While Mavoi Satum does a lot of work on the legal front to help ‘agunot’ and ‘mesuravot get,’ part of its goal is to promote awareness, which it does through events like the Women’s Film Festival.
By BARRY DAVISAvigail Sperber visits her sister Ariella in prison in ‘Probation Time.’(photo credit: COURTESY AVIGAIL SPERBER)
Mavoi Satum has been doing its best for almost two decades to better the lot of women struggling to obtain a much-desired, and often long-awaited, divorce. The beneficiaries of this two-pronged service purview include agunot (women whose husbands cannot be tracked down) and mesuravot get (women whose husbands will not grant them a Jewish divorce).Perhaps, then, it comes as no surprise that the organization is run by women. However, considering that Mavoi Satum constantly does battle with the rabbinical courts, the fact that the director-general and her colleagues come from the Orthodox side of the religious tracks is less expected.On Sunday and Monday, the Jerusalem Cinematheque will host the 10th annual Mavoi Satum Women’s Film Festival, called Goundbreaking Women. The event features screenings of some thought-provoking works, such as Avigail Sperber’s Probation Time and the moving French-language Felix & Meira. Also on the twoday agenda are panel discussions, lectures and award ceremonies.Batya Kahana-Dror is a religious lawyer who has been at the helm of Mavoi Satum for some years. She says it is hard going, but that progress is gradually being made.“We try to help these women in two ways,” she explains. “We provide legal representation – we are all lawyers here – and we submit a lot of petitions to the High Court against all sorts of injustices. And we are also trying to advance various legislation.”Kahana-Dror is keenly aware of the need to also get the word out there.“We want to make the public aware of these problems and what we are trying to do to solve them,” she says. “That’s the reason for the annual film festival.”The Mavoi Satum director general feels that improvements need to be made on the domestic front as well.“To me, it is abundantly clear that if a husband and wife have equal status at home, that can help to alleviate the situation,” she says.A very special family is front and center in the film Probation Time. You could hardly say the Sperbers are your average family in any sense of the word. For starters, the American-British-born couple produced nine offspring, and they adopted an Ethiopian girl named Ariella.Ariella is the main focus of attention in older sister Avigail’s documentary, but all sorts of issues and sentiments find their way into the plot.“I started out with the idea of making the film about the family, but Ariella became the central theme because of all the things that happened to her,” explains Sperber.Ariella’s experiences have not all been of the best kind. We first meet her in prison, when Avigail goes to visit her. It appears that the young woman had committed credit-card theft and was sentenced to three years behind bars.The Sperbers are a truly remarkable bunch, and one can understand why the director’s original idea was to focus on her parents and nine siblings.“We all came out differently,” she says. “Some are secular, some are haredi. There’s everything in my family, and we can all still sit around the same table. We all accept each other as we are.”Sperber herself is a religious lesbian with two children, and had ended a relationship around the time she set out on the Probation Time trail.“My mother is a very important figure in the family. She has an amazing capacity to accommodate other people and to support all of us,” Sperber adds. “But I think Ariella is a challenge for the whole family.”Sperber says her youngest sibling – there are 15 years between them – is a special case. “I think that when you have an adopted child in the family, the issue of unconditional love becomes more acute. My parents, I’m sure, would say that they love Ariella just as much as their biological children, but I think it’s not that simple.”Sperber came across Ariella when she was doing her National Service at a boarding school.“I’d bring her home for Shabbat when the other kids from the school went home,” explains the director. “She had no home to go to. Her father died in Ethiopia, and her mother was badly injured in a traffic accident and died after being in a coma for a year.”The screening will be followed by a panel discussion on adoptive motherhood and on female empowerment. Sperber says she is not sure about the connection between Probation Time and the latter topic but that the former is clearly a major component of her film. In fact, however, the principal protagonists of the film are her mother and Ariella. So the empowerment aspect of the panel session also seems to fit the bill.The director feels that the documentary proffers a number of questions to be pondered by the public.“I don’t think the film suggests defined answers to anything. It offers food for thought, about things such as what it means to be a mother, what unconditional love is and are we capable of loving our children unreservedly, and also how much should parents give up of their own lives for their children. I look at my own mother, and I see that she devoted her entire life to her children. That is what she has been doing for the past 40 years, and we all continue depending on her for help with our kids,” she says.Sperber says she wrestles with her own maternal deliberations.“The film starts with the separation between me and my partner.Maybe some people expected the movie to be about the conflict of what it means to be religious and a lesbian, but I am glad it turned out not to be the issue but just a fact among other facts in the documentary,” she says.The director feels that the parental and religious aspects are more important here.“There has never been a question regarding my parents’ acceptance of my being a lesbian. That, for me, is far more important than any halachic or social considerations and whether one can be both [a lesbian and religious],” she asserts.The film festival also provides a worthy setting for a number of award ceremonies. The honorees include Orna Barbivai, the first female IDF general; and Dr. Hannah Kahat, founder of the Kolech organization. It operates on various fronts, such as genderbased educational empowerment, prevention of violence and sexual abuse, promoting equality between couples and fighting discrimination against women. And there will be a birthday gathering for Geula Ben-Ali, who last month received a divorce after a 21-year battle. •For more information about the Mavoi Satum Women’s Film Festival: (02) 671-2282(02) 671-2282;*9377; www.mavoisatum.org; and www.jer-cin.org.il.
