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A little learning By Tamar Rotem Tags: Shas, Israel News  There was no happier moment in Adina Bar-Shalom's life than when she stood to recite the Shehechiyanu prayer, said on special occasions, at the first commencement ceremony of Haredi College. It was two years ago that the ultra-Orthodox institution she founded in Jerusalem graduated its first class of female social workers. She looked at her father, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. The spiritual mentor of the Shas Party sat in the VIP section of the Jerusalem Convention Center auditorium, together with Sephardi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar, Shas chairman Eli Yishai and other dignitaries. Rabbi Ovadia looked pleased. Bar-Shalom was overjoyed that Haredi women now had a path to higher education - in no small part thanks to her efforts - and that her father had been a constant pillar of support. In a photograph of her from the event, her face appears to be bathed in light. She looks young and lovely, radiant, with a rare smile beneath her wide-brimmed hat and wearing the silver dress she had sewn for the occasion. At that moment, was she recalling the 14-year-old whose parents refused to let her attend high school? Or perhaps the long hours spent at the sewing machine rather than studying psychology as she had wanted? A bittersweet sense of victory coursed through her as she watched her newly-minted graduates file past. To her the gates of knowledge had been locked, almost literally. Her parents believed that being a seamstress was the only suitable profession for a Jewish woman, and Bar-Shalom fulfilled that destiny. A few years into her marriage, to a rabbinical court judge, she wanted to study at a university. Her husband forbid it, with her father's backing. With a heavy heart she forsook her dream of acquiring an education. That's life when you are the daughter of Rabbi Ovadia. Outwardly, she accepted the situation. For most of her adult life she ran a bridal salon. But a few years ago she reached a turning point, when she launched a struggle to open a university for Haredi students. She reinvented herself as a public activist, taking full advantage of her status as the daughter of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. Obtaining access to higher education for Haredim became the center of her life. Advertisement "One of my students has 10 children," Bar-Shalom notes. "I asked her, 'What do you need this for?' and she said that she simply wanted to learn. This is a new Haredi femininity: the recognition that a 40-year-old woman can still develop and realize one of her longings. It's not an advanced age. They can still fill a whole world with content. My own story is different. It has to do with soul-searching, with the question of why I came into the world. I love sewing very much. It's not that things were bad for me. My life had substance. But I was searching for meaning. My three children were married and settled. I looked for something to do that would remain after me, something to generate change." New world The conflict and the search for meaning that shaped Bar-Shalom's life and character are vividly reflected in a documentary by Yohai Hakak and Ron Ofer, "Haredot" (English title: "The Rabbi's Daughter and the Midwife"). It was screened this week at the Jerusalem Cinematheque's annual Jewish Film Festival. Before the college opened, apart from a few media interviews Bar-Shalom led a life of total privacy in her Tel Aviv home. She took no part in managing the home of her widower father, in contrast to her siblings, who hover in his shadow, or her sister-in-law, Yehudit, who pulls the strings behind the scenes. But the film does not reveal what prompted her to begin the process that led to the creation of the college or how she implemented her father's vision of Haredi social workers in the Haredi community. Or perhaps it was her own vision, which she induced him to share? Over the years Bar-Shalom was often gossiped about for not following in her father's path. Her appearance only strengthened the impression that she was somehow less strict about her religious observance than he. She wears a hat on top of her short hair, with full, dark bangs. By way of response to her critics she points to an old photograph of her parents in which her mother is wearing a loose scarf that exposes much of her hair. "You see? That's how we walked around at home," she says. "I dressed like that and so did all my sisters. That was once a style for Haredi women - it's just that the world changed." This sense, that everything around her has changed, becoming more extreme, that the natural encounter between secular and religious Jews she knew in childhood has gone, is a recurring theme in conversation with Bar-Shalom. She is 64, her husband Ezra is a rabbinical court judge in Tel Aviv. Only one of their three children has an academic degree - in nursing, from Tel Aviv University - and works in her profession. A second daughter is a homemaker. "My mother would get a lot of satisfaction from her," Bar-Shalom laughs. Her grandson - her son's son - has completed a preparatory program at Haredi College and will soon begin studying logistics. Bar-Shalom grew up with an awareness of her father's elevated position. That awareness, she says, was lovingly instilled in his children by their mother, Margalit, who "worshipped the ground he walked on." Her father spent most of his time closeted in his study, poring over religious texts, while the children