“Serious Jewish education should demand doing and learning, that changing lives is much more difficult than writing a lecture.”

Levi grew up in Cleveland, Ohio in a very committed Jewish home; committed to Israel, and committed to Jewish tradition. He attended public schools, and simultaneously a rigorous daily Jewish/Hebrew education program, which met 10 hours a week. Levi’s parents in his own words were “profoundly Jewishly undereducated”.  However, their commitment to Jewish education was unshakeable and they overcompensated in how they educated their child.  Attendance at his Jewish education program was not up for discussion and as far as his parents were concerned being Jewish was the most important part of his identity and it was important that he know all about it. According to Levi, Cleveland’s eastern suburbs were a good place to grow up Jewish, because there is little else to do.  The Jewish community is very organized and they put the wealth to good use.

Levi’s parents were leftist in their politics and humanistic in their understanding of the world.  His mother taught for many years in a school where almost everyone was African-American, and Levi grew up understanding that while life is be lived, paying attention to those who are disadvantaged is just as important. His household was one that took civil rights very seriously, but being a Jew was the most important part of your identity.

“I always knew I wanted to be a Rabbi,” says Levi, as modeled by the rabbi in his synagogue, someone who was powerful and influential, who stood on the pulpit and gave sermons, but was not necessarily very learned.  Levi attended the University of Cincinnati, studying political science and simultaneously studied for a rabbinical degree at Hebrew Union College.  Spending his junior year at Hebrew University in Jerusalem was the most decisive year of his life for several reasons.  Being out of reach of his very protective parents taught him he could make it on his own.  Falling in love with Chaya, his wife of 44 years, made living in Israel crucial, as she was already committed to making aliyah.

Levi went back to the US, completed his degrees, and worked for 4 years as Hillel Director at the University of Missouri.  The post included teaching at the University and serving as the rabbi of the synagogue in Columbia, Missouri.

In 1976, the Lauer family made aliyah.   Chaya found work nearly immediately as a social worker at Hadassah Hospital.  Levi struggled to find work until after applying to be a student at Pardes, he was offered the job of director..

Levi served as Director of Pardes for 17 years, taking an organization with 20 students and an overdrawn bank account to an organization with 85 students and money in the bank.  At the time, Pardes was the only co-ed, post-university, halachic institution of learning.  It was a place for seriously searching adult Jews who wanted an environment committed to halacha, but without insistence on any particular standard of halachic commitment and practice.  The young people who attended were among the best and the brightest; people who wanted to synthesize humanism and devotion, lishma – for its own sake, not for professional training.

During these years, Levi describes two formative experiences.  One was serving in the Israel Defense Forces in a combat artillery unit.  His service taught him a lot about the implications of power, and what it is like to agree to a democratically made decision that you disagree with in political principle.  He also learned about his own capacities and tolerance that he never knew he had and also came into contact with all kinds of people to whom he would never had a chance to be exposed.

The second was working for 6 summers at the Brandeis-Bardin Camp Institute in Simi Valley, California.  At the Institute, Levi had the opportunity to work with Alvin Mars and Danny Gordis, who helped him far better understand what good teaching was and his own capacities as teacher.

After leaving Pardes, Levi spent time working at both Melitz and the Shalom Hartman Institute.  However, at a certain point he realized that doing is more important than learning for the sake of learning.  Serious Jewish education should demand doing and learning, that changing lives is much more difficult than writing a lecture. “It would be good if I were to be able to make a little difference dealing with urgent needs in Israel; affect younger people by giving them work and make it possible for them to be infected with an appetite for social activism.  Demand creates a kind of adrenalin – they will be so addicted to making a change in people’s lives that they will be addicted to it forever,” says Levi.

ATZUM was established in 2002 with one of its goals exploring moving the beit midrash to the street.   It is an organization that addresses the needs of people too little attended or ignored and avoids duplicating the efforts of other organizations. Levi was inspired by Paul Farmer who believes that among the essential ingredients to being a serious agent of social change are the courage to fail (humility) and believing that you do not have the right to be tired.  This was particularly good for Levi as he has endless energy.  With the help of a devoted staff, ATZUM has grown from an organization that worked with 18 terror victims and their families to working with more than 450 families.  Its other projects include, working with Righteous Among the Nations, a task force against human trafficking, and an oral history project for Ethiopian teens and Ethiopian Prisoners of Zion.

As I talked to Levi, I understood that ATZUM works because Levi juggles.  He is constantly on the phone, excels at putting people together,  and making 1+1 equal 3.

