WOMEN'S PLACE IN ISRAEL
Rosenberg, Bernard
Where They Are, Where They Should Be Long is the list of grievances. Some are militantly advanced by the small Israeli feminist community, others spoken more quietly by Israeli women...
...This approach is critical and construc tive, and all the more interesting because Zev Falk is an observant Jew...
...If divorce takes place, and the marital home is not owned by either party, a "presumption of precedence" goes to the husband...
...There were women who parachuted into occupied Europe with the main purpose of assisting Jews to escape from the Nazis, and there were fighting women in the Palmah and Haganah during the '30's, '40's and the War of Independence...
...It is therefore mildly heartening to quote a recent dispatch from the Anglo-Jewish press (The Jewish Week, June 13-29, 1976): The Moetzet Hapoalot, Israeli sister organization of Pioneer Women, has embarked on an extensive campaign to encourage leadership of women in political life and public involvement...
...Unmarried, fired with the enthusiasm of youth, they could work hard, take meals in their communal dining hall, and then talk, sing, and dance until dawn...
...There is no evidence that this differential fertility does not now obtain or will soon cease to be operative...
...In the Army WOMEN do not have equality of entry into the army...
...All told, they ramify in every direction of an extraordinarily diverse little society...
...A number go to Elath, Israel's "sin city," where they find pimps and become prostitutes...
...Professor Golan speaks of a double transition that these women ideally undergo: from wifehood to widowhood—and from widowhood to womanhood...
...Family planning is commonly endorsed, and for the last two years the only major doubt about an abortion law was whether it would be weak or strong...
...is an exception...
...That aperture, this time through no fault of the state, is closed more tightly than ever before...
...Beyond that area Orthodoxy, in his judgment, has overreached itself...
...Not the middle class...
...The wife has no such prerogative...
...these matters are decided by the religious courts...
...but momzerim suffer from the additional disability that they are permitted to marry only other momzerim...
...Meanwhile, the Israeli government "invests heavily" in nursing homes...
...Hence from this perspective more than half the women of Israel are not to be approached by the left unless it has a well-thought-out program for their rescue...
...Across the board, upgrading and promotion are extraordinarily difficult...
...or any swing in the economy...
...There can be little doubt that this little triumph was fueled to some extent by cynicism about the Labor party from which Aloni had resigned...
...Parliamentary Politics GENDER, as we know from bitter experience, is a poor clue to political persuasion...
...So, the agunah now is perceived as a victim whose unnecessary sorrows cannot be indefinitely prolonged...
...the kibbutz door...
...4"The changing Kibbutz," Midstream, June 1965, p. 51...
...Mrs...
...The variety of social services provided for preg nant women has been widely applauded, mostly for a three-month maternity leave with pay...
...Wives are the worst victims...
...Some are militantly advanced by the small Israeli feminist community, others spoken more quietly by Israeli women unaffiliated with any movement...
...The new law does not permit abortion on demand nor does it specifically permit abortions for women with numerous children...
...As many as 500 women in one factory ceased to work because "perhaps five male supervisors had to go to the front...
...Who suffers first...
...I guess it was to preserve the race" (Newsweek, January 20, 1975...
...Were there no women to replace them...
...They envisage nursery schools that are not set apart from, but are more like extensions of, the family...
...Annabelle Yuval, an American living in Israel since 1952, writes that: There is a tradition in the country for women to participate in the defense of the Jewish community...
...The consequences of this disparity can be alarming...
...Observers in Israel report that a good number of the legal disabilities experienced by women can be surmounted or evaded by the sophisticated and affluent (e.g., the previously mentioned incident of Supreme Court Justice Cohen marrying abroad...
...Father...
...That's a powder-keg" which ought not to be prematurely detonated...
...In time, energy lags and what is a lark for the young person is a chore for his or her older comrade...
...These religiously neutral problems could or should be resolved by civil authorities without legal offense to the rabbinate...
...Thus, again, all income is technically the husband's...
...So there was a protest vote as there was a women's vote, in addition to a progressive religious vote...
...It is to help rectify such inequities that Professor Falk in all his Orthodoxy would demand the appointment of a woman to the Rabbinical Court...
...Women have always played such a role in the Yishuv...
