International Jewish Women Look to the Future

On Sunday, May 22, 50 women of the International Council of Jewish Women (ICJW) met for a gala opening of their five-day Quadrennial Conference, called “Looking to the Future,” at the Shalva National Center in Jerusalem. They exude a sense of true feminine power that they are channeling to fix the world. According to spokeswoman Sarah Manning, of the Tikshoret Communications Agency, they were presidents of national Jewish women’s organizations from, Israel, the U.S., Canada, South Africa, Mexico, the Czech Republic, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Australia, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Slovakia, Sweden and Switzerland, and elsewhere, and delegates who represented the interests of Jewish women at the United Nations in New York, Geneva and Paris. Due to COVID-19, it was the first time in four years they had met face-to-face. 

In a fractured world, it was refreshing to see women who represented a broad religious and political spectrum in their private as well as public lives. Among the Israeli women were representatives of Emunah, Women’s International Zionist Organization, the chairperson of the left-wing Meretz party and a past MK of The Jewish Home and New Right parties in the Knesset.

The outgoing president, Penelope Conway of the UK, said “The ICJW was founded in Berlin 110 years ago and is an umbrella organization for women’s organizations from 37 countries, working to promote a just society based on Jewish values … Jewish woman are a force to be reckoned with.” 

During the past four years, said Manning, Conway and her team have been involved in the Jewish NGO campaign at the United Nations to modify the antisemitic content of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) text books used in Palestinian schools. (More on that later.) The ICJW has also participated in international campaigns including #metoo, anti-trafficking campaigns, calling out antisemitism, combatting domestic violence, interfaith dialogue, environmental awareness, and Generation Equality. Their meetings have also been about the UN Commission of Inquiry against Israel.

ICJW’s incoming president, Lilian Grinberg of Mexico, said “one of my goals is to get more young people involved, including through volunteer work.  We have to be grateful to the countries where we live. I live in Mexico. I’m Jewish. But Mexico opened their arms when our grandparents came from Europe.” Grinberg is involved in helping impoverished Mexican communities, the Mexican Red Cross, Mexican hospitals, schools for children with disabilities, a center for at-risk youth, and homes for elderly people. 

Zohar Damsa Blau, the eloquent MC for the evening, spoke emotionally about how her mother, Bosna Barhanu, who was also in the audience, brought Zohar and her siblings from Ethiopia. She told the audience, “I will be happy when people stop looking at my color.” Zohar is the coordinator of the “Street Mobility” project in Ramla, holds a BA in Administration and Law, is a fellow of the Gal Community Leadership Program, has worked at a locked home for at-risk girls, and at a shelter in Lod for girls on a path toward prostitution. 

Shuli Davidovich, head of the Bureau for World Jewish Affairs and World Religions at Israeli’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told the international crowd, “we will always be here for you when you decide to come,” and said they should, “work together against hate speech in social media.” Davidovitch described the life of a woman who is a diplomat, and how her children were born in various cities and countries throughout the world.

The delegates toured Jerusalem, visited Ben-Gurion University to learn about progress on climate change and sustainability, and met with residents of Jewish and Bedouin towns.

The delegates toured Jerusalem, visited Ben-Gurion University to learn about progress on climate change and sustainability, and met with residents of Jewish and Bedouin towns. They discussed how to help victims of domestic and sexual abuse in the Jewish community, and women who are denied a Jewish divorce by their husbands. Panel discussions included the situation in the Ukraine and Central Europe, women’s health and economic independence, and the environment.

Dr. Joan Lurie Goldberg now retired, has represented the ICJW as a JNGO – a Jewish Non-Governmental Observer at the UN for the last 17 years. 

“We started a serious effort to fight this problem [of the schoolbooks] at the UN in NY in 2016 and 17.” Their website is: www.reformUNRWA.org. “The path to peace begins in the classroom, but not these classrooms, where the UNRWA has taught this obnoxious curriculum. 

“The UN has a High Commission of Refugees. Refugees do not pass on that status to their children; if they can’t go back to their own homes, these people are resettled.  However, UNRWA decided that being a Palestinian refugee is an inherited characteristic, but only for Palestinians, so there’s a never-ending increase. Since 1948, the number by now should be down to a few hundreds or thousands, but due to UNRWA’s definition, it is about 5.5 million.

“500,000 of them are being educated at any one time. The teachers were also educated this way and the whole culture is about hating and aspiring to destroy the state of Israel.

“UNRWA is inciting the students to start a war of return so they will inherit the entire state of Israel. They are no longer interested in a two-state solution. Every single textbook they teach out of has that position in it. There is a second-grade textbook in which children sing about having a war of return and then having the remnants of the Jewish population pushed into the sea.” 

Dr. Lurie Goldberg works with David Bedein of the Center for Near East Policy Research and says that his work is “amazingly impressive.” It includes, among other things, documentaries about the schoolbooks in the refugee camps. She refers to a film produced by the Center, “The Summer of 2021 — Hamas and Jihad Summer Camp,” and says, “It’s really one of the most horrendous films I’ve ever seen on this topic.”

She expresses frustration that “executives of major Jewish organization in the U.S. either don’t know about this issue or don’t care. We feel that if we can get these movies in front of major women’s organizations, not necessarily Jewish women, we would have an impact. I also believe we should be talking more with the evangelical Christians, because obviously they have a very strong interest in not having these Palestinian children grow up to be murderers; it’s not good for Christians either.

 “The angle that has been relatively ignored is child abuse in the classroom, child abuse in 7-to-10-year-olds crawling with rifles in their hands through barbed wire. Why don’t people who claim to care about children’s rights rise up and do something?

“We, the US, used to be the biggest donors [to UNRWA] but now it’s Germany who gives the most money — to a system that teaches people how to kill Jews!

“The ICJW has been incredibly supportive of our work, and has a delegation at the UN in Geneva. They have to listen to the Human Rights Council bash Israel three or four times a year. There’s a new and really atrocious antisemitic UN project called a ‘Commission of Inquiry’ in which three very anti-Israel people are being given millions of dollars to go around the world investigating everything bad that Israel has allegedly done from 1947 till today, and it’s going to go on in perpetuity from 1947 till today.” 

Dr. Lurie Goldberg is originally from Brooklyn. She raised two children in New Jersey; she was in California for 14 years, where, as a physicist, she worked with satellites taking picture of the earth. She says she worked on both classified and unclassified projects. “I did ‘Google Earth’ before there was a Google.”

In a video message, Dr. Lurie Goldberg says, “After 70 years of largely ignoring all of this, the world is starting just now to pay attention. Corruption at the highest level in UNRWA has been discovered; several nations have actually held up their funding for UNRWA because of this corruption; it has put UNRWA in the news.

 “The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) of the UN has cited the Palestinian Authority for the antisemitic textbooks they are producing. UNRWA doesn’t write a single book, but UNRWA is tasked with vetting the books that the Palestinians produce. The Secretary General of the UN for the first time in history has started an investigation of the anti-Semitism in these books. We might actually see some progress.”

It was a moving vision at the gala opening when every delegate walked in with her country’s flag and the evening concluded with a wide variety of accents filling the hall with the singing of “Hatikva.”  ■

Toby Klein Greenwald is the award-winning theater director of Raise Your Spirits Theatre, a recipient of American Jewish Press Association Rockower Awards for Excellence in Jewish Journalism, and editor-in-chief of WholeFamily.com.