walked on tiptoes in order not to disturb him. Occasionally he emerged. "My father spoon-fed us until a relatively late age to make sure we ate," she relates. "During dinner he would listen to the radio, to Nechama Leibowitz's Bible study, and tell me that I would learn like her." He encouraged the girls to study the Bible, she says, and also helped them with their homework. "But he viewed women's studying as a hobby, not a career." Her admiration for her father became part of her very identity. "From the age of ten I received a weekly allowance of two [Israeli] pounds, which was a great deal of money. I saved up to buy clothes for myself and Turkish Delight for Father. I very much wanted to pamper him, to hear a good word from him." She was almost desperate for a word of praise from him. She would get up at midnight to make him a cup of tea and carry it on tiptoe to his study, placing the steaming cup and a sweet on the desk beside him before going back to sleep. An outside observer finds it hard to reconcile the inherent contradiction in her character: on one hand a trailblazer; on the other, at least by her own account, almost worshipful toward her father. "It is not out of submission, it is out of love," Bar-Shalom says. She still turns to her father for rabbinical consultation and accepts his decisions. Following the Sephardi tradition, she kisses his hand each time they meet. "My entire life I have felt that to be the daughter of Rabbi Ovadia means being worthy of him. To excel on my own, in my studies and at home and to educate my siblings - sometimes a bit arrogantly, since after all I was just a young girl." As the eldest child, she had nine siblings to look after. (She was already married when the youngest, Moshe, was born.) The good life in Cairo In 1947, when Bar-Shalom was three, the family moved to Egypt for three years, where her father had a well-paying appointment as head of a rabbinical court. When they left Israel they had two children, Adina and Yaakov. They returned with four. Bar-Shalom has good memories from Egypt, even though she and her brother were taught at home and had few friends apart from the children of her father's students. Playing with the neighborhood Arab children was out of the question. In contrast to life in Jerusalem, the family was relatively well-off in Cairo. They often went on outings. Bar-Shalom remembers camel rides near the pyramids and a boat trip on the Nile. They lived on the fifth floor of a crowded apartment house. They were cut off from events in Israel during the War of Independence, but her mother had a premonition of her own brother's death in the war that proved prescient. "There was an atmosphere of fear," Bar-Shalom recalls. "We stopped going out. For the neighbors, we were the Zionist enemy. Mother was afraid of the cleaning woman and hid knives under the mattress for protection." A few times rocks were thrown at their door. "One day there was a knock at the door. Father opened it and members of the Egyptian secret police came in. They followed my father to his study and asked if he had any weapons. Unruffled, he replied, 'These are my weapons,' pointing to his books. Later he related that he had been afraid." Bar-Shalom was six in 1950, when the family returned to Israel, and went straight into first grade. Her father insisted on enrolling her in Bais Yaakov, a network of Ashkenazi-run, Orthodox girls schools, even though all the Sephardi girls at the time attended state-religious schools. In a class photo from the period she looks very sad. "I didn't know a word of Hebrew," she says. "At home we spoke only Egyptian Arabic. We knew a few songs in Hebrew and that was all." Her survival instinct told her that if she spoke so much as a word in Arabic in Israel's post-war atmosphere she would be considered "an Arab," an enemy. She soon forgot the language. From her first years in Israel she remembers a family atmosphere, with her parents' siblings heaping warmth and love on their nieces and nephews. It was also then that her father's propensity for sermonizing began to emerge. "Every Saturday evening, after the end of Shabbat, my mother's sisters brought their families and Father told stories. They were stories with a moral, folk tales. He elaborated on them, he would whisper in one place and raise his voice in another. You cried with him and rejoiced with him, and he would cry with us. The children were absolutely riveted. The moral of the story penetrated your soul: Be good and good things will happen to you." These gatherings still take place, she says, albeit less frequently in recent years due to her father's failing health. The family moved to the Beit Yisrael, near the ultra-Orthodox Mea She'arim neighborhood. They had a small apartment with steel-framed, thin-mattressed "Jewish Agency beds." There was a common toilet, washroom and kitchen in the courtyard. Soon there were six children. As the eldest, Bar-Shalom looked after the housework and made sure her siblings did their homework. "It was the Tzena austerity period," she relates. "There was privation but we didn't know we were poor. We were in seventh heaven if we had a little jam with our bread. We never went hungry on Shabbat: Mother made one chicken last for two meals. She would put aside a little money for a rainy day. Father taught in a Talmud Torah [religious elementary school for boys]; he gave her everything he earned and she gave him pocket money for books. Sometimes he would stay in the store for hours, unable to tear himself away from the books." When the twins