"Women who undergo the process of becoming religious are shaken up. Among them there are talented women with a gift for writing, who do not want to erase themselves on their journey, and so they ask: 'What will I do with my talent? I want to express myself. I have something to say.' That's a sense I also had during this process," says Avital Ganet Keshet, who became religious some 17 years ago. Her book, "Before and After in Bnei Brak City," was published in 2015, and she recently independently published a book of poetry titled "An Exchange of Words."
When it comes to haredi women, she says, "They are very diligent, they go to work and also run the household. Some of them have another side, that is creative and [enjoys] writing, which is oftentimes pushed aside. And someone who has that talent wants to express it."
Keshet, who is highly motivated to advance the less discussed side of many of these women, is a friend of filmmaker Natali Arbiv Vaknin. Vaknin is also newly religious and the two women launched a series of gatherings for women from all sectors – secular, haredi, the newly religious and the national religious. Among these women there are those who read their own poetry or sing songs they wrote and composed.
The idea for these gathers came about in a business meeting the two women held to discuss Keshet's book.
"Natali told me that she was going out that night and I asked her where. She said to a poetry reading night, at a mixed where both men and women go. I told her I'd stopped going to places like that a long time ago and that we need to create an evening that is for women only, for there to be an alternative for those who are interested [in that type of event]. I laid out a plan for such an evening and at the end of the meeting, I returned home. Not 15 minutes had passed since I arrived home did Natali call and say, "Avital, I have a place for our evening."
Meeting a spiritual need
Not many women showed up to the first gathering, which took place in Jaffa, but those who did came from all over the country.
"It was amazing. There were women from Jerusalem, from Gush Etzion, from communities in the south."
The women have held six such gatherings in various places so far, one of them being the Art Shelter Gallery, which supports newly religious artists. According to Keshet, the gallery prioritizes women who took part in the events.
Q: Is there a specific subject you focus on in each meeting?
"Usually there is. So far, we've had evenings [focusing] on the subject of childhood, forgiveness and lack of forgiveness, royalty, as well as an evening that had the theme" Who is hiding behind the mask?
Q: When there is no specific subject for a gathering, what subjects tend to come up?
"There was a lot of distress in the poems, a lot of pain. Some of them were about relationships that did not succeed, for example. There are songs that stunned me in their openness."
Q: What do the women talk about during these gatherings? What do they not talk about?
"Since along with the haredi women and the newly religious women and national religious women, women who do not keep mitzvot also come [to the gathering], it is important for us for there not to be content that could embarrass some of the attendees, for example, detailed or graphic descriptions of relations between him and her, or words that would not be appropriate for them to hear in such a forum.
"Although the women who participate do not talk about sexuality, they absolutely talk about relationships and about aspects of relationships, about problems. … [This is] an issue that is not usually discussed in public and there is a surprising openness to it. There is a sense that the women who participate have a need to express what they feel."
Q: The atmosphere, then, would need to be pleasant and conducive to that kind of openness.
"Absolutely, and part of that is just the fact that these are meetings for women only. Even when I was secular, there were women's conversations around me that were different in character and in the subjects that came up from the conversations in which men would also take part. I also think that women from different backgrounds have a lot in common, there are similar sensitivities and the level of openness increases significantly when it's a women only."
Q: Outside of the designated platform, how is a woman who writes poetry and wants to share her writing received in haredi society?
"There are the professed authors, who write prose. But I haven't seen female poetry books in haredi stores. The writing and the sharing meet a spiritual need, but I think that with quite a few women the thinking is practical in nature. There are women who are very talented writers that ask me, "But what will I get out of it?"
Not everyone was born to code
"After we started with the meetings, other platforms started sprouting up," Keshet says with a smile. "It's amazing. Before, there was nothing. And now there is another periodical for female haredi poetry and a spoken word night for haredi women. That's not to say that there are a ton of possibilities and places, but the important thing is that there is something. One can see an awakening on the matter, on the desire and the need on the part of the women desire to take part in these activities, with part of that being the encounter with other women."
According to Keshet, there has been a significant increase in haredi women who are showing interest in the theater and the stage. The increase in activity in the fields, whether in the form of performances put on by haredi actresses, platforms for learning the art of acting and the long hours, thought and hard work invested in productions, is a result of the influence of the secular world, she says.
"What happens there echoes in the haredi world and penetrates it. Not all women are disconnected from the secular world. There are, for example, haredi women who are on social media."
Still, she says, there is room for improvement when it comes to the sector's professional and artistic level.
"The haredi public is not a very emotional public and in the theater, you need to express emotion on the stage, to bring something from a personal place. From this perspective, the shows … are not quite there."
These days, Keshet is working on another project- a one-woman show aimed at a haredi audience that focuses on the process of becoming religious. In addition, she and Arbiv Vaknin are developing a personalized writing workshop aimed at haredi women that is set to include reading the monologues they write on the stage.
"It's a challenge," she admits but says that "if it gathers steam, it will be amazing. Not all haredi women were born to be programmers. There are those that have a strong talent for writing, that is just waiting to burst out of them."
