{"id":11341,"date":"2015-03-13T00:15:17","date_gmt":"2015-03-13T07:15:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=11341"},"modified":"2015-03-12T10:49:08","modified_gmt":"2015-03-12T17:49:08","slug":"an-equal-just-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2015\/03\/13\/an-equal-just-society\/","title":{"rendered":"An equal, just society"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hannah Kehat (photo from New Israel Fund Canada)<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

A crowd of 100 people \u2013 mostly women \u2013 filled Temple Sholom\u2019s sanctuary on Feb. 23 to hear Dr. Hannah Kehat, a prominent feminist religious activist in Israel.<\/p>\n

Kehat\u2019s Kolech, founded in 1998, was the first Orthodox Jewish feminist organization in Israel. The group\u2019s aim is to create awareness around gender equality and women\u2019s rights in the religious and public spheres, and advancing women\u2019s engagement with Jewish and civic life in Israel.<\/p>\n

In her address, which was moderated by Rabbi Dan Moskovitz, Kehat underscored that Israeli women, religious and secular, face different challenges than women in North America.<\/p>\n

One major difference, said Kehat, is the lack of separation between religion and state in Israel. All marriages, divorces, conversions and burials go through the rabbinate; their ultimate authority means you cannot have a non-regulated lifecycle event, no matter your level of religiosity. Women may have equality under the Declaration of Independence, she said, but this equality is aspirational in reality. The aim of religious Jewish feminists is to reframe women\u2019s rights for the Orthodox community, but also to integrate the daily concerns of secular women into their fight for representation and legal-halachic equality.<\/p>\n

The obstacles to full equality for Israeli women start with being seen and heard in public. In the last several years, women and girls have been systematically erased from advertisements, billboards, books, pamphlets and textbooks, and they have been subjected to segregated seating on buses, enforced modesty codes, street harassment and violence. Meanwhile, there are still people \u2013 women and men \u2013 who assume feminism and religion to be mutually exclusive.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re tired of apologizing,\u201d said Kehat. \u201cWe want to stay religious. Don\u2019t ask us why are you still religious if you are a feminist, and don\u2019t ask me why are you a feminist if you are religious. It was acceptable until maybe the last 20 years that it doesn\u2019t work together, either you\u2019re a feminist or you are Orthodox….<\/p>\n

\u201cWe say in Israel, \u2018gam v\u2019gam.\u2019 It\u2019s very complicated. We know it\u2019s very complicated. It\u2019s hard to hold the both together. It\u2019s very painful because you have all the time to fight and you have a lot of battles in the family, in the synagogue, in the community, but we don\u2019t want to give up any part of our identity…. We knew in the beginning [of the movement] that it\u2019s not halacha that is against feminism\u2026. It\u2019s social power. It\u2019s political….<\/p>\n

\u201cWe started from the place that we know Torah. We\u2019re all lecturers, rebbetzins, we know Torah; we know the truth that it\u2019s not the problem, that we can have an equal society, even if we\u2019re religious.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kehat said that, today, Israeli women are raising their voices and claiming their space, and Israeli courts have been supporting legal challenges to the status quo. Recently, the Supreme Court ruled that it is illegal to harass women on buses or on the street, and those abuses have almost all but stopped, she said. Legal challenges have proved successful and are one major strategy to create institutional change, she added.<\/p>\n

Kehat described growing up the daughter of a rabbi in the Jerusalem Charedi enclave of Meah Shearim, a world she consciously left as a young woman so that she could advance her education and follow her own path. She became modern Orthodox, got a PhD in Jewish philosophy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, married a rabbi and had six children. She is a lecturer, an academic, a writer, an activist and a Torah scholar. And, while she started her movement from within the modern Orthodox world, she sees more and more Charedi women taking up the feminist mantle \u2013 progress that cannot come soon enough.<\/p>\n

