July & August Newsletter
The New Israel Fund Human Rights Awards Dinner
Photo by John Rifkin
(From left to right): Dinner Chairman The Rt Hon the Lord Woolf, Israeli Minister of Education Yuli Tamir, and the Dinner Sponsor Trevor Pears, Executive Chair of The Pears Foundation.
Three outstanding Human and Civil Rights Award Winners honoured by New Israel Fund at inaugural Awards Dinner on 9th July
In light of the many achievements in the field of human and civil rights in Israel, the New Israel Fund and The Pears Foundation agreed it was time to recognise these accomplishments and the people behind them.
An inspiring Awards dinner, sponsored by The Pears Foundation, as well as Mick and Barbara Davis, was held on Monday 9th July 2007 at the Hotel Russell, London. Its purpose was to honour Uri Pinkerfeld, Hanna Zohar and Dan Yakir - three of Israel’s most outstanding activists working in the field of human and civil rights. Professor Yuli Tamir, MK, Minister of Education of the State of Israel, gave a keynote address and The Rt Hon the Lord Woolf, former Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, chaired this event.
More than 270 people attended the evening and nearly £200,000 was raised to support the human and civil rights work of the New Israel Fund which, for more than 25 years, has been a leader in strengthening Israel’s democracy and promoting freedom, justice and equality for all Israel’s citizens.
A film on each winner told their individual stories. Click here to see the films.
• Dan’s exceptional legal work bringing complex and challenging human rights issues before Israel’s Supreme Court
• Hanna’s untiring efforts to help Israeli workers and foreigners working in Israel to understand their employment rights and expose companies that exploit and endanger their workers; and
• Uri’s direct and unwavering drive to provide humanitarian aid and work with Palestinians in the Northern West Bank to rehabilitate their olive groves damaged by radical Israelis.
Trevor Pears, Executive Chair of The Pears Foundation and Uri Pinkerfeld, Retired Farmer and Grassroots Activist, New Israel Fund Human Rights Award Winner 2007
“It was thrilling to see the audience give standing ovations for the winners as they left the stage,” says Ellen Goldberg, NIF UK’s Executive Director, “which for me summed up the inspiration and warmth of the evening and the connection created between the audience, the awards recipients, and the important work that they do.”
Each award winner was presented with a glass trophy and a cheque for $10,000, sponsored by The Pears Foundation, to support a project of their choice in Israel.
Uri Ben Yaacov Pinkerfeld was born in Jerusalem in 1928. A Palmach soldier, a founder of Kibbutz Revadim, a shepherd, and turkey farmer. Very active in public life over the years, Uri believed that realising Israel’s dream meant ensuring equality for all her citizens, and helped start charities that promote Jewish-Arab economic development and Bedouin rights. The conflict more recently has led to widespread humanitarian needs among Palestinians in the West Bank, and Uri was moved to help fellow farmers who were losing their livelihood. His prize money will go to rehabilitate a natural spring in a Palestinian village by organising fellow Israeli Jews to work with the Palestinian neighbours they’ve been helping in recent years.
William Frankel, Honorary President of the New Israel Fund and Hanna Zohar, Founder and Executive Director, Worker’s Hotline, New Israel Fund Human Rights Award Winner 2007
Hanna Zohar, founder of the Worker’s Hotline, was a pioneer by raising the employment and exploitation problems suffered by foreign workers onto the public agenda in Israel over 15 years ago. Today the organisation provides legal aid and practical assistance to both Israeli and foreign workers – in all types of jobs, in all regions of Israel. Through educating the media, and political advocacy it has succeeded in raising not only public and press awareness for the rights of migrant, salaried and subcontracted workers, but also the awareness of the workers themselves regarding their rights. Hanna will be using her prize money to promote safety on the job, as her research has shown recent rises in work-related injuries and deaths, with disproportionate incidents among foreign workers.
Lord Woolf, former Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales and Dan Yakir, Legal Counsel, Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), New Israel Fund Human Rights Award Winner 2007
Dan Yakir has worked for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) as an attorney since 1989, serving as its Legal Counsel since 1995. A well-known trial attorney, Dan specialises in human rights in the occupied territories, freedom of speech, and gay and lesbian rights. He has won many precedent-setting judgments at the Supreme Court and lower courts, and helped people from every sector of Israeli society to realise their rights as equals before the law. Dan’s prize money will be used for ACRI’s social and economic rights project, which recognises that the full enjoyment of civil and political rights depends upon full realisation of social and economic rights.
