“To this day, when I get flowers, I always think of being hit and abused.”
That is how a woman who prefers to be known only as Margaret described her plight.
Margaret, who shared her story Wednesday, Nov. 2 at a panel discussion at San Francisco’s Congregation Beth Sholom, is a former battered woman.
She said her father, who held a doctorate in engineering from MIT, beat her mother on a daily basis.
He also kicked his wife downstairs and, on one occasion, locked her in the garage all night.
The discussion, which drew an audience of several dozen, was titled “May Our Homes Be a Shelter of Peace.”
Sponsored by a number of Jewish organizations, the event coincided with National Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Margaret, who asked to have her real name withheld from publication, was one of six speakers.
“Children learn what you teach them,” she said, “and my siblings and I never knew how to have healthy relationships.”
When Margaret married at age 25, thinking herself deeply in love, it was to a man who sometimes threw his dinner back at her if the meat was not in its “proper” place. After each outburst, he bought flowers and got on his knees to apologize. Only when her husband started to punch her in the face and beat her while she was nursing their baby did the woman decide to leave him.
Jewish women don’t like to talk about domestic violence, said panelist Naomi Tucker, who in 1992 co-founded Shalom Bayit, a Bay Area resource for battered Jewish women. To the typical battered woman’s sense of embarrassment and failure is added the shanda –shame — of speaking out against the community, and the fear of aggravating anti-Semitism by airing dirty laundry in public.
Also, if a Jewish woman approaches a community leader with her problem she may well be told to go home and make shalom bayit, or domestic peace: The message is, “You’ve blown it, baby.”
Elizabeth Landsberg of Shalom Bayit confirmed that domestic violence crosses all boundaries and is not related to religion, socioeconomic level, culture, educational background, age or sexual orientation — there is now a Bay Area support group for women who have been battered by women. She noted that domestic violence occurs at the same rate in the Jewish community as in the general population.
Landsberg proposed that programs be established in high schools, where teens can learn how to keep on the lookout for early warning signs.
She also suggested that domestic violence awareness be included in rabbinical school training, and that perhaps it was time to talk about radical ideas such as “outing” perpetrators.
Although publicity for Jewish domestic violence may be relatively recent, the phenomenon itself is as old as the religion, said Janet Harris, program director of the Koret Synagogue Initiative at Beth Sholom. In her research on domestic violence throughout Jewish history, Harris found certain ancient texts that counsel Jewish men to keep their wives in check by beating them; but there were also laws about sexual and domestic behavior that favored women.
She was particularly encouraged by the Talmud’s teaching: “When you destroy one soul, you destroy the entire world, and when you save one soul, you save the entire world.”
Other panelists were Ariella Hyman, an attorney at the San Francisco Neighborhood Legal Assistance Foundation, who spoke about legal options for women, and Linda Kalinowski of the S.F.-based Jewish Family and Children’s Services’ Dream House. Kalinowski wore a purple domestic violence awareness ribbon.
“People have been asking me what the ribbon means,” she said, “which is great.”
“May Our Homes be a Shelter of Peace” was co-sponsored by Beth Sholom, the S.F.-based Jewish Community Relations Council, the American Jewish Congress, Ani V’Atah: Jewish Social Action Project of the Northern California Hillel Council, the Women’s Alliance of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation, the National Council of Jewish Women, La Casa de Las Madres, JFCS’ Dream House and the New Israel Fund.