In early 2026, as Jewish organizations from Israel and the Diaspora gather at the Jerusalem Post Miami Conference to take stock of a fractured political and social landscape, World Emunah will be among them. Represented by its Director, Meira Lerner, the organization arrives not as a newcomer to the conversation but as one shaped by nearly a century of global institutional work, and by a year in which questions of leadership, care, and women’s public roles have moved from the margins to the center of Jewish life. Instead, as Director of World Emunah, she emphasizes a key distinction that she believes explains nearly everything the organization has accomplished during that year. “Emunah isn’t just an organization,” she states. “In Hebrew, it’s Tnuat Emunah. A women’s movement.”
This distinction is significant. Organizations offer services; movements assert claims. Describing Emunah as a movement emphasizes that its activities, education, welfare, leadership development, and political advocacy are integral to Israeli society, not just peripheral. Throughout 2025, Lerner has aimed to highlight this perspective, especially at a time when religious women are often seen either as lacking power or resistant to feminist ideas. This year, she contends, Emunah sought to change that narrative from within – by making it outdated, rather than confronting it directly.
The opening note came early, with an event focused on olim and their capacity to act as advocates for Israel. Leadership was the explicit theme, but the choice of keynote speaker carried its own logic. Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, a senior political figure and outspoken defender of Israel, was not invited as a token woman in a male space but as evidence that women already occupy those spaces, often without being fully acknowledged. “She’s an incredibly powerful woman and leader in her own right,” Lerner says. That approach became the guiding logic of Emunah’s Women’s Leadership Conference in March, held to mark the organization’s 90th anniversary.
Instead of asking when women might take leadership roles in the future, this pivotal 90th anniversary conference posed a more provocative question: what does women’s leadership in Israel look like today if institutions are willing to acknowledge it? The response was intentionally diverse. Panels featured women from politics, education, business, nonprofits, and civil society, including both religious and secular women, Israeli-born and olim, individuals from all walks of life.
The focus was not on exceptional cases but on the collective presence, highlighting the influence of women already involved in decision-making, policy, and community life. “There shouldn’t be a struggle to find women leaders,” Lerner states. “We have them. They’re here and ready to have their voices heard as the incredible leaders they are.” She suggests that visibility, not only development, is what is needed. Religious women, often seen as outside leadership roles, are actually supporting them. Emunah’s approach was not defensive but based on facts. “Not just women,” Lerner emphasizes. “Everybody.” The conviction was quiet but strong: leadership already exists; it just needs to be recognized. “You give them the hand, and the network” Lerner says, “pull them forward, and let them do their thing.”
Leadership at war
If leadership shaped Emunah’s public stance in 2025, the organization’s cultural efforts revealed a quieter, yet equally important, concern. Amid a year dominated by war, Lerner contends that leadership extends beyond authority or titles. “Alongside war, people seek comfort,” she explains. “Music and art become vessels to tell the story of a nation.” This understanding guided Emunah’s Women in the Arts event, held in partnership with its arts college - Michlelet Emunah, part of a broader educational network that includes four high schools and a college - all focused on women’s education. Female artists showcased their work and discussed how creativity, *aliyah*, identity, and rupture intersect, illustrating how personal displacement and national crises influence their artistic language. Lerner notes that women’s cultural work is often undervalued or seen as ornamental, but it actually upholds society’s emotional cohesion during long crises when political discourse hardens, and private grief becomes collective. “Women bring soul,” she says. This focus on continuity also shaped Emunah’s engagement with younger women.
That emphasis on visibility and continuity carried into a far more contentious space later in the year: the World Zionist Congress. Emunah arrived as the only independent religious women’s organization represented, with a delegation intentionally composed of women across ages, nationalities, and backgrounds. “We are here,” Lerner says. “We are this voice for women.” The Congress yielded concrete outcomes: resolutions addressing women’s representation, aliyah, and the role of younger women in Zionist institutions.
But the moment that lingered was the election of an Emunah representative to lead a central body within the Congress, the only woman to hold such a position. “Without women in these places,” she says, “it’s going to be that much harder to get further.” The point is structural rather than symbolic. Without women embedded at decision-making levels, representation remains aspirational rather than operational, a value affirmed in principle but denied in practice.
Care, visibility, and the work that continues
Despite its religious identity, Emunah resists being labeled exclusive. “Our events aren’t only for religious women,” Lerner emphasizes. “And they’re not even always only for women.” That inclusiveness extends across Emunah’s institutions, from children’s homes to educational frameworks and therapy centers.
Jewish values, in Lerner’s framing, function not as boundaries but as commitments, ethical anchors rather than gatekeeping mechanisms. “We care for everybody,” she says. “We care for a country. We care for a people.” Nowhere has that commitment been more quietly consequential than in Emunah’s work with the wives of reservists. Over the past two years, as military service stretched unpredictably and domestic life absorbed the shock, women bore much of the emotional and logistical strain, often without public acknowledgment. “People are finally becoming aware of the toll the war has taken on women,” Lerner says.
Emunah’s therapy centers have responded by offering group and individual sessions for reservists’ wives and families, creating spaces where endurance is acknowledged rather than assumed. At the Women’s Leadership Conference, Sapir Bluzer, a founder of the Reservists’ Wives Forum, articulated what has often gone unspoken: that women’s wartime labor constitutes a parallel front, sustained through emotional regulation, care work, and continuity.
Lerner argues that women are not solely leaders because of holding formal titles. Instead, they act as leaders by maintaining systems long enough for institutions to evolve. She describes women’s organizations as a support network. As Emunah prepares for its upcoming conference, Lerner focuses on coherence rather than celebration, aiming to demonstrate that leadership, education, culture, political engagement, and care are interconnected rather than separate priorities. “Our goal,” she states, “is simply to continue this path." While public discourse often claims feminism is complete, World Emunah provides a quieter counterpoint – an ongoing practice that asserts women do not need to be cast into leadership roles; they already lead through education, support, organization, healing, and governance. According to Lerner, the task is not to announce their arrival but to make their presence impossible to ignore.
Written in collaboration with World Emunah