Their son should always have a handkerchief in his pocket: It was one of Ruth’s husband’s many rules. Each day, he would come home and interrogate her. Was she raising their son correctly? Did he do his homework? Did he have a hot breakfast? And, finally, did he have a handkerchief in his pocket?
This particular afternoon, he did not. Ruth, a Jewish woman from Marin, suffered one of the many beatings she would endure during the marriage. She tells her story in a video produced by Marin Abused Women’s Services.
“Can you imagine how that boy felt?” said Stephanie Linder, community educator for the social agency, which Jewish Women International’s Tamar Marin chapter has targeted for special help. The agency receives some 4,000 calls each year from abused women, roughly 9 percent of whom enter the residential programs or use support services.
With such statistics in mind, JWI, (formerly B’nai B’rith Women), a group devoted to preventing domestic violence, is zeroing in on the guilt and stress suffered by children. Local chapters have provided activities and supplies for children at the Marin Abused Women’s Shelter and funded a playroom at San Francisco’s Dream House, the Jewish Family and Children’s Services’ transitional shelter.
“It’s really important for the children to have a safe place to play. They may never have had that before in their lives. So often they get used by the batterer and…they’ve had incredible stress and guilt,” Linder said.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that police bring teddy bears with them when they answer a domestic violence call,” said Emily Weinger, a member of the Tamar Marin JWI chapter who also serves on JWI’s national executive board.
Added Linder: “Even when parents think children aren’t aware what’s going on, that they are in their rooms, or asleep for the night, they are very much aware” of domestic strife.
In fact, in Marin County, 30 percent of domestic violence calls to 911 are placed by children, according to Linder.
JWI answered a call to provide children in emergency and transitional housing with toys, games, stuffed animals, art materials and school supplies.
“Clothing they can get,” said Laura Rosenthal, JWI’s Northern California representative. “But for children, they need something like a teddy bear, that feels like a nurturing animal. They are in strange surroundings, and they can’t communicate.”
“They call us when a child is having a birthday,” said Weinger. “There are some babies there right now, and we just brought over some things for them.”
The Washington, D.C.-based JWI has been focusing on family violence and its prevention for the past 15 years, said Debbie Israel Dubin, its Houston-based regional director. For that reason, the organization funds the Bay Area’s Shalom Bayit “Warm Line” for women in crisis as well as toys for children in shelters.
“When these women come in, they’re in such distress, and the children are in distress, too,” Dubin said. A toy “brings them comfort and gives them something to do while the mother is attending to the life-and-death issues of getting their lives in order.”
Statistically, family violence occurs as frequently in Jewish homes as in others, those in the field point out.
In Ruth’s case, her husband’s unrelenting control eventually drove her out of the home and to a support group, where, for the first time, she met other Jewish women who’d been the victims of family violence — a turning point for her. But Jewish women are slow to seek help, according to Dubin.
“We are grappling with decades of denial,” she said. “We all have this image that it doesn’t happen in our community. Jewish women stay five times longer in an abusive marriage than others. They have so much shame. Now we know it takes place in every community. And our acknowledging it is the only way women can seek the help they need.”
In an effort to reach out to Jewish women, members of Tamar Marin JWI have donated supplies for a Passover seder and Chanukah party to the Marin shelter.
But just as the families who stream into the shelter cut across “all religious, ethnic and class lines,” according to Linder, JWI also wants to serve children of all backgrounds.
“The mission is simply to put a smile on the face of a child who has been through hell,” Weinger said. “People come in around the holidays and make donations, but the rest of the year, people in shelters are forgotten. We wanted to be involved in an effort that would be year-round.”
Chapter members plan follow-up visits to the Marin shelter: “Two women had babies, and they also needed art supplies for activities in which the mother and child can interact, so we’re going to get those things to them,” Weinger said.
Amy Cooper, Dream House program coordinator, said a special art event one afternoon at the shelter brought about an epiphany for staffers.
“We set out some art materials, and the children ran in and just pored all over them, like people walking through the desert finding water,” she said. “That brought it home, how important a piece this is. We used to focus solely on the mother, but that has evolved into a dual focus.”
A talk by Cooper to the Golden Gate Chapter of JWI fired up members, Rosenthal said.
“Our members went wild, all went out and bought new things — bags and bags of stuff,” she said. “It caught on.” Most importantly to the women is that the toys are, with only a few exceptions, the children’s to keep.
“Possessions are important psychologically,” she added.
Cooper agreed.
“Children work things out through play, they work things out through art, they work things out through fantasy, and peer relationships in which they do all these things,” she said.
At Dream House, Cooper said, one girl who had been witness to family violence carried a doll with her everywhere. She named the doll after herself and gave it the qualities that she wanted to have.
A boy talking for his superhero action figure promised to keep him safe from a host of harms, and to never let down his guard. His mother, alarmed to hear this “dialogue,” realized how important it was to help him feel safe.
Providing toys has enriched the givers as much as the recipients.
“Our membership is aging, and dwindling in numbers because of that. We were getting a little down,” Rosenthal said. “We needed something to perk us up. You talk about children and these old ladies’ eyes light up.”