By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
Meira Shupak believes strongly in building bridges within Seattle’s Jewish community.
“Sometimes there are things very specific to Orthodox lifestyle that are not easily understood,” she said. “It’s hard not to have your own judgment about something, if you’re secular, from the outside.”
That is why she was recently hired by Jewish Family Service’s Project DVORA to help the anti-domestic violence program reach out further to the Orthodox communities.
“Orthodox women have met one-on-one with us, women have been to the support groups, Orthodox women have been to the Rosh Chodesh groups. Orthodox women have participated in the seder, in the writing workshops, on all levels, there has always been representation of the women in the Orthodox community,” said Project DVORA Program Coordinator Michelle Lifton.
One major part of Shupak’s new job, she said, is “just to be a resource to women in the Orthodox community so that they are able to access Project DVORA.” While she and Lifton are quick to say that Project DVORA already connects with Orthodox women, Shupak said an important aspect of her position as Orthodox Program Advocate is to aid Project DVORA in increasing “its sensitivity and the services to really reflect the needs of women in the Orthodox community, which are different than the secular.”
Another part of Shupak’s role in her 10-hour-a-week position is “educating and being a resource for the leadership of the Orthodox community— being able to have them make referrals” to Project DVORA.
“Then, there’s a community awareness part,” she added, “which is trying, on a community level in the Orthodox community [to build the dialogue] around domestic violence — about what it is.”
From there, she said, her hope is that once people understand the meaning of domestic violence, “to not let it happen and really to find solutions, and to be a community that’s committed to not having that in our midst.”
One way she hopes to increase that commitment is to help create a curriculum around domestic violence education specifically tailored to Orthodox education, something that DVORA has not done up until now.
Shupak said she wants to work with the Northwest Yeshiva High School to develop an educational program around domestic violence, so it “works for the purposes of being at an Orthodox day school, with an Orthodox theology, with an Orthodox idea of how things are between men and women in society.”
Lifton said the creation of the position of Orthodox Advocate and Shupak’s hiring was a realization that she and the other part-time advocate could not do everything themselves, but it was also a recognition that working more closely with the Orthodox community required special sensitivity. She made a point of saying that this did not represent a change in direction or action from the past.
“Project DVORA, from the get-go, did not want to create this cookie-cutter model of ‘this is how you address domestic violence’ and stamp it onto every situation,” Lifton said. “We were aware that the reason you needed culturally specific services for the Jewish community was that the secular services were great, but they didn’t draw on that which was intrinsically Jewish. Orthodox women have been participating in Project DVORA since the first,” she added.
Lifton said that she has had a positive relationship with the area’s Orthodox rabbis both in building community awareness of how domestic violence occurs in all communities, and also that many have referred women to Project DVORA before now.
Even so, Shupak said, there are some issues that are better addressed by someone who is a part of the Orthodox community, herself.
“Sometimes there are things very specific to Orthodox lifestyle that are not easily understood,” she said. “It’s hard not to have your own judgment about something, if you’re secular, from the outside. I’ve had countless conversations with people and it’s sort of a show-stopper: ‘Why does so-and-so cover her hair?’ or ‘That’s clearly a sign of her oppression,’ [or] ‘Obviously you’re being controlled – you have to go to mikvah.’ These are simply Jewish law or choices about Jewish law and they’re not seen as controlling things within the community.”
These possibilities for miscommunication are what Shupak said she hopes to steer around on either side of the issue.
“Project DVORA’s seeking to ameliorate and educate about issues of domestic violence is not a criticism of Orthodox lifestyle,” she said. “It is really to diminish things that are misrepresented and are unfortunately present in all communities — and no more or less in the Orthodox community, but are, because of these other things, end up being boundaries between services and the community.”
Shupak said she feels her own background has put her in good stead to bridge the cultural differences that exist within the Orthodox community as well. Having become observant herself while in Israel in her early 20s, she said, she is less tied to one tradition within Orthodox Judaism than someone who was born and raised within one branch or another may be.
“There’s an expression in Judaism…that there are 70 faces in the Torah,” she said. “Though my family background is Ashenazic, I belong to one of the Sephardic synagogues myself. The Hebrew that I speak is a Sephardic-style Hebrew.”
She spent her first two years in the Puget Sound area as a part of the Chabad community.
“Within Orthodox Judaism, basically the mikvah, kashrut and Shabbat are the three big connectors. Everybody within the Orthodox framework do those three. The fact that mikvah is an area that all the women within this framework are involved in,” said Shupak, “is an area that [it] is a meeting place. Though people have different customs around mikvah, the mitzvah of mikvah and what’s required in mikvah is the same for all of us. So that’s an area organically for us to be involved. Because it has to do with relations between a husband and a wife, that it’s an organic point of connection.” Not that she feels that there are no barriers to be overcome within the different branches of Orthodoxy.
“There are things that are hard for people to hear,” said Shupak. “It’s probably more of a situation of hard-to-say. The goal is for…raising the level of community awareness and having the community conversation.
“I love the diversity within Orthodox Judaism, and I love to be in all the different communities and to experience all the different strengths of different communities. I think that it’s a delicate balance of tailoring the message of Project DVORA the best we can to reach the greatest number of people within the broadest aspect of the whole community,” she said. “There are different ways that the different communities have dealt with the issue, but everyone is concerned.
“We all have one Torah that tells us how to be human beings and gives us a road map of the right and wrong things,” she added.