...Social workers can recommend and ostensibly secure legal abortions for their clients, but only through the Ministry of Health...
...Tamar Eshel, MH secretary general, here on a recent visit, explained that her organization wanted qualified women to take a more active part in public life in Israel . . . : "We were caught napping with our pressures down...
...A liberal leader and former Labor MK (Member of the Knesset) such as Zena Harmon doubts that the Oriental or the devout woman is sophisticated enough to want freedom from Halachic and patriarchal protection...
...After all, most immigrants of the Second Aliyah, who came from 1904 to 1913, were students...
...Of these, the government, while promising more, supplies relatively few...
...A divorced or widowed woman with children does not enjoy the full rights of tax exemption conferred on a solitary man living with children in a motherless household...
...There they are, poorly housed, poorly educated, poorly fed, and widely scorned...
...On the other hand, families with four or more children, of which there may be 120,000, are generally stigmatized for their ignorance, their poverty--and their fecundity...
...After the War, with widespread political polarization and an attendant consolidation of previously disparate groupsecles, Aloni's party still took three seats...
...Both sexes had to learn from scratch...
...Even in the desperate crisis of October, they were not permitted to drive...
...Over 10 percent are classified as "unpaid family members," a category no doubt made up largely of women who help out in their husbands' businesses...
...Hence the unsettled problem of momzerim...
...On the contrary...
...The Technion in Haifa affords an example in which a woman became and remained office manager...
...Donino's pressure group petitions for community service and neighborhood planning...
...If a married man lives with another woman...
...The rules in the Rabbinical Court are tight for her, loose for him...
...In this thesis one finds no intimation of irony, no sense that it is a comic or a pathetic echo of Trotsky's formula for all workers of the world—or none...
...What to do with these people...
...538-45...
...in the Journal of Marriage and the Fami(r...
...Nearly half a million Arabs, most of them Moslem and some Christian, live alongside a substantial Western and denominationally heterogeneous Christian community...
...Clearly, day-care centers are in order...
...But everywhere, symptomatic if not yet systemic, relief is in sight...
...For its application, everyone, believer and nonbeliever alike, is classified as Moslem, Christian, or Jew...
...For what else animated Degania in 1909...
...Mothers with offspring who attend these nursery schools listen to retellable stories and watch handicraft activity while learning about hygiene and child development...
...Nevertheless, it is a potential benefit of a democratic society that sometimes the less urgent problems can be tackled more readily than the more urgent...
...The vast majority of girls who drop out become mothers' helpers...
...The Yom Kippur War caused a postponement of the elections that were to have been held in 1973...
...Then they have "records," and records make them ineligible for military service...
...But momzerim are not bastards in any intelligible sense of the English word...
...This cycle is a universal brake on advancement within any occupation...
...Associated Press, February 2, 1977...
...Given their wartime experience, officials have begun to see the point...
...If a wife is once unfaithful she forfeits support, whereas no sanctions are imposed on a husband for his infidelity...
...Already an Orthodox group of "women's liberationists" assembles without censure for sexually separate but equal study of the sacred legal texts...
...It will be a lot cheaper...
...This flexibility is hardly available to the person who has only one role...
...They also pack parachutes, teach, and promote cultural activities in the development areas...
...But is it not a curse to have many children...
...Himself the product of it classically large Moroccan .Jewish family, Donino has created a substantial lobby and organized it under the name Zahavi, meaning "My Gold...
...To support this view, the magazine quotes an anonymous psychologist who explains that "The boys went out to fight and the women stayed home and waited...
...And there will be fewer pathologies...
...you want to kill the females as well...
...And with reason...
...Prescribed contraception and legal abortion will not banish them or their problems...
...Ronald Sanders thinks it is inherent in the utopian community that aging, mating, and reproducing are enough to account for the failure...
...Nevertheless, a succession of children makes for less and less steady employment...
...Officials tend to reward motherhood...
...This last demand is frequently echoed by professional women...
...Donino wants action on the housing front...
...In a way, Marcia Friedman would agree...
...Then there were the irrecoverable bodies—each of which produced one more agunah...
...As to domicile, the wife is required to follow her husband...
...it also subjects women to prosecution for submitting to the operation...
