Adina Bar-Shalom: A Pioneer of Charedi Education

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Adina Bar-Shalom is the eldest daughter of the esteemed Rav Ovadia Yosef z’’tl. As such, it is no surprise that she has spent her life making a difference in the Jewish and Israeli worlds. Rabbanit Adina was born in Jerusalem in 1945, lived for a few years in Cairo, Egypt, and eventually returned to Israel as a young girl as her father gained prominence as a chacham and posek, famously going on to become the Sefardi Chief Rabbi of Israel in 1973. She married Ezra Bar-Shalom at age 18, and has spent her life advocating for the Israeli Chareidi population to reach their full potential.

Famously, Adina Bar-Shalom always had a penchant for academia and furthering her education. Her desire to study psychology created mild tension as it was not the norm for a chareidi girl to do so, especially given that there were no institutions that were deemed appropriate for religious students to attend. Bar-Shalom always respected the wishes of her father and husband, but kept her dream alive and eventually found a way to make it work.

Arguably, Bar-Shalom’s best-known work is founding the Charedi College of Jerusalem. Seeing the apparent problems that Haredi students would face in regular secular institutions (immodesty, mixed classes, lack of leeway for young parents, and so on), Bar-Shalom founded an institution that would accommodate these students. There is a narrative that this project went against Charedi values and disrespected the will of her father, but it is clear that this is no more than embellished hearsay or simply misunderstanding. Bar-Shalom has always been clear that she only created the college, and would only have done so, with the express support of her father and husband. In an interview with the Jerusalem Post, she said “Anything I do is according to my father’s will. I will not start any project without consulting him first and obtaining his permission, and even now, should he tell me today that I should stop and quit the college, I would do it without hesitating a second.”¹

At the heart of Bar-Shalom’s work is the desire for the Charedi population to prosper. She is realistic in her understanding that hishtadlut looks different for each person and their households. Hashem has granted each of us specific skills and gifts, and Bar-Shalom encourages people to use those to advance Klal Yisrael. She has noted for years that the Charedi population in Israel often lives below the poverty line, and there is a distinct lack of facilities and professions that accommodate a Torah lifestyle. To rectify this, education and training is the first step.

Bar-Shalom maintains that everyone should always act in accordance with the Torah, and even when engaging in secular studies, she is clear that nothing should interfere or counteract the values that one has been brought up with.

It is worth noting that Rav Ovadia Yosef only endorsed his daughter’s project, writing, “At the college, students learn, in an academic setting, for various professions and receive an appropriate degree so that [they may] work in their blessed and needed communities and in the general economy. My beloved and blessed daughter, who comes from a holy home, Mrs. Adina Bar Shalom, heads the Charedi College. She manages the college in the holy spirit of the people of Israel, and with the blessings of God-fearing Rabbinical figures and Torah scholars. God desires it to succeed.”²

Many people have described Bar-Shalom as a feminist, and this label has elicited a host of mixed reactions. It feels pertinent to write that Rabbanit Adina does not use this term herself. This label, as is the case with labels in general, is limiting. Moreover, it carries connotations that do not suit Bar-Shalom or her work. Bar-Shalom has written that she is passionate about women feeling empowered in their communities and harnessing the strength that Hashem has endowed in Jewish women. Part of this manifests itself in women engaging in politics, social activism, or simply academia and work outside of the house. Regardless of how it looks, Bar-Shalom wants women to feel that they have a choice in their path and that they can still lead a Torah-centered life even in ways that are not yet commonplace in their communities.

Bar-Shalom received the Israel Prize in 2014 for her contribution to Israeli society. In the announcement, Shai Piron, the education minister at the time, said that Bar-Shalom had made “ground-breaking achievements to bridge social divisions and to advance the integration of a Charedi lifestyle with societal openness to higher education.”³

Rabbanit Adina has received many positive and negative reactions to her work over the decades, and some of these reflections have affected the reputation of her father as well. In their own words, they only spoke highly of one another, and Bar-Shalom is very proud of her home and way of life. She has remained unapologetically Charedi and devoutly observant, while steadily maintaining that there are kosher ways to integrate into the wider world that do not force people to compromise on Torah values.

Adina Bar-Shalom is undoubtedly a visionary, and if anything, her family’s reputation has given her a platform through which people will at least listen to her message, where many women trying to champion the same cause might not be given the time of day. And still, she remains steadfast in her love for fellow Jews and her desire to see them succeed in the ways they may never have imagined themselves.