ITIM: Resources and Advocacy for Jewish Life was founded a decade ago, taking as its mission to enable individuals to lead Jewish lives in Israel. The issues ITIM addresses regarding particular challenges to women focus largely on lifecycle events and conversion. ITIM seeks to make the individual’s experience of Jewish life positive, while at the same time addressing the obstacles put in place by a national system that is overwhelmingly anchored in policies that are not friendly to women.
Conversion of Women
Let me begin in the area in which ITIM’s hotline receives the most calls: the area of conversion. ITIM’s involvement with conversion goes back to 2005, when we published the first guide to conversion in Israel, which was subsequently adopted as the official sourcebook by the Prime Minister’s office. Since then, ITIM has helped more than 4,000 individuals through the conversion process in Israel.
During the past two years, we have fought publicly and vocally to have Orthodox conversions, including conversions performed in the IDF, recognized in Israel. More recently, we have also begun to address the maddening situation concerning conversion of women, whereby rabbinical court judges participate fully at the moment of the woman’s immersion in the mikvah. A number of articles written on the subject provide ample halakhic grounds to change the norm, under which female converts immediately prior to their immersion— at perhaps their most vulnerable moment—are subjected to questioning by three men who are in the room with them as the women stand or sit in a bathrobe (or less), and who subsequently observe their immersion.
In the sarcastic words of an ITIM female employee who regularly accompanies female converts to the mikvah, “The dayanim seem to care what the convert’s dress is just before and after the mikvah, but at the time of the mikvah, clothes just don’t seem that important to them.”
There are a number of halakhic solutions to the present problematic situation. One suggestion is to rely on the opinion that women can immerse fully clothed, thus minimizing the vulnerability issue. A second is to follow those (minority) opinions that allow the dayanim to be outside the room at the time of immersion, and to rely on the female attendant to observe the immersion. What these suggestions have in common is that they begin to address the vulnerability issue frontally. I don’t believe that either one, on its own, will at present pass the halakhic viability test, but together, they provide a platform that should at least engage halakhists.
ITIM seeks to make living a Jewish life fully accessible to women.
The challenge for ITIM is not only to provide the precise halakhic constellation to enable the policy to change, but, in addition, to ensure its implementation within the national conversion system. To this end, we have published opinion pieces about this issue, and at the most recent national conversion convention (yes, such a thing exists in Israel), an ITIM staffer raised the question to rabbinical court judges in an open forum. Gradually, ITIM is both educating people about the problem and seeking solutions on a systemic level.
At the same time, ITIM has participated in an initiative to help support women converts and to accompany them to the mikvah during the conversion process.
Unfortunately, we are discovering that, perhaps because they are inured to the practice, the policy makers (generally, the rabbinical court judges) don’t feel that watching a woman immerse under a bathrobe or a large cloak is an infringement on her privacy and modesty. They argue that since this is the normative opinion in halakha, by definition it cannot conflict with the rules of tzniut. I would argue that the rules of tzniut have changed to a large extent over time, and women need to be consulted on these issues. In my opinion, the present situation is not acceptable, and new solutions must be sought.
Women Participating in Burial Services
In another area of endeavor, ITIM has been very involved in the issue of women’s participation in burial services in Israel. Before addressing the general issue, I would acknowledge here—particularly for a North American audience—that women can now deliver eulogies in most cemeteries in Israel. Many American Jewish families now choose to bury their loved ones in the Eretz HaHayim Cemetery near Beit Shemesh, which is privately operated and which, in the past, prevented women from speaking there. ITIM negotiated a settlement with the directors and owners of that cemetery enabling women to speak publicly within the funeral parlor located in that cemetery.
On the national level, I participated in the Prime Minister’s Roundtable on Women’s Exclusion during the discussions related to women’s roles at funerals. At ITIM, we continue to receive complaints from individual women who have been prevented from delivering eulogies at funerals, and we continue to seek systemic solutions to these problems. This past winter, some progress was made on the issue, and the press reported that the chief rabbi of Israel had issued a p’sak halakha suggesting that there was no basis for preventing women from delivering public eulogies at the time of the funeral. The press further reported that Israeli hevra kadishas would henceforth have their licenses issued conditional upon their agreeing to allow women to deliver eulogies.
However, a report submitted by ITIM to the Knesset in the spring highlighted that the directive of the Ministry of Religious Affairs enabling local hevra kadishas to allow women to deliver eulogies did not go far enough. Rather than conditioning the issuance of a license to bury the dead on the willingness of the burial society to permit women to speak, the Ministry’s directive ultimately left the issue open, allowing the local hevra to decide. Because of these lacunae, some hevra kadishas, such as the one in Petah Tikva, still refuse to allow women to speak at the ceremony. ITIM continues to lobby against this policy.
There are a host of other policies of local hevra kadishas that denigrate women, and ITIM has launched small scale campaigns to eliminate them. These range from insisting that women “sit in the back” at funerals to not letting woman anywhere near the plot during the burial service. I recently witnessed a burial where the hevra kadisha representative told the daughter of a deceased man not to come near or look at the plot, as it would be “bad for the deceased.”
These practices, while perhaps rooted in kabbalistic sources, create a hillul hashem and have no place in the modern Israeli funeral. The same can be said of the prevention or dissuasion of women from saying Kaddish, either during the funeral or at the burial.
Birth Ceremonies
Finally, in the area of birth rituals, the simhat bat ceremony has become a fairly normative rite among the Modern Orthodox. ITIM’s website now supports, in both English and Hebrew, a build-your-own-ceremony section that enables new parents to develop their own rituals and print the descriptive text with a click. More and more families are adopting this ritual and developing new family customs based on the material available on the web.
In many respects, there is greater awareness now than ever before of the opportunities available for women to celebrate the Jewish lifecycle. Yet particularly in the areas in which there is institutional control, women are held back from playing a full role in Jewish ritual life, and in some cases, continue to be humiliated because of their gender. ITIM expends considerable resources to end such practices and seeks to make living a Jewish life fully accessible to women.