...o ADDENDUM: The above was completed before Israel's 1977 election, and does, we hope, help to explain its depressing outcome...
...To be sure, this radical feminist views the Oriental woman as a person who, while mostly illiterate and powerless, is nevertheless aware of her oppression: "She sees herself in a master-slave relationship...
...It's because she doesn't understand the dynamics of large family life...
...But, at this writing, Begin's fate is tied to two religious parties whose presence can only signify a temporary setback for women's rights...
...Based on this, the government would assure that each child, no matter how large the family, is afforded this level of subsistence through income grants or a system of negative taxation...
...Of these, 34 percent work in factories, a disproportionate number of them in possibly nonviable industries, such as textiles, which cannot compete with the sweat-labor products of Hong Kong and Taiwan...
...And, "When they came home, the women pampered them...
...The moderate Shimoni bill would permit abortion without fear of prosecution for pregnancy in several stipulated circumstances...
...As a result, women's lib went out the window...
...Professor Falk's case comes to this: that a good many of the consequences and offshoots of polygyny (a marriage system allowing for more than one wife) still survive in Israel, even though polygyny itself was long ago abolished by the Sanhedrin...
...Is it too hard to be a housewife and a scholar...
...Many could have taken over, but since foremanship is reserved for males, the factory had to be closed...
...Yet Friedman does not feel that the Oriental woman should be "irresponsibly" stirred to action...
...A Learned View PROFESSOR ZEV UALK of the Hebrew University has a well-deserved reputation as the foremost Israeli authority on Jewish family law...
...Marcia Friedman...
...The Israeli Woman," Judaism, Spring 1973, p. 234.] The War Widows NAOMI GOLAN, a professor of social work, is most concerned with the women, very many of them hardly more than girls, who comprise Israel's 12,000 war widows...
...A second and stronger bill introduced by seven Knesset members would have enabled a woman to "order" an abortion during the first 12 weeks of her pregnancy by walking into her gynecologist's office for that purpose...
...For the proletariat she substitutes "Women of the World," grimly contending that their liberation is "impossible in one country...
...Lacking special dispensation that is granted on appeal, one case at a time, these women are perpetual widows...
...This law prescribes a five-year prison term for any person performing an illegal abortion...
...Zev Falk probably would not favor a change that he thinks is in any case politically impossible, namely, the subsitution of civil for religious marriage and divorce, as to whose legality the courts have traditional jurisdiction...
...Halachah nowhere precludes the judgment of women in these matters or in matters of guardianship, adoption, and breach of promise...
...Just give us more space in our own homes...
...They are subtly !Further data, culled from the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics: of the total labor force, among men.81 percent work full-time...
...My people suffer first--and last...
...All able-bodied kibbutzniks work -which is obviously not the case in Israeli society at large...
...They envisioned a society that would be somewhat on the order of an expanded family, and thought that about 20 persons was an optimum beyond which they should not go" (emphasis added), 4 as Ronald Sanders has remarked in his analysis of Israeli collectives...
...In general, the Arab-Israeli birthrate continues to soar, with the OrientalIsraeli birthrate perhaps not so far behind, and the Ashkenazim's--Jews from Central and Eastern Europe—the lowest of them all...
...Part of the story is simply scandalous, and Sophia Wyatt, a freelance journalist, has reported it in that spirit: As war raged in Syria and Africa...
...There are too many little fourstory buildings in which 16 families with a hundred children are cramped together...
...What was accepted naturally 25 years ago is no longer there and we have to make up for lost time...
...Perhaps," Donino concedes, "there are too many of us...
...men are able to talk politics day and night because their womenfolk stay home tending to housewifely tasks...
...so does all formal education for a large number of children from Arab-speaking families...
...What else...
...Zahavi's proposed legislation has its backers even among those who deplore the proliferation of large families...
...Scores of successful women prove otherwise...
...The Jewish Quarterly, Autumn, 1974] Despite the influx of women from Eastern Europe with builders' skills, there are no women in construction work...
...What for...
...Why not...
...I visited a model center, and my only caveat about it was the absence of male personnel...
...Why bother to be an MK...
...One notorious case has so far been litigated for over ten years...
...On the other hand and at every level, work for most women in Israel as in America is a sometime thing...
