Women living in insular communities are dying of a disease they cannot name: breast cancer. Responding to the crisis, one organization’s innovative approach is saving lives. With special guest, Sarah Landman of the Eden Center.
Women living in insular communities are dying of a disease they cannot name: breast cancer. Responding to the crisis, one organization’s innovative approach is saving lives. With special guest, Sarah Landman of the Eden Center.
Regarding the article thing about woman [sic] and breast cancer, that’s a sobering statistic. Of course it has nothing to do with what I wrote.
In his Mishpacha article, Sruli Besser reflects on his experience on “the other side of the mechitza” during his daughter’s Bais Yaakov graduation. Among the many rebuttals of his piece, which praises Jewish women for being pious and suffering subpar conditions in silence, several people noted that Haredi society’s negligence of women’s needs leads, among other things, to higher rates of breast cancer deaths in the community. According to Israeli studies, Haredi women die 30% more often from breast cancer than women in the general population.
Besser insists this has nothing to do with his jolting experience of what it’s like to be on the women’s side of the mechitza.
But it has everything to do with it.
There is a systemic problem of ignoring women’s experience in Orthodox Judaism, and it has far more severe consequences than stale cookies and poor air conditioning.
In Judaism, those who make policy for the entire community are men. Men, by virtue of being men, don’t experience Judaism as women do. This is natural.
What is not natural, however, is not listening when women describe their experience and ask for change. Communal and rabbinic leaders simply do not consult with women. They don’t allow for serious input from them, and they don’t hear from them about the consequences of communal policy and priorities. Thus, women’s needs come after a long line of other considerations and as a result, policy doesn’t take them into consideration.
This is wholly unnecessary and wrong. Moreover, the failure of policy and priority to consider women leads directly to many of the issues we face in Judaism today.
Policy fails Jewish women.
In marriage and divorce:
Religious courts often ignore the needs and wants of Jewish women and do not use their power to protect them where they should. As a stark example, earlier this year, in Jerusalem, a woman seeking a divorce from the husband who beat her, was refused by the rabbinical court which said, “since he only beat you because you asked for a divorce, you should go back to him and not ask for a divorce and then you won’t be beaten.”
In religious courts, get extortion is encouraged and judges who seekhalachic solutions to terrible situations are punished.
In women’s Jewish life:
Haredi political parties control the Rabbinate, and the Rabbinate controls all Jewish ritual life. Though they purport to represent all those who practice Torah Judaism (including women), no women are on any committee or allowed onto any haredi political party list.
During a Knesset meeting to discuss a Supreme Court case brought by religious women to improve services and practices in the mikvaot, MK Moshe Gafni looked around the room, packed with religious women seeking change and said, “there are no problems in the mikvah!”
A law passed only a few years ago placed women on the committee to elect religious court judges for the first time. It guarantees four out of the 11 spots to women. Haredi MKs who opposed the law when it was created are trying to reverse this decision to weaken women’s representation.
In women’s health:
In Israel, Haredi women rank 8th for life expectancy. Haredi men rank 2nd. The disparity is huge.
Yet, not one haredi MK has yet attended the committee on women’s health in the Knesset. The Minister of Health is himself haredi.
‘Kosher’ radio stations won’t say the words ‘breast cancer’ and events on fertility and women’s reproductive health are routinely held with no women presenters or women in the audience.
Haredi women develop breast cancer less often than the general population, yet they die 30% more often. This is a fact confirmed by three medical studies in Israel. The high morbidity rate can be attributed to a number of factors, from poor knowledge of the disease, to the fact that it is considered immodest to talk about, to the intense pressure the community has to appear healthy for marriage matches, to the refusal of many to allow for awareness raising. All of these communal issues add up to women dying.
In the obsession with ‘modesty’:
Women and girls are hurt, confused, and outraged at being blurred or photoshopped out of existence. Yet, when they speak out against the practice, their voices and protests are dismissed. Boys are taught that they cannot look at or see women. They are trained to not see or relate to them, and the balance of society is upended with Jewish women being portrayed as objects of sin to be avoided and shunned.
This leads, as we see in Bet Shemesh, to justifying verbal assault and even violence as men and boys scream ‘shikse’ and throw trash and rocks at girls and women who don’t look the way they think they should.