Forbidden Women
Leading Designers and Celebrities Publicise the Plight of Agunot
One of 20 dresses designed to convey
the anguish of the agunot.
Israel’s thousands of agunot – literally “chained women,” refused a get (Jewish law divorce) by their husbands - usually keep their chilling stories of abuse a private affair. But when NIF grantee ICAR (International Coalition for Agunot Rights) staged a recent celebrity fashion show, the personal stories of agunot made headlines in the country's gossip columns and mainstream media.
Twenty of Israel’s top fashion designers each paired up with an agunah to design a dress that embodies that woman’s struggle. Pop singers, supermodels, actresses, and other Israeli celebrities modelled the dresses at a Tel Aviv fashion show in June attended by hundreds. The event also received a major grant directly from NIF.
“One of our biggest successes is that the issue is in the public eye,” said Robin Shames, director of ICAR, a coalition of 25 Israeli women’s organizations spanning the religious spectrum from secular to Orthodox. “At one point you would say agunah, and people wouldn’t know what you were talking about.”
All Jewish couples in Israel must divorce through the Orthodox rabbinate’s court system. According to Jewish law, a husband cannot be compelled to grant his wife a divorce and men exploit this to make demands in exchange for the get. For many mesuravot get (‘refused a get,’ also commonly referred to as agunot), those demands amount to blackmail.
Israeli law allows the Rabbinate to pressure the husband through sanctions ranging in severity from revoking a passport to imprisonment. In practice, the rabbinical courts rarely pursue those sanctions.
Trapped in an unwanted marriage, agunot cannot remarry or establish a new family without any newly begotten children being considered mamzerim – bastards – according to Jewish law. In the desperate attempt to obtain a get, many women relinquish rights to property, child support, and sometimes even child custody.
ICAR, founded by NIF and Shatil, works to eliminate the phenomenon of agunot through psychological counselling, legislative lobbying efforts and educational campaigns. For years, the organization has been lobbying for legislation that recently passed a first reading in the Knesset: a bill that would allow property to be divided between spouses without needing to wait for the husband to grant the official divorce, freeing up the financial issues that often fuel the prolonged battle for a get.
Pnina Rabi’s Story
Pnina Rabi has been waiting 17 years for a divorce.
Pnina Rabi, 50, flips through an album of wedding photos in her modest apartment in Kiryat Gat. She stops at a portrait of her husband, Menashe, beaming under the chuppah.
But behind the groom’s sweet disposition hides a man who has refused to grant his wife a divorce for 17 years. Before he fled the country in 1992, he told Pnina that he would not grant a get “until you reach an age when you cannot have children.” He is thought to be living in an ultra-orthodox community in New York.
“I was beaten, spat on, cursed at,” said Pnina. “The worst things you could ever imagine. When I became pregnant, he said, ‘You took advantage of me.’” Three weeks after giving birth to her daughter, Pnina suffered a major stroke. Sprawled unconscious on the floor, she was neglected by her husband for ten hours before being taken to the hospital. Six months later, after continued beatings, she escaped.
To this day, Pnina has not received one shekel of child support from her husband. “The rabbinical court calls me a blackmailer because I want money. One time a rabbinical court judge told me, ‘You know that women pay to receive a get!’ But why should I pay? That is not written in the Torah,” Pnina said.
Fashion designer Keren Naftali was moved by Pnina’s story to design the “Embalming Dress”: a skin-tight, flesh-colour dress with layers of creases. “I didn’t cover her up with layers, with a head covering,” said Naftali. “It is a naked, exposed dress. She screams, ‘I am here, I am a woman.’”
Secular Yeshiva To Become Part of IDF Yeshiva Track
The Secular Yeshiva in Tel Aviv, the world's first secular yeshiva, has been granted "Hesder Yeshiva" status by Israel's Ministry of Defence. The Yeshiva in Tel Aviv is the initiative of NIF grantee BINA: Centre for Jewish Identity and Hebrew Culture, which received a special allocation from NIF to set up the program last summer, in which students combine religious studies with social work in a disadvantaged Tel Aviv neighbourhood.
Following the approval of the yeshiva's study program by the IDF, students will be able to combine military service with their studies at the yeshiva. The move gives important Israeli government recognition to the Secular Yeshiva, which will become the first non-Orthodox yeshiva in the Hesder program.