...Looking at the "free world" (it doesn't take long these days), she sees a general decline in parliamentary power that goes with a general increase in executive power...
...and Dorit Padan-Eisenstark, a militant social scientist, agree that the Yom Kippur War, or its aftermath, had a positive aflect on women's rights...
...Another clause sanctions abortion "if the pregnancy is likely to cause severe harm to the woman or her children because of harsh social and family conditions...
...Neither is she eligible for the same amount of national insurance...
...The Israeli government's law of 1951 excludes matters of marriage and divorce from the secular sphere...
...Jobs are held for women who can reclaim them as long as one year after childbirth...
...That freedom would presumably aggravate the disorientation of women already sufficiently upset by cultural contact...
...who led the battle for abortion, met with less resistance than any expert could have anticipated...
...In the Labor Force MEANWHILE, 365,000 women comprise almost one third of the labor force...
...ExDefense Minister Shimon Peres, chided about this inequity, "promised to do something about it...
...On the truly apocalyptic issue of survival, Israel was caught napping "with its pressures down" between 1967 and 1973—and barely aroused itself in time...
...The restoration of fathers to a full parental role such as they ideally played in the kibbutzim is an exciting possibility that some educated women would like to promote...
...rate of reproduction, below replacement...
...Here and there women who took hold in October'73 have held on as administrators...
...Fathers who come for plumbing and other vocational courses find themselves drawn into the classroom...
...Zena Harmon is not at all surprised to learn that in one recent American election, a nun and a lesbian—running as such—won impressive victories: "They are ideally suited to work that is still too exhausting for wives and mothers...
...Let production center in,—say, a cement factory—and men, to the extent that they were ever there, leave the kitchen, the laundry, and the classroom...
...Nor will he be put off by talk about inflation, financial crises, and business cycles...
...His approach, as recorded in the Israel Law Review and more popularly over the radio, is readily summarized by him in private conversation...
...August 1973, pp...
...Meanwhile, the preference for women who already have certain skills is easy to understand...
...5 No doubt Tamar Breznitz-Svidovsky, a Hebrew University psychologist, is correct when she asserts that during and after the Yom Kippur war women "wanted to go to bed to have babies--even unmarried women sometimes...
...10 percent part-time...
...Those who believe that their primary role in the army is to boost male morale sometimes feel they might just as well be camp followers as "soldiers...
...Friedman's program is global...
...It follows the usual cycle: work after completion of school interrupted by the bearing of children who tie mothers down until they grow up sufficiently so that a woman can reenter the job market...
...She works with the League for Women's Rights in Tel Aviv, a growing organization that is connected with WIZO (Women's International Zionist Organization...
...Donino insists that his war is for the masses who live perpetually on the border of poverty...
...Where They Are, Where They Should Be Long is the list of grievances...
...The husband alone files an income tax report and the wife is 'The Orthodox Hapoel Hamizrachi specifically denied this right over 30 years ago...
...Israel needs women power as much as it needs manpower...
...Donino points to the immemorial virtues of mutual aid, marital devotion, and honor to the aged...
...The unofficial estimate is 80,600, which, if accurate, means that one out of every three pregnancies is illegally aborted...
...In any case, many are subject to arrest, adjudication, and conviction, with or without incarceration...
...But her preference is not so much to work behind the scenes as to transform them...
...But suppose it is...
...designed to involve men in the child-rearing process...
...About 30,000 adolescents, mostly Sephardim between the ages of 14 and 18, are out of school and out of work...
...Here a vestige of the medieval guild matches a vestige of the medieval family...
...Donino does not think so...
...While higher education proliferates and women comprise about 65 percent of the university population, as well as 50 percent of the teaching assistants, only a few, perhaps 5 percent of their sex, have become full professors...
...The agunah is a woman forbidden by religious law to remarry unless the remains of her presumably dead husband have been found...
...The bill overrode "a storm of protest from rabbis and conservatives who called the new legislation a license to mass infanticide...
...denied access to any file or record of her own earnings...
...A fragile right-wing coalition has come into being, and Menahem Begin, leader of the Likud bloc, appears to be as stunned as his opponents by his victory...
...It has something to do with the very survival of a state under constant siege...
...Father...
...But we have no breakdown of these statistics...
