ots@ohrtorahstone.org.il

THREE DAYS A WEEK, Chana Shannon makes the two-and-a-half hour journey to Jerusalem and back from her home in Sa'ad, a religious kibbutz near Ashkelon. Chana, an energetic mother of five children aged 14 to 22, is currently enrolled in the Monica Dennis Goldberg Women's Advocate Program on a generous scholarship from the Federation of Greater Los Angeles.

Her previous professional experience makes her uniquely suited to the program. "I served in the army working with delinquent youth," she recalls. "For the first time in my life, I came into contact with all kinds of social problems - crime, drugs, family violence - from which I had previously been sheltered. It forged in me a commitment to tikkun olam, to seek out society's burning issues that need addressing."

In 1990, as the mass aliyah from the former Soviet Union was in full swing, Kibbutz Sa'ad was asked to open a Jewish studies program for immigrants who were thirsting to claim their heritage. Chana became its director and, in the course of the last twelve years, helped over 500 people and their families to take their place within Klal Yisrael.

Inevitably, over the years, some of the couples on the program decided to separate. Chana found herself guiding those couples through the bewildering process of applying to the rabbinical courts for a divorce. "While the system is confusing for anyone," she says, "the experience for immigrants of appearing before a Beit Din is especially traumatic and bewildering. They are unfamiliar with the process and don't know what's expected of them." It became clear to Chana that Russian immigrants needed their own advocate, someone who could effectively represent them within the rabbinical court system. "Because I understand where they're coming from, I felt that I was ideally positioned to fulfill that role."

And so, in September 2002, Chana enrolled in OTS's Women's Advocate Program; launched in 1991, the program trail-blazed the entry of women into a previously all-male profession. "I am fully aware," she says, "that just ten years ago, this path would have been barred from me." The rigorous program teaches participants how to best represent clients who apply for divorce, child custody, arbitration or any other type of litigation brought before a rabbinic court.

After qualifying, most of Chana's work will involve divorce: "In cases where I can effect shalom bayit (reconciliation), I will," she says. "But if the marriage has irretrievably broken down, I will help couples to divorce with maximum dignity, minimum rancor and in a way that safeguards the rights of the woman and the welfare of the children. I especially want to help agunot trapped in marriages by recalcitrant husbands who refuse to give them a get. The results will ultimately prove that Jewish law can work for everyone - men and women."

Adds Nurit Fried, the Women Advocate Program's founding director: "The program has dramatically extended the frontier of women's learning, and has produced - for the first time in history - a generation of female halachic experts. It has also had an effect on the rabbinic establishment as a whole, making male judges far more sensitive to the needs ands rights of women than they ever were before."

< Back

Return to Ohr Torah Stone