Levy and Chaya live in Jerusalem.  They have 2 daughters and 2  grandchildren.

Highlights of their activities include:

For the First Time in Israel: Adapted Community Service Instead of Imprisonment for People with Disabilities

Bizchut has been working for years to promote alternatives to imprisonment appropriate for offenders with disabilities. We are happy to announce a recent breakthrough in this area.

During the past six months, Bizchut together with the Commission for Equal Rights of Persons with Disabilities held two training seminars for all the staff of the Unit for Community Service, part of the Israel Prison Service.

The seminars aimed to make participants aware that people with disabilities can be successfully employed. Together with Elwyn (an organization that runs employment programs for people with special needs) we showed how employers can be recruited to employ offenders with disabilities as part of community service. We presented the concept of supported activity in the mainstream community for a person with a disability, and the adaptations required for different kinds of disability.

The final seminar concluded with a joint declaration by the Director of Community Service, Bizchut and the Equal Rights Commission to implement a pilot project involving 12 people with disabilities who have been sentenced to community service.  Their placement and employment as part of this program will be accompanied by professionals who will advise on how to provide adaptations to meet their special needs.

The Struggle to Save the Accessibility Law Regulation

In July, the drafting of the statutory regulations governing access to existing public buildings was finally completed and they were brought before the Knesset Labor, Welfare and Health Committee for approval.

The Interior Minister Eli Yishai, made his approval of the regulations conditional on over a 100 weaker local authorities being excluded from the regulations, in effect giving them an exemption from dealing with this accessibility, even though it had been agreed in the Knesset Committee that the local authorities would only be obliged to implement the regulations in 2021, 11 years from now.

While some stakeholders yielded to the request concerning exemption of the weaker authorities in order to ensure the regulations would be approved before the recess and subsequently come into force, Bizchut thought otherwise. Together with other organizations and under the uncompromising and strong leadership of MK Ilan Ghilon, chairperson of the sub-committee for the accessibility regulations, we worked to prevent the suggested discrimination. The amendment was rejected and the regulations approved by the Committee. They are now waiting for the Minister’s signature before they can come into force.

Class action against Egged and Dan Accepted

In June the Jerusalem District Court accepted a class action brought by Advs. Kadari, Aharonsohn and Levi on behalf of Reuven Baron, Michelle Lustigman and Bizchut against Egged and Dan companies, in light of violation of their obligation to ensure that local public transportation is accessible to sight impaired and blind people. In its decision, the court ruled that the defendants only partly meet their obligations to install warning lines at the entrance to buses and at the top of stairs and operate internal and external public announcement systems, and do not at all meet their obligations to have accessible signs that show the bus number or indicate stop buttons or straps. In accepting the class action, the court made a precedent setting ruling that enables people with disabilities to bring a wide range of claims in relation to the implementation of the Equal Rights for People with Disabilities Law and its statutory regulations.

More updates can be found in our Activity Report 2009-2010.

According to Shlomit Solomon, the initial idea for this project was based on the numerous phone calls received by the Itim hotline from families (mainly of olim but not only) and hospital staff members who were in a state of great confusion in the day following the death of their loved ones/ patients. Families were overwhelmed by the horrible combination of the desire to drop everything and surrender to their grief- and the need to make many decisions- some of them involving huge sums of money- instantly. Hospital staff members simply didn’t have the crucial information and therefore couldn’t help and give advice.

Again and again we received calls from people saying:

“We thought that burial is for free but are asked to pay 12,000 NIS! Is that ok?”

Or : “The chevra kadisha is telling us we have to make up our minds right now whether to purchase a burial plot for the spouse of the deceased. It’s very expensive! Do we have to make that decision right now?”

And: “Our father is not Jewish according to halacha. What are our choices? Where will he be buried?”

We’ve helped people on a one-by-one basis until we realized that in order to really help, we should help train the staff at the hospitals- mainly social workers who are the ones that are in charge of helping the family when a death occurs- but also nurses and other staff members. When it comes to burial costs and expenses, on many occasions money was spent unnecessarily and can’t be reimbursed, so prevention is crucial. It may seem like a horrible thing to think about at these moments, but for many families these are sums that they don’t have and unfortunately there are many people out there who take advantage of families at these very moments.

During our seminar we cover topics such as: whose liable for burial in Israel, what are the costs of purchasing a plot in advance, what’s covered by the National Insurance Institute and what isn’t, what are the different types of burial used in Israel today, the options for burial available for non-Jews and those who wish to be buried in a civil ceremony, contact numbers in case the family/staff feel they have been given wrong information- and more.

