Rest in Power: Alice Shalvi, the Mother of Israeli Feminism

The late Alice Shalvi was an Orthodox mother of six, a remarkable intellectual—and a breaker of glass ceilings who advanced women’s equality in realms both secular and religious.I first met Alice Shalvi in 1978 in a meeting room at Jerusalem’s King David Hotel when I was still an editor atThe year before, I’d visited Israel for the first time and been impressed by the energy and activism of its homegrown feminists.

Born in Germany in 1926 to parents who were patrons of the arts and played records of famous cantors on a gramophone in the parlor, Alice Shalvi enjoyed a privileged, culturally rich childhood. She taught herself to read German at age 4 and gathered neighborhood children in a circle so she could read aloud to them.

In 1946, she attended the Zionist Youth Congress in Basel, Switzerland, where exhilarating speeches by Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion, the future first president and first prime minister, respectively, of the soon-to-be Jewish state, solidified her decision to make Israel her permanent home.

From 1975 to 1990, she headed Pelech, an innovative high school for Orthodox girls, and created a curriculum that includes the humanities, arts and sciences but also women’s history and the study of the Talmud. During the last 20 years of her life, she split her time and waning energy writing her memoir and giving talks all over Israel and the U.S. about her two enduring passions: promoting justice for all women and a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Conversations with Alice were rarely frothy, and thank heavens. Whenever I was in Israel, we had tea together in her garden and small talk got short shrift. I could hardly wait until she went off on some disquisition about, or a Yehuda Amichai poem we both loved, or a deplorable statement by some right-wing Knesset member.

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