Israeli Life: Mothers

By Leora Eren Frucht for Hadassah Magazine

They were an odd couple, these two middle-aged women—one in a black hijab and ankle-length dress, the other in tight-fitting jeans and colorful T-shirt—standing there in the middle of the room, locked in a tight embrace.

Later on, several people would point to that moment as the most jolting and unforgettable scene of the afternoon in Jaffa.

None of them could have been more astonished than I—the
woman in the jeans and colorful T-shirt.

I had gone to Jaffa that day with several other members of my Reform congregation in Modi’in to meet Muslim families from the town of Jaljulya in an effort to get to know each other. A simple act, but one that flies in the face of the growing alienation and animosity between Jews and Arabs in Israel today.

Over the course of the year, a mob of Jewish teenagers beat up an Arab youth, leaving him unconscious on the Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall in Jerusalem; an Arab woman on a shiva visit to the capital was stoned by a group of yeshiva students. There had been other violent assaults, hateful graffiti, slashed tires, even calls by municipal chief rabbis not to rent homes to Arabs.

Some might ascribe these acts to a handful of extremists, but I knew that this climate affected more than just the lunatic fringe. When my son was in fifth grade, his class went on a school trip to Jaffa, a mixed city of Jews and Arabs. There, his Jewish classmates had run down the street yelling hysterically when they saw an Arab woman, with her head covered, walking in their direction. “Terrorist!” some had shouted.

That is one of the downsides of living in a middle-class suburban community like Modi’in where everyone looks more or less like you. At best, Jews here—and in many other parts of the country—never get a chance to meet Arabs and, at worst, they fear and dread them.

I did not want my children to grow up to be like those on the school trip, so I jumped at the chance to join Neighbors Encounter, a project initiated by Stanley Ringler, an American-born Reform rabbi who lives in Israel. His idea was enthusiastically adopted by YOZMA, the Reform congregation in Modi’in.

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