\u201cCharedi women, I can use the example of myself. To grow up as a Charedi girl, I think it\u2019s the lowest level in Israel. You\u2019re silent, you don\u2019t have any voice. You come to the world just to serve the man since you are very, very young. You can see it in Jerusalem, B\u2019nai Brak, like me, girls, 6, 7, carrying their brothers and the babies and doing all the [house]work. Really, the aim, the mission of [a woman\u2019s] life is to serve the man … the father, the husband. So, Charedi women are still really very depressed. They have a lot of pressure in their lives.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I started Kolech … I got a phone call from the minister of health…. He said, \u2018I heard about you, the leader of the Orthodox feminist movement. Finally, I have an address to address my problem.\u2019\u201d He told her the alarming statistic that the death rate for Charedi women with breast cancer was 30 percent higher than for other Israeli women. Today, that statistic is even worse, Kehat said, and may be closer to 50 percent higher. The minister continued, \u201c\u2018Do you know that the expectancy of life of Charedi women is the lowest, the worst in the country?\u2019 It\u2019s unbelievable,\u201d Kehat said. \u201cThey did research in B\u2019nai Brak. The Charedi men are in the second level of life expectancy, and the women are [at the bottom]…. Even though Kolech is not a Charedi group, [we] try to raise the consciousness of Charedi women to take responsibility for their health and educate them about resources.\u201d<\/p>\n

The main obstacle to women\u2019s equality is the conflation of religion and politics with the rabbinate.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Israel, we have another problem \u2013 that the rabbinate is a political institution, part of the government. This is really unbelievable and it\u2019s really an historical mistake. The rabbinate became such a political powerful part of government and it\u2019s worse than the government because we are not choosing the rabbis, only the politicians choose the rabbis and we don\u2019t have any influence over who is going to be the rabbi…. Everyone knows that the rabbinate and the chief rabbis are not really the ideal people that we\u2019d like to be our religious leaders, they\u2019re political rabbis, we know that. So, it\u2019s not so hard for us to go out and say, \u2018Something is wrong over there, something is corrupt and we have to change it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The visibility of women\u2019s rights activism is growing. \u201cThe feminist issues are on the agenda for the religious community all the time. Every seminar, every yeshiva, we have a lot of yeshivot for women … synagogues are much more open to egalitarian ideas. I think there are more than 20 synagogues that are egalitarian…. The last two years, there is a big change. Something is going on in the Charedi community. It\u2019s very exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the bright spots is the number of women joining Facebook groups dedicated to women\u2019s activism. There are groups like \u201cFeminists under the wig\u201d and the group wryly named \u201cI\u2019m also a religious feminist and I don\u2019t have any sense of humor,\u201d both of which have growing membership and provide an online space to share experiences, gain empowerment and strategize.<\/p>\n

Kehat was brought to Vancouver by New Israel Fund Canada. NIF in Israel supports at least 800 nonprofit, government-certified organizations with priorities to \u201cstrengthen and safeguard civil and human rights, bridge social and economic gaps and foster tolerance and religious pluralism for all its citizens.\u201d<\/p>\n

NIFC\u2019s national outreach associate, Atarah Derrick, spoke at the top of the program. \u201cThirty years ago, NIFC was established in Canada to address Canadians\u2019 desire to address the needs of Israelis in a way that no other charity was doing,\u201d she said. \u201cEvery year, Israelis have told us what it is that they need to create the kind of world that they\u2019d want to live in, a place where all Israeli residents are equal, where they have the freedom and the voice to improve their status … regardless of race, gender or ethnicity.\u201d<\/p>\n

She added, \u201cI work with New Israel Fund of Canada, with NIF, because I am passionate about making Israel an even better place than it already is and, in my work with New Israel Fund, I get to see firsthand the kind of change that we are able to make when we get together.\u201d<\/p>\n

Basya Laye <\/strong>is the former editor of the<\/em> Jewish Independent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hannah Kehat (photo from New Israel Fund Canada) A crowd of 100 people \u2013 mostly women \u2013 filled Temple Sholom\u2019s sanctuary on Feb. 23 to hear Dr. Hannah Kehat, a prominent feminist religious activist in Israel. Kehat\u2019s Kolech, founded in 1998, was the first Orthodox Jewish feminist organization in Israel. The group\u2019s aim is to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11288,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4329],"tags":[3398,3399,4330,46,2161,3400],"class_list":["post-11341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-israel","tag-atarah-derrick","tag-hannah-kehat","tag-israel","tag-new-israel-fund-canada","tag-nifc","tag-womens-rights"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11341"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11341\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}