* * *
Besser says that Halacha is perfect.
This is not about changing Halacha.
This is about changing social policy and priorities towards a more just Jewish society.
When Bnot Zelafchad came to Moshe and all of the communal leaders to claim their portions of the Land of Israel, they said: “Our father died in the desert… has no son. Why should the name of our father be omitted from among his brothers because he had no son? Give us a portion among our father’s brothers.”
Moshe did not dismiss them saying, “The Torah is perfect, accept your lot.” He took their voices seriously, and the law was amended according to their logic and arguments.
For Judaism to thrive, we must end this culture of ignoring women’s experiences.
For Judaism to be healthy, we need to have women’s voices and images as a full part of Judaism.
For Judaism to be just, women must be a part of the process of policy and standardization.
Change on the ground starts with change in the conversation — and that conversation must include the Orthodox Jewish woman’s voice.
See the original article in The Times of Israel
So said the former chief of staff for the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, Rabbi Dov Halbertal. He was explaining why posters raising awareness of breast cancer screening in Charedi society were inappropriate for the very population they were crafted to reach. No matter how carefully posters talking about women’s health are worded, he explained, the fact that they address women at all makes them inherently immodest.
How, then, does one convey a message about women’s health to those who have no access to the internet or television, and where “kosher” radio stations won’t utter the words “breast cancer”? Doesn’t the very absence of information in these women’s lives mean that they are the ones who most need to hear it?
Three major Israeli medical studies in the past decade have revealed that, despite the fact that Charedi women develop breast cancer at a lower rate than the general population, they suffer a 30 per cent higher mortality rate from the disease.
There are numerous unofficial theories as to why they are disproportionately dying from breast cancer. Ashkenazi Jews have a one in 40 chance of carrying a BRCA mutation, which significantly increases the risk and aggressiveness of the disease. Socioeconomic, health and lifestyle factors, such as poverty, poor diet and lack of exercise increase risk. In addition, too many are diagnosed in later stages due to lack of awareness about screening.
Charedi society values modesty as a high priority. The word “breast” is rarely uttered, even in women-only settings. When heightened modesty is coupled with a cultural reluctance to discuss “negative things” plus the need to appear as healthy as possible for potential marriage matches, and compounded by an overall reluctance to medical testing, it creates a population unaware of the risks and signs of a disease whose survival rate decreases rapidly the longer it is left undiagnosed. I’ve written about this extensively and lectured about it at the JOFA (Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance) conference in New York. It will be the topic of one of my upcoming UK lectures in July.
Ruth Colian of U’Bizchutan, a movement to get Charedi women into the Knesset, embarked on a campaign to raise awareness of breast cancer screening within her community two years ago. Recognising the sensitivity of the subject, she created a campaign designed to meet the needs of Charedi society.
Her billboard poster — a pashkevil, as they are known in Yiddish — called on women to “perform the Torah commandment of guarding one’s health” and to call a number for more information about mammography. She got rabbinic approval for her wording and set to work hanging the posters in Charedi neighbourhoods. Chochmat Nashim, an organisation of religious women that spotlights issues facing the Jewish community, raised funds for the campaign.
This year, 2,000 posters, 2,000 fliers and an enormous highway billboard broadcast the message. So far, Colian reports that 250 calls have come in, with men and women calling in nearly equal numbers. She tells them about the issue and gives them the current medical guidelines appropriate for their age.
When Colian tried to bring her campaign to the city of Bnai Brak, the majority of whose 182,000 residents are Charedi, she was told the posters would create panic and were immodest and inappropriate.
Halbertal echoed these claims in a television appearance with Colian, saying that public streets are not the place to discuss women’s issues but failed to suggest a viable alternative. Previous campaigns had attempted to raise awareness with brochures placed in mikvahs, that most private and feminine space, but were nixed by rabbis who claimed women would become fearful about their health, which in turn would ruin the mood on a night when husbands and wives were meant to be together.
In a segment of society where women’s health cannot be discussed, where internet campaigns don’t exist, where pink ribbons mean nothing, where health care clinic pamphlets are censored to remove women, where there are no women MKs and none of the male MKs attend women’s health committees, and where Charedi women from within the community like Colian are blocked from disseminating life-saving information, how exactly are women supposed to discover the need for the proactive, preventative care that can save their lives?