To date, the seminar funded by anonymous donors, was presented to the social workers of the oncology ward at Rambam Medical Center and to the entire social work staff at the Sha’are Zedek Medical Center. On both occasions, the staff was very eager to learn and quite surprised to learn many facts they were unaware of. Itim is working on preparing additional seminars in hospitals and for organizations.

Activism 3.0: Without leaving the comfort of an air-conditioned room or even missing a day of work, hundreds of Israeli activists succeeded in connecting a Palestinian village to running water

JERUSALEM - July 20, 2010 - The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) and Bimkom – Planners for Planning Rights launched the blog “Action-a-Day” in order to connect the Palestinian village of Twaneh, located in the South Hebron Hills under full Israeli control, to running water. For two-and-half months, we encouraged activists volunteering for the projects to participate in one action a day via our blog and Facebook, each action taking only a few minutes. For each action, a new objective was chosen. The activists worked in complete coordination despite the fact that most of them had never met one another or the residents of Twaneh.

Last week, ACRI received a letter  from the Civil Administration, announcing the decision to connect Twaneh to running water.

Among the campaign actions, activists “bombarded” Knesset Members Haim Oron and Dov Khenin with letters, who accordingly sent a query to Defense Ministry; to Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilna’i, who investigated the matter; to and Communications Minister Moshe Kahlon, who also promised to check into the situation. The activists advised Deputy Foreign Minister Dani Ayalon to connect the village to running water for the sake of Israel’s international image.

In addition to the letters, activists were invited to take part in a number of innovative projects: they took pictures of their faucets at home as a sign of solidarity with the residents of the village, produced a short, satirical film in which Israeli youth “thanked”  the residents of the village for “giving up” water for them, created a Wikipedia entry on Twaneh as well as a computer game, both attempting to convey the tangible ramifications of the lack of building and planning infrastructure in the village.

The major turnaround came following our appeal to the Civil Administration. After Brigadier Yoav Mordechai, head of the Civil Administration, received a barrage of appeals from Action-a-Day activists, he personally contacted two of them, thanked them for their letters, and informed them of his intention to convene a special meeting to discuss the village’s access to water. Subsequently, ACRI received the welcome news.

“We are excited and happy about the Civil Administration’s decision to connect the village to running water after thirty years,” stated the activists. “However, it is important to remember that this is only part of a larger problem. In normal circumstances, running water and shelter constitute a basic matter, not a reason to launch an entire campaign. The important lesson here is that complaining about the situation does not suffice. We can change things through concrete action. We must engage through civic activism – and someone is listening.”

“Israel is responsible for about 150,000 Palestinian residents of Area C, many of them living in villages which are unrecognized by Israel and therefore lacking official plans, explained Alon Cohen-Lifshitz, architect at Bimkom. ”As a result, many residents are not allowed to build houses legally, making it difficult to provide entire villages with basic infrastructure connections to water and electricity”, he said.

“We decided that if we were not able to change things on a large scale, we would start small”, explained Ehud Uziel, a coordinator of ACRI’s public activities. “The challenge we set for ourselves was to provide the village of Twaneh with access to running water. Residents of the village use water which they buy in shipping containers and for which they pay seven times more than the average Israeli. Two hundred meters from the village a pipe from the Israeli water company “Mekorot” provides clean water to the settlements of Maon and Carmel and to the adjacent outpost of Chavat Maon.”

“We weren’t sure if we would succeed,” continued Uziel. “We told ourselves that even if it doesn’t happen, the project itself will raise awareness about the issues of water shortage and housing rights of the Palestinians who live under Israeli control in Area C. The ‘Action- a -Day’ Campaign offers a new kind of activism, for those who care and want to bring about change”.

Ramit was married in 1993, after she and her future husband became religiously observant. The couple lived in a Charedi neighborhood.   Her husband’s violent behavior began soon after their marriage. After 12 years of continuous suffering, Ramit and her daughter were compelled to leave their home , and Ramit filed for divorce. As often happens, despite the fact that Ramit and her husband jointly purchased their apartment , the title to the apartment was in his name. He took advantage of the situation and claimed full ownership of the apartment. To make matters worse, the Beit Din demanded that Ramit should give up the apartment in exchange for a get and pressured her to transfer jurisdiction over the apartment’s ownership from the civil courts to the bet din. Ramit refused.