were born (the eighth and ninth children in the family), her mother pressed her father into accepting a rabbinical court judgeship in Petah Tikva. But they soon returned to Jerusalem. Bar-Shalom was 14 when her 10th sibling, a sister, was born. Her mother was bedridden for three months afterward, with a ruptured disk. Adina stayed home to look after the babies and take charge of the house. "I never felt as if I didn't have a childhood," she says. "I felt the responsibility that was on me, and that was wonderful. It is only in retrospect that I understood that I did not have a normal childhood." The rules of the household were clear. The boys in the family did not do chores. They were destined to become Torah scholars. The girls did housework, but Adina had special privileges: "I read everything - 'Jane Eyre,' 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' 'Little Women,' even Ayn Rand's books and 'Gone with the Wind' - there were no restrictions put on me," she says. "Everyone was then reading belles lettres and novels. I took flight on the wings of imagination. I cried, I grieved - I had a romantic soul. But the world was crystal-clear. Reading books did not confuse me. I was not looking for other worlds. These things happened to them, to gentile heroines. I had my own world." Protest strike Her childhood world was shattered at the end of eighth grade. That summer she had planned to take a national examination that would determine whether she was eligible for a high-school scholarship. She knew her parents could not afford to pay her tuition. "One day there was a parents' meeting, and Mother was happy to learn I was being recommended for a sewing program," Bar-Shalom recalls. "My father, too, thought that was appropriate. But I wanted to be a teacher." Of the 40 girls in her class there were three others from Sephardi families. The school referred all four to vocational training on the sewing track. Until then, Bar-Shalom says, she did not feel she was different and was unaware of any ethnic discrimination. "I excelled in my schoolwork," she says. On the day of the national test, her parents, fearing she might be tempted to take it, locked her in her room. Everything she had thought about herself and about how her parents trusted her came crashing down. "I got into bed and covered my head with the blanket," she relates. "There was crying and anger. I went 'on strike' for two weeks and didn't help out at home. I believe they thought it was for my own good, so I would have a trade. 'You are young, you have butterflies in your head,' Mother told me. 'When you get married you will thank me.'" After two weeks life resumed its regular course. "I was a girl. How long could I stay angry? I went to that wretched place where they taught sewing. At first I hated it - the standard was low." She compensated herself, she says, by doubling the number of books she read. Her joy in life returned. "There was work to do. The house was full of life, full of children. There was no time to wallow in pain. People come, your father becomes an important figure, and also I began experiencing the joy of making things. I began to love sewing and I excelled in that, too." Three years later, one of her sisters faced the same dilemma. "I fought like a lioness," Bar-Shalom says. "I did not permit a situation in which any girl in the family would be unable to go to high school. My parents understood. They saw my pain at not having gone to school. My frustration. In Father's world men earn a living and women stay home. It was only in the area of adapting halakha [Jewish religious law] to the times that he was more modern than others. But he did understand that the world had changed. And years later, Mother told me that if there was one thing she regretted it was not letting me study. It takes greatness to acknowledge that." Bar-Shalom remembers vividly the pain and the feeling of a missed opportunity. "I felt sadness and grief. But the sadness belongs to the girl I was then," she says. "I did not become bitter. People dismissed women's intellectual abilities, their ability to accomplish things. People dismissed the Sephardim. But I was goal-oriented and ambitious, and what happened did not extinguish my spirit. I gave in because there was no choice. I silenced my inner ambition, because I came from a home in which one does not rebel against parents or tradition, and also because I was busy surviving and had not yet found the path that was right for me." If there is one thing that Adina Bar-Shalom cannot countenance it is the discrimination against Sephardi girls in Haredi schools. And worse, the impotence of Shas, whose leaders want their children to attend the prestigious schools controlled by the Lithuanian Haredi stream. "Shas adopted the Lithuanian spirit, and that hurts me," Bar-Shalom says. "Why was Shas [which stands for Sephardi Torah Guardians] founded, after all?" She believes in integration, not separation. "I did not want a Sephardi party," she says. "The first year [1984, the first year the party ran in the national election] I did not vote Shas. I wanted to express my opinion and I told my father it was a mistake to create the party. 