AICE ISRAELI FILM FESTIVAL: Ron Ofer and Yohai Hakak’s documentary is an illuminating profile of two remarkable middle-aged women who, in very different ways, are working miracles among the Haredi, Israel’s ultra-orthodox Jewish community.
Part of the filmmakers’ Haredim trilogy, The Rabbi's Daughter & the Midwife is likely to be an eye-opener for Gentiles like me who knew little of the cloistered Haredi world’s strictures and mores.
Adina Bar-Shalom is the eldest daughter of Rabbi Ovadia Yossef, a highly respected Rabbinical authority and spiritual leader of the conservative Shas political party. In 2001, she founded the first Haredi College in Jerusalem, breaking a long-term taboo by encouraging ultra-orthodox women to study. Her achievement is more than a touch ironic because, in her late teens, she wanted to do a university degree in psychology but her husband forbid her, as did her father.
Rachel Chalkowski, commonly known as Bambi, has run a charitable foundation for poor families for more than 35 years in addition to her demanding day (or, more often, night) job as a midwife at Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Hospital.
The two women are a contrast in style and personality. Adina appears affluent and is smartly dressed, wearing a succession of fetching hats, eloquent and assertive. Rachel is quieter, her grey hair wrapped in a scarf, and lives in a small apartment with her husband.
Adina and her unseen Rabbi husband have three children and 13 grandkids. Rachel is childless, reflecting ruefully that 'it wasn’t my choice" and declaring that she channels her maternal love into other children, including her sister’s 12 offspring.
The filmmakers follow Adina as she’s ushered into her father’s presence to pay homage like a royal courtier. The stiffness in their relationship is later borne out when she admits, 'I can’t speak to my father like a friend."
There’s some revealing footage at her College, where the 600 female students are segregated from the 280 males. A Rabbi is shown preparing the girls on how to behave in the workplace, urging them not to speak or laugh loudly, use first names or nicknames and to refuse to make coffee for male bosses.
Adina tears up when she recalls her parents locked her in the house so she couldn’t take tests which might have enabled her to attend an academic high school, with the government paying her fees. Instead she was sent to a vocational school and later worked as a seamstress managing a bridal salon.
The doco estimates that half of Israel’s 500,000 Haredim population lives below the poverty line. Rachel speaks movingly of women who raise and support 12-15 children while their husbands devote all their time to studying the Torah. She freely dispenses contraceptive advice to poor women who are struggling to cope with large families, arguing, 'A woman is not just a machine for having babies."
The filmmakers accompany her on one of her regular fund-raising trips to New York, where well-off Jewish women seem happy to donate money. We’re not told how much cash she raises, but it’s clear all her work is voluntary. This is a fascinating portrait of two brave women doing their utmost to bring change to a society many of us in the West would see as repressed and disadvantaged.