We need to make education and awareness accessible to all.
Originally published in the Jewish Chronicle
Though charedi women develop breast cancer less often than the general population, their mortality rate is 30% higher. Among the reasons for this is a lack of awareness of the disease and how to spot it. To counter this, Ruth Colian of Ubizchutan (a charedi women’s political party that ran for Knesset) decided to create ‘pashkevelim’ in modest language and post them in charedi areas.
For the second year running, Chochmat Nashim has joined with Ruth to raise funds for the campaign which reaches out to charedi women calling on them to ‘guard their lives’ (a Torah commandment) and to go for certain medical checks. The posters are written in the charedi style and in very modest language.
Unfortunately, when Ruth contacted the municipality of Bnai Brak- a very large charedi city, she was denied the right to hang posters there for fear of ‘creating panic in the city’. You can see the news story (in Hebrew) here.
This is the silence we are up against. The notion that a breast cancer awareness campaign (which never mentions the word breast or cancer out of sensitivity to the population) is suppressed by a municipality on the basis of creating panic…
With your help, we raised enough funds to create 2,000 posters and to rent a billboard at a major intersection (the Coca Cola intersection) of Bnai Brak (owned by a private individual). Posters were hung in Bet Shemesh, Jerusalem, El Ad and 2,000 fliers with the same message were given out in Bnai Brak and Jerusalem.
Last year the campaign brought in over 200 phone calls from men and women asking what they should do and what a mammogram is. We will continue to raise funds and awareness and collaborate with other organizations working within these populations to reduce these horrible statistics and save lives.
A 48-year-old woman goes to see a breast surgeon. She has four lumps in her breasts, a large ulcerated mass and cancer that has spread to her lymph nodes. She says she had not come in earlier because it didn’t seem so important.
A 36-year-old woman sees her dermatologist for an irritated nipple. The doctor palpates a tumor the size of a golf ball and immediately sends her to a breast surgeon. The patient returns to the dermatologist a month later for the same condition. The doctor, shocked to see that she has not had surgery, asks if she had seen the surgeon. The woman says she was concerned about the level of kashrut at the hospital to which she was sent and, upon her rabbi’s advice, was waiting to have surgery at another hospital with stricter kashrut. She dies not long after.
A mother of seven is fully aware that she has a gene that makes it very likely she will contract the cancer that killed her mother and sister. She knows that if she has her breasts and reproductive organs removed, it could save her life. But she refuses. Not because she wants more children, not because she is afraid of surgery, but because she is afraid that if the neighbors find out, it will ruin her daughters’ chances for a shidduch (match). After failing to convince her that she could have the surgery with no one knowing, her doctor puts her in touch with a woman who has had the surgery and reconstruction undetected by her community. She finally agrees.
These stories seem very hard to believe. But imagine that you had heard almost nothing about breast cancer, that it was something not spoken about.
Imagine that you did not know the statistics and had never seen the pink ribbons, heard the calls for self-examinations or witnessed the marathons to raise money for a cure.
Would you know that cancer was lethal? Would you know that early detection was key to survival? Would you understand that talking about it could literally save lives? And even if you did know, suppose you also knew that if anyone was aware you were ill, your daughters’ chances for a good marriage could be significantly lowered (a terrible fate in your community)? Three major studies in the past decade have revealed that haredi women have fewer incidences of breast cancer, but that more of them die from the disease than women in the general population.
Read more in the Jerusalem Post
Shoshanna Keats Jaskoll
Haredi women are dying of modesty and living in a ghetto of silence.
The death rate among Israeli Haredi women from breast cancer is 30% higher than in the general population. This, despite the fact that the rate of haredi women diagnosed with breast cancer was 70% lower than secular women, according to various studies.
In Haredi society, speaking of breasts and other female body parts is immodest.
So they aren’t spoken about.
This means that Haredi women have fewer breast exams and mammograms are not routinely done and too many women do not learn that they are ill until they are dying.
Read more in the Times of Israel
Shoshanna Keats Jaskoll
