NEW YORK (NY)
JGirls Magazine
February 2018
By Ayelet Kalfus
The night started with song. The words of Shehecheyanu, the Jewish blessing for gratitude at experiencing something new, washed over the crowd as Naomi Less sang: “Blessed are You who has enabled us to reach this moment.” We weren’t singing in gratitude for what had brought us here; rather, we were grateful to be, for the first time, confronting an issue that had been wrongfully denied and neglected for years within our community.
We, nearly 300 communal professionals, lay leaders, and members of the public, were at the “Revealing #MeToo as #WeToo in Jewish Communal Life” event at the Jewish Women’s Foundation of New York (JWFNY). Using two events in the theater industry as a model, JWFNY organized the night to reveal the prevalence of gender-based harassment in Jewish organizations and strategize for the future.
The first half of the night was storytelling. When I was first invited to the event as a teen reporter, I imagined that these stories would be long, court-like testimonies. I was wrong. Performers from the Jewish community, varying in race and gender stood from their seats, slowly walking to carefully-placed microphones spread throughout the audience. JWFNY had collected the stories of anonymous Jewish-community professionals. The performers read parts of these stories—moments taken from long accounts of gender-based harassment.
For 40 minutes, the crowd was silent, except for sharp intakes of breath, sounds of surprise and disgust. The air was crackling with anger, sadness, pain. I had chills the entire time. The fact that the performers were standing within the audience amplified the night’s message: these stories were our own. This pain was the pain of our fellow community members.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.