After addressing the opening meeting of the NCJW Union County Section’s opening meeting for the year, Marilyn Flanzbaum, right, talks with fellow members about life in Israel.
Photo by Elaine Durbach
September 18, 2008
A community activist who lives part-time in Israel suggests the Jewish state is struggling to maintain its educational standards and children’s Jewish identity.
Marilyn Flanzbaum warned that disproportionate political influence by the fervently Orthodox or “haredi” parties is diverting resources from the study of science and mathematics in non-haredi schools.
Flanzbaum, a former president of the Jewish Federation of Central New Jersey, addressed the 2008-09 opening meeting of the National Council of Jewish Women’s Union County Section, held Sept. 10 at the Westfield home of section presidium member Ruby Glassel.
Flanzbaum is an honorary national vice president of NCJW and a member of the executive committee of its international body.
As a community activist, education has been one of her central concerns. She served on NCJW’s Research Institute for Innovation in Education in Israel and on the board of the Women and Gender Studies Program it established at Tel Aviv University.
For the past few years, she and her husband, Gerry — also a former federation president — have been dividing their time between homes in Warren and Hadera. “Living in Israel for six months of the year is very different from going there as a casual visitor,” she said. “There is an awful lot that’s right, but an awful lot that’s wrong.”
Citing a study quoted by The Jerusalem Post, Flanzbaum said that science and math students in Israel ranked last out of the 57 countries grouped together in the Organizations for Economic Cooperation and Development, despite the stellar reputation of the country’s scientists.
The reason, Flanzbaum said, is that the haredi parties demand disproportionately more money for their schools than do the other three streams — secular, religious (Modern Orthodox), and Arab. The haredi schools, she pointed out, do not follow the state curricula.
“They have no math or science or literature — just religious studies,” she said. “We’re not talking about Orthodoxy as you and I usually know it — the Modern Orthodox.”
She went on to describe the complex electoral system that has given the small religious parties leverage over the major parties, Kadima and Likud, and the refusal of those parties “to bite the bullet” and join forces to gain a majority in the Knesset.
‘Learning to push’
Flanzbaum also discussed two other challenges in Israel that have grown out of religious conflicts: the Jewish status of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, and the plight of agunot, women unable to obtain a Jewish divorce.
To make aliya under the Law of Return, all “Russian” immigrants needed was to have one grandparent identified as Jewish. However, Halacha, Jewish law, says a child is Jewish only if the mother is Jewish by birth or conversion or if the child converts.
While many immigrants have undergone conversions to become Jewish, in a number of cases in recent years, the religious authorities have revoked that status.
“They demand the right to come into your home forever,” Flanzbaum said. “If a woman is not keeping a 100 percent halachic home, or if they admit to not being Shabbat observant, [the authorities] can revoke the conversion.”
Added to the identity struggle is the question of the agunot, women caught in a marital limbo by the refusal of their estranged husbands to grant them a get, a religious divorce. Absent a get, if agunot have children from subsequent unions, they are considered illegitimate — with consequences for the children too. In an effort to prevent such conflicts in the future, a prenuptial contract has been created that would force a man to provide a get if a civil divorce has been granted; some rabbis, however, have objected to the notion of a man being obligated to sign such an agreement.
“The laws to protect women are not enforced,” Flanzbaum said. “Israeli women are just learning to push for what they want.” She described the many organizations that have been formed to help and protect women, many of them run by Israeli women as professionals and volunteers. NCJW has played a role in establishing many of those groups — and in many cases continues to support them. “You have much to be proud of,” she told the 20 or so people at the Westfield gathering.
Flanzbaum ended on a positive note, talking about the joys of life in Israel, not the least of them spending Shabbat evenings with children and grandchildren, a description that brought wistful smiles to many of the faces around her. “The upside more than outweighs the downside,” she said.
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