...If so, it strode back through many a door—but not 'This statement is true but tricky...
...It was especially troublesome for the generation of immigrant women whose husbands were cremated in Hitler's death factories...
...but she is a busy lawyer who spends much of her time fighting the political, personal, and social subordination of Israeli women...
...Equal pay exists in the Civil Service, as it does in the free professions, but with differences in fringe benefits...
...So far no one in the movement !ID7 has formulated such a program...
...Diversified activities are age-graded, and to an American there is nothing exceptional about them except their latent purpose...
...Yet all came to grief over "the woman question...
...And that ministry, apart from its head, is allegedly in the hands of the National Religious party...
...Ettia Simcha agitates for the abolition of injustice based on sex...
...Other things—war and peace, domestic economy, internal corruption—strike most Israelis as more urgent...
...Yet, among all the Israeli feminists I have met and read, only one, Rivka Bar Yoseph, was bold enough to declare that the dual or even the multiple role has its advantages: "With more than one role you can multiply your options, increase your rewards, retreat now, return later...
...MK Aloni can respond to the opposition with a touch of humor in part because the Civil Rights party, originally the Women's Rights party, which she created, maintained that it was not antireligious but only antitheocratic...
...Poorly educated girls—and boys—come mostly from the Oriental population...
...one casualty of the last war was the budding women's liberation movement...
...Besides, Israeli researchers report that they have yet to find one woman in their land who does not want a child...
...He argues that maintenance of overcrowded housing is costlier than the investment required to make life more tolerable for a sizable part of Israel's population...
...Socialist idealism required such equality, and frontier conditions (in Ottoman Palestine as in colonial America) reinforced it...
...Bus service came to a standstill for the same reason...
...And while few would go so far as MK Friedman, who told me that she "would rather be at the front lines than in the kitchen because it's easier," not all of those who comprise a semi-elite group rejoice in their opportunity to be typists, teachers, messengers, gymnasts, or singers...
...The Orthodox and super-Orthodox were predictably adamant in their opposition...
...It is a source of outrage to her that religiously, and therefore "by legal definition, married women do not exist in this country...
...Subsequent court rulings have mitigated the severity of this law by recognizing that the preservation of a woman's life or health may justify terminating a pregnancy...
...When these measures went to committee in 1975, both were opposed by members of the National Rights party and the Torah Front...
...The visitor to Israel doubts that ever again will the women of that country be quiescent or their demands unheard...
...Credentials matter and, after acquiring them, Israeli academics know only too well the meaning of "publish or perish...
...Without options, it is much more likely that the male professor will "perish" for failure to publish...
...Compulsory education terminates at age 14...
...Rabbi Porsh intoned: "You are even worse than Pharaoh...
...Family law is religious law...
...Approximately 24 percent are rejected as "poorly educated," a category that does not exist for males who get drafted even if they are illiterate...
...The official number of nationalities in Soviet Russia is 104...
...They are located in attractike community centers calculated to draw not only preschool children, but older siblings, parents, and grandparents...
...And, on the average, a child is what they increasingly settle for...
...Working women are guaranteed equal pay for equal work...
...The press reported impassioned protest by Menahem Porsh, Kalman Kahana, and Pinhas Scheinman--all religionists to the right of their merely Orthodox colleagues...
...Women as unalike as Shulamit Nardi...
...In his enthusiasm, he sounds not too different from the kibbutz zealot...
...among men, 23 percent are listed as employers, self-employed, or members of cooperatives, and among women, 6 percent...
...It seems probable that for no more than a very small minority of Israelis the issue of women's rights now does figure as a major one...
...The Jewish majority is almost perfectly bisected into those who derive from Islamic and those from European cultures, a balance tipping more and more toward the progenitive "Orientals...
...Zahavi is also an acronym taken from a Hebrew phrase that repels some modern Israelis: Rights for the Family Blessed with Many Children...
...Discrimination Against Women A "REBELLIOUS WOMAN" is one who has committed a legal act of desertion...
...The proportion of kibbutz women who cook, wash, clean, nurture, instruct and raise the young is greater than that of Israeli women at largc...
...Curiously, Marcia Friedman, despite the relative success she has enjoyed as a leftwing feminist in the Knesset, expresses no more enthusiasm for that institution than does Zena Harmon...