Read more about the Secular Yeshiva in this previous NIF News report:
End of Season Summary: Enhanced Impact for NIF’s Anti-Racism Football Campaign
Black players in Israel are often subjected to humiliating “monkey chants.” One of Maccabi Haifa's Latin American players is greeted by Israeli children at an NIF pre-match anti-racism ceremony.
NIF’s campaign to kick racism out of Israeli football has just completed its fourth season with clear evidence that such chants as “Death to Arabs” are on the decline. However, the 50 NIF volunteers, whose weekly reports on racist behaviour by the fans, which are regularly featured in the Israeli media and make it possible to quantify racism, observed a rise in racism in the final third of the season - particularly “monkey chants” directed at Black players.
NIF can draw satisfaction from making an increased impact during the 2006/07 season. For the first time the Israel Football Association began fining clubs for the racist behaviour of their fans, with their disciplinary committee using the reports from NIF observers as evidence. The State Prosecutors Office reminded the police of their duty to arrest racist fans, while pre-match anti-racism ceremonies attracted enormous media coverage, particularly before the Israel v England match, which was broadcast live in 22 countries worldwide. NIF is intensifying its educational activities and is more deeply involving the leading Jewish and Arab football stars who are role models for the fans.
World Environment Day: Green Globe Awards Attract Major Media Coverage
What a difference a year has made for Jerusalem Mayor Uri Lupolianski! Last year he was awarded the Black Globe for damaging the environment, while this year he received a Green Globe prize for protecting the environment. There was also a Green Globe prize for the NIF- supported Coalition for the Preservation of the Jerusalem Hills, which earlier this year (with the support of Lupolianski who changed his policies) succeeded in getting the government to scrap plans to expand Jerusalem westwards destroying acres of forests and hillsides.
The Jerusalem hills (above) and an artist’s impression (below) of how they might have looked if the campaign of the Coalition for the Preservation of the Jerusalem Hills had failed.
“The public and consequently public figures take the Green Globe and Black Globe awards very seriously because they attract so much media coverage,” explained Sigal Yaniv, Executive Director of the Green Environment Fund (GEF), NIF’s partnership for environmental activities with the Nathan Cummings Foundation, Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies, The Pratt Foundation and an anonymous American foundation.
The award of the Green Globe prizes for the environment is shown live on Israel’s Channel 10 Community TV and featured prominently in the country’s media. The awards ceremony is the central annual event as Israel marks World Environment Day on June 5th. The ceremony was first launched five years ago by GEF and SHATIL but for the past 2 years has been organized by Life and Environment, an umbrella organization of some 100 local green organisations, which is supported by GEF.
Among other Green Globe prize-winners were GEF grantees: Citizens for the Environment in the Galilee, a group of Arab and Jewish grassroots activists who work to preserve water and other natural resources; the Organisation for the Quality of Life in Nahariya, which seeks the safe destruction of the many asbestos structures in the city, and Haredim and the Environment, which promotes green awareness in the ultra-orthodox sector. The Black Globe was this year awarded to the Association for Collecting Drink Materials because it is lobbying against legislation that would improve the recycling of plastic and glass bottles and cans.
Upcoming Events
Summer Daytime and Evening Ulpan at the Spiro Institute
Does the London weather make you depressed? If so, Spiro might just have the remedy: occupying your mind constructively - like learning Ivrit at any level. For more information contact The Spiro Ark: Tel: 020 7723 9991; Email: education@spiroark.org; Website: www.spiroark.org.
Message From Ellen Goldberg, New Israel Fund Executive Director
Several weeks after our first Human Rights Awards Dinner, and having said farewell to our awards winners as they returned to Israel, we at the New Israel Fund have one important message: We want to thank all of you veteran supporters of NIF, as well as our newly acquired supporters, for your presence at the event and/or your donations for our human and civil rights work. And most of all, for your fabulous enthusiasm expressed towards the awards winners and the work that they do!
We particularly thank our sponsors, patrons, benefactors and table hosts who invited friends and colleagues to join us in recognising that although Israel faces numerous challenges – including many from within – there are dedicated Israelis who work hard to help find solutions that make Israel more just, more equal, and therefore stronger.
We are proud of our winners, and proud of Israel’s democracy, that enables them and others like them, to raise tough questions, to challenge public authorities that aren’t vigilant enough in protecting rights and equality, and to empower Israelis to stand up for themselves and make sure their voices and needs are heard.
Enjoy your summer vacation, knowing that you have contributed to improving the lives of scores of Israelis throughout the country!
