Why I Cannot tell Young Women to Make Aliyah

I cannot, in good conscience, encourage women — especially young women — to make aliyah. I would reverse that only when life for women in Israel actually improves. Not the slogan. The law, the street, the army, and the religious institutions the state still pays for.

I wanted to live a gentle life, but life for a single woman in Israel placed pressure on me to become tough, and at times downright cruel, in ways I never had been before.  I learned how to fight back because my space was invaded daily.

Sitting on a beach in Tel Aviv was virtually impossible back in the day, and probably not much better today. I was simply denied the right to be left alone to enjoy the sunset. More times than I can remember, somebody was always invading my space.

The state helped pay for another version of the same lesson. I spent years in a women’s ba’alat teshuvah seminary. I did not get job training. I got a head trip: dress, voice, marriage track. I cooked Shabbat meals and watched other people sing while I sat like a potted plant. I am a singer. I was told I could perform — women only, for women only — because kol isha, my voice, might cause a man to become aroused. Why would I care/ How does his personal problem have anything to do with me at all? Why should a man’s “stumbling block” be allowed to run my life?

I was pushed toward the back of the bus more than once while living in Jerusalem; I did not feel elevated; I felt like Rosa Parks. Six years later, I was still unmarried (BH). I left with no job skills.  The Israeli government had spent its money to make me a compliant Jewish mother. I started college in my late twenties after my return to America. I got an education and paid my own way. Life as a woman got a lot easier.

I grew up Reform and was raised on stories about the life of Hannah Szenes and Golda Meir. We saw amazing things happening because of socialism and the work being done in kibbutz as a new nation was built.

I was raised on the idea that Israel was egalitarian and that a Jewish girl could be anything — even a rabbi. That is the country I was sold. Socialism has become a dirty word in a state founded by socialists. The inheritance I was raised on said women stand in the field and in the cabinet.

Amongst the many horrors of being unequal in Israel, there is none more degrading than Jewish marriage: it is not a private custom. It is a legal status the rabbinate controls. A husband must give a get. If he refuses, she cannot remarry as a Jew. Courts can sanction refusers: They do not remove his leverage. Men who will not accept a get have a workaround that women are not granted in the same form. Jewish women are not baby factories to be used and discarded with no rights after the fact.

There are over 10,000 chained women in Israel (a figure long cited in the Jerusalem Post and Wall Street Journal, and in the same range as Mavoi Satum’s 2025 estimate; see the Jewish Women’s Archive, “Agunot”). I cannot in good conscience advise a young woman to sign up for that. I would never advise anyone to sign their rights away, whoever they are.

The Treasury should stop subsidizing the Baal Teshuva movement, as it promotes gender discrimination and harms fellow Israelis. If any Israeli is denigrated in any way, the whole state suffers. Consequently, if the state is paying to indoctrinate young girls into a way of life that diminishes their rights and their ability to gain employment, then we should really ask ourselves what we are funding: schools that train girls for a lesser legal status, then hand them a marriage contract they cannot exit.

Yes, many religious women have secular educations: I am not talking about that. I am talking about funding institutions that promote a way of life that harms Jewish women by diminishing their right to have control over their own lives and personhood. A way of life that has left women exhausted, degraded, and impoverished, with no way out.

Even in a toxic marriage, most of my religious friends stayed married because they had several children and few economic options; never mind hurdling the Beit Din and its notorious treatment of women.

The Association of Rape Crisis Centers logged more than 51,000 contacts in 2024, including over 16,000 new cases. About one in ten victims go to the police. Of sexual-offense files the state has described, on the order of four in five close without an indictment. Older Israeli estimates still circulating in official and advocacy literature put lifetime sexual assault near one in three women and rape near one in five. You can argue about surveys. You cannot argue that the pipeline from harm to a courtroom works.

The IDF is a conscript army. In 2025 its gender-affairs unit recorded about 2,420 reports of sexual harm, up from the year before and part of a multi-year climb. Most victims were women. A handful of cases became indictments. Many ended in a command conversation.

Before October 7, a state comptroller-era finding was that about a third of women in mandatory service had been sexually harassed in a given year. After October 7, we learned something else: the Gaza-border spotters — almost all young women — reported Hamas training in the open for months. Their warnings went ignored for months, leading to one of the worst security breaches in Israel’s history.  Proving my point: sexism is dangerous; it is also a threat to the State.

Many of those soldiers said that if men had been on the screens, the reports would have landed differently. Then they were killed or taken hostage.

Israel drafts women into the army, then fails them twice: it does not keep them safe in their units, and it did not believe the female spotters on the Gaza border when they reported what they saw.

The economic story is the same pattern with a paycheck. Israeli women study and work at high rates. The full-time gender wage gap is still about 21 percent, among the worst in the OECD, and has barely moved in twenty years. In high-tech, the gap is wider still. The Knesset is about one-quarter female — near the bottom of the OECD. The World Economic Forum’s political empowerment ranking for Israel has fallen into the bottom third of the index. Haredi lists send no women. No woman led a party in the race, as IDI described it, heading into 2026.

Closing

The hypersexualization of female IDF soldiers is pervasive and dangerous, and it needs to stop; it harms morale and leaves the impression that our female soldiers are sex toys; they are not.  If you cannot ensure our safety from fellow soldiers, we are not obligated to serve.  And removing women from the IDF is not the right solution. The solution is to treat women like people.

I cannot in good conscience encourage women to make aliyah until the State begins to make real changes. I also cannot tell women they should serve in the IDF if the army does not keep them safe, and continues to promote degrading TikTok videos that make female soldiers look like strippers rather than well-trained service people.

In Israel, a husband can refuse to give a get. Then the woman is still married and cannot leave. Women in the army report sexual harassment and assault. The seminary the state helped pay for did not teach me a job. It messed with my head. How I dressed, walked, talked, and sang was treated as a problem because of kol isha and what men said they could not handle. I will not sell that life to another Jewish woman.

Until Israel begins to treat women like people, I cannot advise Jewish women to move there.