...Others get caught up in the drug traffic...
...Thousands run away from home...
...A man can easily disencumber himself of a wife who cannot divorce him even if he is a profligate, a certified psychotic, or a deserter...
...Donino has a plan...
...Habib Shimoni, a member of the Alignment (Labor and parties allied with it) sponsored a bill to supersede the present law, which is a relic of Mandatory Palestine...
...Some Romanian women arrived in Israel as licensed bus drivers...
...Not the workers organized in trade unions...
...despite a severe shortage, about four thousand married but qualified nurses "were grounded in their homes" for lack of day care centers in which they could leave their children...
...The fantasy persists that a miraculous reappearance will occur, a fantasy partly sustained in 1973 by the inordinately long time Egypt took to release its list of Israeli POWs...
...Small children besieged, hugged, and clung to me, crying, "Aba...
...Their duties include clerical [estimated to be 70 percent—BR.], medical, housekeeping and communications work [which I assume is a euphemism for carrying messages—BR...
...Seven of the nine women MPs, led by Haika Grossman, voted in favor of a bill that had 24 sponsors and passed by a show of hands...
...their children are legitimate...
...As of 1973, over 40,000 families lived in apartments holding at least three persons per room...
...Blessed...
...It is newly troublesome for the young agunot whose husbands have perished in battle without leaving any traceable remains...
...This hideous practice made identification more uncertain for a number of Israeli combatants...
...How like America...
...A major reason may be that the fields themselves are disappearing as more and more Israeli collectives undergo industrialization...
...New Outlook, June 1973...
...But one cannot agree with Sophia Wyatt that all this relates only to the question of "women's plight...
...The rules governing domiciliary entrance of third parties differ for husband and wife...
...Only if they're divorced do they become legal entities...
...This is true but not very satisfactory, since, first of all, large numbers of the poorer or ill-educated Israelis, especially those coming from North Africa, are not in a position to engage in these dodges, and, second, it is deplorable that in a modern and enlightened society, which Israel is, such provisions should still be on the books...
...Factories were forced to shut down...
...Celibacy or family estrangement (as with Golda Meir and Indira Gandhi) is the putative alternative for women who plunge into parliamentary politics...
...The family unit is reconstituted in this unfamiliar setting...
...Its most controversial provision permits abortions for unmarried women or girls under 16...
...Furthermore, the idealization of large families need not be the barrier that it is...
...would require the government to determine a basic subsistence level for each child in the family...
...3 How to break the cycle...
...The woman from an Oriental or an Orthodox family is heavily underrepresented in almost every sector of the labor force, although markedly less so for a second-generation immigrant from an Afro-Asian country.' She typically looks after her several children and sometimes earns extra money as a domestic servant or an unskilled laborer...
...Whoever would generalize should stop to recall that at last count the Israeli population was drawn from 102 countries...
...Indeed the children's house, an institution that freed kibbutz mothers as well as fathers to work in the fields, is rapidly disappearing...
...The trickle down theory predominates: let privileged women be more privileged and everyone will benefit...
...He merely points out that 10 percent of the families in Israel raise 40 percent of the children...
...In Israel the official estimate of illegal abortion runs from 40,000 to 60,000 per annum...
...A final fillip, as it appeared in the Jerusalem Post: Just before the House rejected the religious Members' demands to remove the bills from the agenda, Poale Agudah's Avraham Verdiger shouted, "The only thing that should be aborted is our Government...
...These women stayed home and, in war after war, many found themselves bereft of husbands who often had been theirs for merely a few months...
...But reasons of health, possible deformity of the fetus, impregnation by rape or incest, and if the mother is over 40 are all now legal bases for abortion...
...But that she should remain at home is no less a point of pride for her husband than it ever was for his bourgeois counterpart in the West...
...But in Israel...
...Now the tendency is to curtail social services...
...For these conscripted women are forbidden to bear arms...
...He even offered qualified support for Mr...
...That war seems to have shaken Israelis more than any past war...
...Their fate is a sore spot on the body social...
...These families are suffering...
...Ettia Simcha is not a judge...
...The women's total rate of unemployment is twice that of Israeli men...
...She makes an additional point with some acerbity...