'You will be scorned.' My mother told him the same thing. But he said, What about the unfortunate children who are not accepted to the [Ashkenazi educational] institutions? What about the Torah world? Afterward I voted Shas out of respect for him." Storm the barricades Ashkenazi-run girls' schools continue to reject Rabbi Yosef's granddaughters, and getting them admitted requires some pulling of strings. "When my niece stayed home for three months [because she was not admitted to a school], my sister-in-law said we should play down the issue. She was ashamed. I think we should storm the barricades." When she was 17, her father offered her three young men as potential matches. She chose the most serious of them, a yeshiva student. "I was mature, I knew what I wanted," she says. "I wanted someone like Father. I wasn't willing to compromise. At our first meeting I called my [future] husband 'Sir,' and he became upset." They were married six months later. Her husband spent his days in a kolel, a yeshiva for married men. Their first child, a son, was born a year later and she began to work as a seamstress. "My mother was mad at me. It's a funny world. But I was a good Bais Yaakov pupil. I felt it was a privilege to have a Torah scholar in the house." Two years later she opened a bridal salon and worked from morning to night. "I didn't look after my children," she reveals. "I had nannies. But gradually I saw the damage and decided that my husband would take a teaching job so I could reduce my work hours." She continued doing sewing work at home. After her husband became a rabbinical court judge and her third child was born, she wanted to study psychology. The plan was vetoed by her husband and her father. "I wasn't angry when they said, 'Absolutely not' - it was because there is no separation between men and women in the university." Outwardly, at least, Bar-Shalom does not resent this approach, which views women as little girls who cannot resist temptation. "I am a great believer in the power of love," she explains. "If you sit side by side with the same person for years, nothing will help, no matter how strong you are. Anything can happen." She opted for a compromise. She studied fashion design at Shenkar School of Engineering and Design and during her studies worked for the fashion designer Yehuda Dor. "I was constantly searching for an outlet for my talents, my creativity, and my father convinced my husband that it was just a school for seamstresses." The idea for an academic college came a few years later. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef thought the Haredi community needed social workers of its own. Attempts to establish a training course jointly with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem failed. "When I came to him with the idea of establishing a Haredi university, he was happy and blessed me," she relates. "Apparently everything has its own time. Maybe if I had woken up earlier my father would not have agreed." Her whole life story seems to have been arranged to culminate in poetic justice. She, who was not allowed to study, opened the gates of education to Haredi women and men. The college, which has now been operating in Jerusalem for eight years, has 700 Haredi students, 500 of them women. There is total gender separation. Philanthropists and foundations such as the Avi Chai Foundation and the Friendship Fund assist with scholarships. She believes with all her heart that academic studies are above all the key to earning a living, a tool for coping with the rampant social poverty. "I cannot shut my eyes to what is happening in our society," she says. "The poverty, the fear, the anxiety over how to support a family, how to marry off the children. I think Haredi society should be based on Torah learning, but at the same time everyone who wants to acquire a profession should be allowed to do so. Not just to declare from on high, 'You have to work,' but to open the door so that people can earn an honest living." In the first year after the college opened its doors the Ashkenazi rabbis fought her. The external walls of the building were pasted over with pashkevilim (posters) against her, and there were fears that the college would not survive. "My father understood the situation, so he visited the college every month," she says. She is also delighted that Haredi men attend studies in the afternoon, after poring over religious texts all morning. But she seems more thrilled by the women. "This is not a revolution," she cautions. "The parents of these girls fear they will become smarter than their husbands. I don't believe their studies will cause Haredi society to change, or that women will become more involved in society and politics. I am happy that a Haredi woman can do what she likes with the support of her husband and family, and I am convinced that the social objections will gradually fall away. I would be delighted for the leaders of Shas to send their daughters to the college." Three classes of social workers have graduated already. The other fields open to women at the school are computers, communications disorders and medical laboratory sciences. Recently Bar-Shalom overcame a major obstacle; in cooperation with Ben-Gurion University of the Negev she introduced studies in the field the Haredim feared above all others: clinical psychology for women students. The program is identical to the one at the university in Be'er Sheva. The students will undergo therapy over the course of their studies - but only with female therapists. Despite her apprehension, her father gave her his blessing and the new track will be launched next year. Bar-Shalom plans to audit the courses herself.W Bookmark to del.icio.us   Knesset express Rightist party offers Jonathan Pollard top spot on Knesset list. Mahmoud's Gospel Ahmadinejad: If Jesus were alive, he would stand in opposition to U.S.

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