Safe Families – Clergy deal with Violence in the Family

The symposium was sponsored by Van Leer, Voice of the Woman and the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel and brought together experts, women activists and clergy.

Prof. Hanna Herzog from Tel Aviv University, an academic and feminist, together with Rabbi Professor Naftali Rotenberg from the Van Leer Institute opened the study day, setting an atmosphere of self critique and reform in the face of one of our society’s most serious problems – violence within the family, especially against women and children.

Dr. Suhad Daher-Nashef from Oranim College and al-Qassemi College described the facts on the ground, painting a very bleak picture of the phenomenon of violence in the family within Israeli society. The statistics she provided were a wake up call to all present that this is a plague in our contemporary world.

Debbie Gross, director of the Center for Assistance to Religious Women, who defined herself as ultra-Orthodox, deftly defined the types of violence encountered within the family. She also outlined the strategies many victims use to hide their wounds because of shame and fear of exposure.

These two lectures were followed by an interreligious panel. Nourit Fried, a rabbinical attorney in the Jewish religious courts, Qadi Iyyad Zahalqa, Islamic judge in Jerusalem, and Father Elias Daw, head of the Greek Catholic ecclesiastical court, shared their perspectives on the attitude of their religious traditions to the reality of violence in the family. Each one underlined the importance of the family and its protection.

This was followed by a dramatic interlude with four women actors dramatically reading the true accounts of battered and abused women. The actresses providing voices for the victims of violence brought their suffering into the auditorium.

The day continued with workshops to help the participants try to develop skills in order to uncover abuse and violence and deal with it.

In the audience, there were a number of clergy, Jews, Muslim, Druze and Christian, who contributed to the discussion.