...For example, the tendency in kibbutzim to consider family sleeping and eating arrangements a replacement for communal ones is largely the result of instigation by women...
...Degania is generally known as the first kibbutz, but its founders preferred the term kvutzah, which connotes a small group...
...Former Minister of Health Victor Shemtov, a left-wing (Mapam) secularist, diplomatically admits that abortion poses a serious moral dilemma...
...The league won a recent victory: women are at last paid social security directly "instead of having to run after their husbands...
...An adulterous wife may be permitted to remarry anyone except her lover—by stipulation in the get (divorce contract), which her husband writes...
...To Donino, all this seems avoidable...
...Agricultural kibbutzim, much reduced in number, tend to retain their egalitarianism...
...Zena Harmon, an ex-M K who says that she "only ran at Golda's behest" in the first place, feels that more can be accomplished behind the scenes than on the spot...
...Nor can we accept as prima facie' fact Netirsweek's opinion that...
...But Marcia Friedman is opposed to the kind of legislation Zahavi has pressed upon a divided Knesset...
...The same act committed by a man does not invite comparable obloquy nor does it brand him as "rebellious...
...The Jerusalem Post of May 22, 1974, tells us of legislation drawn up by Yaacov Neeman, a professor of law at Bar Ilan University, that...
...p. 23...
...Under "universal conscription," almost half the draft-aged women are not drafted...
...Contemporary feminists cannot but regard compulsory service with its "traditional" activity for some women between the ages of 18 and 26, for a 20- (now 24-) month period, as one more sign of regression...
...Of these, some do not wish to be drafted, but many find that they are not acceptable...
...Even then it was a struggle to wrench one responsible post away from the male establishment...
...The first kibbutzniks were in their late teens and early twenties...
...For better or worse, kibbutz assemblies with full representation for what is again the distaff side, are voting women back into traditionalism...
...But the women soldiers in Israel's Defense Forces today do not fight...
...Here at least is a basis for sexual solidarity across class and ethnic lines...
...Falk sees no warrant in the Talmud or in Israeli law for rabbinical adjudication of problems that pertain to domicile, to a husband's obligations, to results of marriage or its dissolution...
...Within that structure a large measure of sexual equality had to prevail...
...Since the present system imposes low status on large underprivileged families, he thinks they should be guaranteed a minimum income without taxes, provided with one kilo of sugar a day, and given enough bread to assuage their hunger...
...Avraham Donino, a Haifa town councillor...
...Circumvention of that principle is notorious in Israel as elsewhere, either by juggling job titles or by other means...
...The Zahavi Proposals MOST PEOPLE REFUSE to go on welfare (and in this they strongly resemble the Jewish poor of urban America...
...so much did they seem to hunger for an adult male figure...
...Few speak for them...
...There one finds what Eliezer Jaffe, of the Hebrew University, calls "a certain amount of schizophrenia...
...Men train for war in a land that is ever on the alert and their work in an industrial kibbutz is that of a proletariat...
...That conventional politics and extraparliamentary means are not to be excluded as vehicles for attaining proximate ends in one small country, we take for granted...
...During that year, Arthur Ruppin, director of the Zionist Organization in Jerusalem, authorized seven young men and women to establish a completely cooperative agrarian community...
...Since this rule applies even to spouses who have separated with an agreement by the husband to provide child support, he may deduct the required amount from her wages...
...Indeed, in Israel the children of all unwed mothers are legitimate...
...Momzerim in Israel and bastards everywhere else are stigmatized...
...Meanwhile, the reality is this: 350,000 children needlessly growing up wrong...
...Obviously not by encouraging child birth...
...Problems of the Family TOUCH THE FAMILY and you strike the central nervous system of Israeli politics...
...Some married women in the academy complain that their dual role precludes a full commitment to scholarship such as men with their single role enjoy...
...For the less well-educated Eastern women who would benefit most from it, there is no vocational training program in the army...
...On the one hand, government officials favor an increase in the population...
...Her studies reveal that quite a few are stuck fast in the first stage of shock and denial...
...Only married women whose marital status is unacceptable to the Rab binate can beget illegitimate children --a unique situation capable of producing much mischief...
...These students succeeded far better than any American communards...
