “rabbi” in a state-religious school.
And of course, there are the Orthodox women in the Women of the Wall prayer group, formed 26 years ago by Orthodox feminists, as well as the more recent “Fadlahushiot” – an acronym for followers of the Hebrew Facebook group “I’m a Religious Feminist, and I Don’t Have a Sense of Humor, Either” (which, according to the page’s description, is a space where women can “laugh at everything, without justifications, without apologizing, without being blamed for a lack of modesty, and without explaining why they have no sense of humor”). The Fadlahushiot have become significant enough that rabbis and leaders have had to start acknowledging them as a force in religious society, either in a positive or a negative light.
These shifts in women’s status have reached the haredi sector as well. One of the foremost pioneers in this area is Adina Bar-Shalom – the daughter of late Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef – who established the Haredi Academic College, first for ultra-Orthodox women who wanted to pursue a higher education, and then for men as well. The college observes strict gender separation to enable haredi men and women, Ashkenazi and Sephardi alike, to attend. Yosef himself approved the move.
“I am a haredi woman,” she told In Jerusalem in an interview on the 10th anniversary of her school’s founding. “I wouldn’t have done it without the permission of my father and his blessing.”
With all these trends in the social and religious spheres, it was only a matter of time before they affected the political scene. The early bird was haredi former MK Tzvia Greenfield, who was a member of Meretz in the 17th Knesset. Now it seems that haredi women’s issues have grown into a political platform of their own, with the recent creation of an ultra-Orthodox women’s group advocating women’s representation in the haredi parties.
Racheli Ibenboim, a Jerusalemite in her late 20s and a mother of two daughters, recently explained the movement’s reasons to In Jerusalem.
“We, haredi women, have our own needs, and no one other than us can promote them,” she said. “It’s nice that women, religious women, run in political parties, but that’s not our point. Haredi parties represent us as members of that sector, and now we need haredi women to represent us inside the haredi parties.”
Ibenboim herself, an activist for several issues concerning women and haredi society, is not running for the Knesset, but Ruth Colian, one of her comrades in arms, has decided to run with other ultra-Orthodox women in the March 17 elections.
The Jerusalem City Council, for its part, has always had women in its ranks, but never representing any of the haredi parties. Women have been members of secular lists (Meretz has always had at least one woman on the council), and the National Religious Party (now Bayit Yehudi) has always sent a woman to city hall as well. However, the current council, which has two parties representing religious-Zionist society, does not have a single woman among its members.
The municipality, to this day, still has a low number of women in high-ranking positions. Among them are Bonnie Goldberg, who heads the Welfare and Community Department; social worker Nicky Gregor, who heads the volunteering and thirdage programs; and Michal Shalem, the municipality’s chief of staff. There has never been a female municipality directorgeneral, and for the last eight years no woman has headed the Education Administration.
Yet for the first time, the municipality has also established a program to promote women to higher positions and empower them both inside and outside the municipal administration. It includes setting up neighborhood clubs for women, including in the Arab sector, with activities aimed at empowering women and raising awareness of their health issues. Mayor Nir Barkat’s first term saw the appointment of an adviser to the mayor on the status of women in the city, Orly Ben-Aharon. The main goals of her program are to raise women residents’ awareness of their rights regarding working conditions and equal pay, and to promote the participation of more women in social and political activism, primarily in the neighborhood councils.