In all hearings relating to the apartment Ramit was represented, in both the rabbinical and the family court, by Gittit Nachliel, Mavoi Satum’s lawyer. Without giving up on her share of the apartment, the rabbinical court recommended that the husband give Ramit a get, though they did not compel him to do so.

In addition, through The Center for Women’s Justice, Ramit submitted a damages claim for divorce refusal. This move caused the judges in the rabbinical court to decree that until Ramit retracted her damages claim they would not arrange for her to receive a get. Luckily, the civil court ratified that Ramit was entitled to half of the apartment and to compensation from her husband for refusing her divorce. When her husband saw that he was fighting a losing battle and was going to lose on all counts, he agreed to give her a get. With our help, the two sides were able to arrive at a fair divorce agreement. As of today Ramit is a free woman.

To date Israel has not had a general immigration law. The Law of Return relates only to people who are Jewish, or are of Jewish descent, and leaves the question of immigration of non-Jews as a lacuna, which is covered by a plethora of sometimes conflicting administrative and judicial decisions. This leads both to confusion, bureaucratic arbitrariness as well as infringements of human rights.  The current state of affairs is detrimental to Israel’s vital interests, a situation which is intolerable for Israel as a state and as a nation. Israel needs an immigration policy. In this Position Paper, the authors, for the first time in Israel, propose a strategy for thought and action ahead of the formulation of an immigration policy that promotes Israel’s interests as a Jewish and democratic state.

Metzilah’s publications – mostly position papers – serve to explore the legitimacy and implications of Jewish national self-determination in the State of Israel, as well as of Jewish self-fulfillment around the world. Moreover our publications seek to shed light onto the compatibility of Zionism and Judaism with Human Rights and Liberalism in the context of a Jewish and democratic State of Israel.  The goal is to create a platform for ideological clarification of the presuppositions and validity of Zionism as well for informed public discourse and decision-making.

The papers are meant to serve as a basis of support for decision makers by framing complex issues and providing policy recommendations that will ensure a Jewish and democratic State of Israel, as well as the welfare of the Jewish people. They also seek to deepen the public discourse and sharpen its understanding on issues that are on the State of Israel’s agenda.

The combination of these two rationales contributes to consolidating a consensus among the public and decision makers, which calls for action on these issues.

ICAR has initiated a Study Day throughout Israel on the subject of agunot and mesuravot get, on and there about International Agunah Day that is marked on the Fast of Esther every year. ICAR sees great importance in exposing the public to the halakhic sources that refer to the problem of the agunah and the mesurevet get and to the varied solutions that appear within these sources to this difficult problem.

In this booklet the halakhic sources are organized by topic. Within each topic the sources are cited chronologically reflecting their precedence according to the halakhic era of each source.

In addition, at the end of the booklet a is sample lesson plan, which is useful for study groups that covers a number of sources that relate to the problem of the agunah from the large variety of sources  included in the booklet, as well as the various solutions that appear in the halakhic sources.

The booklet can be downloaded directly from the following link

We debated long and hard before filing this lawsuit. Mostly, because we know that the problem is not mutual. Women suffer much more. Let’s face it. The halakha is gender-biased. It gives men almost unfettered power to determine their wives’ destiny, recognizes little grounds for divorce, and exercises almost no force over recalcitrant men, and when it does, it is often too little, too late.

All that said, men still suffer from the current way that the halakha allows for the dissolution of failed marriages.Thanks to Rabbenu Gershom, they too can be held hostage to their wives. Religious men, and even men who are not religious, want closure. They want to get on with their lives, correct mistakes, find new love. Sometimes the rabbis in Israel, bending backwards to prove that the halakha is mutual, will refuse to issue any order whatsoever against recalcitrant women. The husbands of these women, like the wives we represent at CWJ, can spend their entire lives in the rabbinic courts.

So we debated for about 6 months whether or not to represent a man in his claim for damages against his wife. Finally we took the case and filed it 2 months ago. At the pretrial hearing, the wife agreed to accept the get and the parties were divorced last week.

At about the same time that out client got divorce, Judge HaCohen –who gave CWJ its first damage award against a get recalcitrant in the amount of 425,000 NIS — issued the attached decision (in Hebrew) that also awarded damages to an 83 year old man (not our client) whose wife refused to accept a get.

Bottom line: The halakhic divorce regime does not work. Certainly not for women, and not really for men. We need to be able to have a third party declare a failed marriage over if the parties, for whatever not very healthy reason, are not able to.

For the full article

For more information about this and other Mavoi Satum’s legal precedents, contact Gitit Nachliel.