...Should the coalition collapse or even be infused with more liberal elements, the setback is bound to be of brief duration...
...Prof...
...Male parliamentarians meet interminably...
...Two weeks into the campaign, pollsters projected five to seven seats for the party...
...Spurning the bourgeois family out of which they came, kibbutzniks were able to think of themselves as one big family...
...To this, Shulamit Aloni quipped, "Too late-twelve weeks have passed...
...This problem is an old one...
...It hardly mattered...
...A feminist such as Hazel Sezer Kahan who lived on a kibbutz with some discomfort because of the sexual subordination to which she, but not her male companion, was subject, writes that kibbutz women tend "increasingly to seek and revert to traditional feminine roles, the very ones their mothers fought so hard to escape...
...As for abortion, the Knesset finally passed a compromise law on January 31, 1977...
...Close to 100,000 Israeli families, the majority of Middle Eastern origin, live in substandard housing...
...Should a woman be known to have had sexual relations with her former husband, she, but not he, is forbidden to remarry...
...On the question of women's rights, while far from fully awake, it is unlikely ever again to slumber without an accompanying nightmare...
...Men wholly enclosed in their single role had better make good at it in a big way...
...So men move steadily toward the higher echelons few women have the opportunity to reach...
...Despite large Oriental families, the Israeli Jew is probably below zero population growth, below the U.S...
...The change in party name indicated no diminution of interest in women's rights, but a broadening of the base for reform in Israeli politics...
...Many who struggle for women's rights are disenchanted with direct involvement in parliamentary politics...
...Nearly 92 percent of the 160,000 officially disadvantaged youth in Israel are Sephardic children, of Middle Eastern background, from large and poor families...
...I Surely they provide a pool from which the family court could draw judges...
...He points out that in the extended family grandparents enjoy "positive relations" with their children's children...
...More than enough of them publish and "perish...
...And this kind of welfare costs more than real help that would alleviate distress and make citizens out of drones...
...Zahavi is also asking that the mother of a large family working as a housewife be considered a working woman who earns 30% of her husband's income, with the concomitant tax credits due every working woman...
...She must render him her income (from employment, not from property) and he retains all of his...
...See Dorit D. Padan-Eisenstark's article, "Are Israeli Women Really Equal...
...Shimoni's proposal in the Knesset, adding only one requirement: prior consultation with a "medicalsociological committee...
...Few do...
...It will take effect one year from that date...
...Several studies, notably those conducted by the gifted sociologist Rivka Bar Yoseph, disclose a familiar occupational profile: the more formal education an Israeli woman has, the more likely she is to work for a long time...
...UNICEF has funded two pilot schools of this nature...
...Such a program does exist for men who can acquire skills in the army that are unavailable to them in civilian life...
...Crops were planted and harvested, bridges built, roads paved, and swamps cleared...
...Hence the educated Western women are most heavily represented in Israel's best melting pot...
...a veteran adviser to Israeli presidents...
...Syrian soldiers decapitated or otherwise mutilated Israeli soldiers and left their bodies to disintegrate...
...In World War 11, 3,000 of them volunteered in the British Army...
...Moreover, there are fewer women in the Knesset today !IGi than there were in 1948, and they are more evenly spread over a broad spectrum of tokenism...
...The Abortion Issue MANY SUCH SPOTS are to be found on that body...
...Well, whoever wants to plan a family is free to do so...
...They suffer the most severe (and unattended) nervous tension, induced in part by the sight of their disadvantaged and too frequently delinquent sons and daughters...
...A husband may forbid entrance to his wife's friends and relatives...
...Pharaoh wanted to drown only the male Jewish children...
...So is Chaim Cohen, a similarly enlightened legal scholar and justice of the Supreme Court who recently married abroad to avoid the rigors of Halachah (Talmudic law), which, inter alia, prohibit Cohens, that is, Kohanim, or members of a priestly tribe, from marrying divorced women...
...A few facts help explain why: • 100,000 families in Israel have four or more children, which is to say, they include over 700,000 individuals...
...The situation was much like our own before abortion laws were liberalized...
...Official statistics would seem to bear her out: in 1974 Israel registered 84,000 births as compared to 66,000 in 1973...
Vol. 24 • September 1977 • No. 4
