THIS WEEK'S TRIBUNE  THIS WEEK'S TRIBUNE Ragen helps mark inaugural event for Yaldeinu
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Ragen helps mark inaugural event for Yaldeinu |
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Written by Sylvia Brooke
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Tuesday, 09 June 2009 |
TORONTO – Acclaimed author Naomi Ragen spoke at the Sephardic Kehila Centre recently to a crowd of rapt and appreciative women. The evening marked the inaugural event for Yaldeinu, a charity established to provide Jewish education and camping experiences to children in third world countries and Sderot. Founder and executive director Michael Ettedgui said in his introductory remarks, “For many of these children, a life running to safety is the only life they know.”
The choice of Ragen for the evening was most appropriate. Born in New York City, she lived on welfare with her widowed mother and older brother. She knew what it was to come from a disadvantaged home and came to her Jewish education by default. When her mother sought to find a better education for her older brother by enrolling him in the Orthodox Jewish day school across town, she paid $5 to have him take an IQ test. Upon passing the test, he would be accepted, with a full scholarship. The boy refused to take the test, so his sister took it instead, so as not to waste her mother’s $5. She passed, and so began her formal Jewish education.
The Haredi community serves as a backdrop to many of Ragen’s novels. The issues and themes woven into her books cover such volatile subjects as infidelity, rape and wife abuse.
“What disturbed me most of all was the carefully enforced code of silence in the religious world, which prevented abused women from speaking out openly about their problems,” exclaimed Ragen. “If you tell the truth, you are going to upset those who are profiting from the lie.”
She sees that as the plight of the Jewish writer.
Ragen and her husband moved to Israel in 1971. It was the first trip there for each of them.
“Jerusalem had one traffic light,” she noted.
It was there that she began writing her novels. The attention her work received was not always positive, but its impact was strong. After her third novel, Sacrifice of Tamar, based on the true story of a black baby born to a religious couple in B’nei Brak and all the turmoil that ensued, women’s shelters began to spring up where previously there were none.
“I have a deep satisfaction in the small part that my books perhaps have played in tearing down the walls of silence,” she added.
Ragen spoke of the urgency of life in Israel, including the disbelief in watching her mother-in-law, an Auschwitz survivor, having to don a gas mask during the Gulf War. She shared the details of her family’s narrow escape of the Passover massacre at the Park Hotel in Netanya, explaining, “in many ways the experience of living so intensely, with the feeling that tomorrow should never be taken for granted has made me more productive.”
Her writing is inspirational and often educational in the ways of Judaism. Ragen stressed the importance of education in the preservation of the future of the Jews.
“Never before have Jews been more ignorant about their history, never before have Jews been more ignorant about their customs, their rights, their obligations and thus never before have they been more vulnerable to the lies of their enemies.” |
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 17 June 2009 )
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