Naomi Ragen is an American-born novelist, playwright and journalist who has lived in Jerusalem since 1971 and who writes regularly in the Jerusalem Post and to her mailing list about Israel and Jewish issues.
Naomi has published nine internationally best selling novels, and is the author of a hit play (Women's Minyan) which has been performed more than 500 times in Israel's National Theatre (Habimah) as well as in the United States and Argentina. She is a tireless advocate for women's rights in Israel, campaigning against gender segregation on Israeli buses and bias in rabbinical courts.
Naomi is a sought-after lecturer all over the world. If your group is interested in hosting Naomi, please click here.
Women to the Back of the Bus!!
The latest craze - modesty glasses for Orthodox Jewish men so they won't be able to see women.
I Am Not Sitting in the Back of the Bus - Why, together with other women, I filed suit to put an end to the primitive and degrading gender-segregated bus lines now popping up all over Israel.
Read my original article about how I was attacked by a religious fanatic because I refused to move to the back (the "women's section") of a Jerusalem bus.
Read about an American woman beaten because she refused to move to the back of a Jerusalem bus.
Read my article explaining why segregated buses are just the latest crazy idea of fanatics with too much free time on their hands.
Read about haredi women who want to sit with their families and don't want to be forced to crowd together in the back of the bus.
Israel Bus Rule Sparks Religious Row - How the liberal western media perceive all this fanaticism.
The festivities for Israel’s 65th Independence Day are in full swing. But for us in Israel, before the hora dancing, the plastic hammers, and the fireworks, there are the sirens. Two minutes of time to stand and think.
First, the siren goes off for Holocaust Memorial Day. It stops traffic. We get out on the highway, eyes closed, hearts heavy. The scenes rip through our souls: emaciated bodies in piles, starving children in rags, family members ripped apart and sent to their death in factory-like settings conceived by meticulous Germans with their talent for efficiency. We are there, all of us, the devout and the atheist, dressed in black gabardine and the latest Paris fashions, stuffed altogether into box-cars, locked in, helpless. Jews.
The siren seems to go on forever. Then it stops. We breathe again. We go back to …
They were all the same those cowardly young jihadi butchers; all soul-less, Nazi wannabees inspired by hatred and death; morons with brains and hearts the size of pebbles.
I was in New York City for a wedding when I turned on the television news and saw pictures of the Otzar Hatorah school in Toulouse.
I could not believe my eyes.
A little over twelve years ago our daughter Rachel had done her second year of National Service there, trying her best to infuse the children and the community with her own love of Israel and their Jewish heritage. Rav Monsenego, who had interviewed her for the position in Jerusalem, was the head of the struggling Jewish school and Jonathan Sandler had been one of the older students there.
It was a small Jewish community back then, a bit raw and …
Everyone who had known Saba Avraham was blessed with the knowledge that his magnificent legacy would live on within them and all the generations that follow.
In part one of “A True Jewish Hero,” published in The Jerusalem Post Magazine on February 24, I followed the story of Avraham and Naomi Timor’s escape from the Holocaust, and their lives as religious, Jewish pioneers in pre-State Israel.
The travails of the War of Independence forced them to abandon their home in Neveh Ya’acov, Naomi giving birth in Jerusalem to her fifth child while Avraham, as Hagana commander of Neveh Ya’acov, courageously led his men to safety on a midnight life-or-death escape to Mount Scopus.
Despite the birth of his daughter, and everything he had already been though, Avraham accepted the appointment of Hagana commander of Mount Scopus.
“Like the biblical Abraham, Abraham Timor was a man of faith, courage and strength who rose to every challenge.”
“By January 1948, the settlement of Neve Yaakov was under siege. The thirty families were under attack by the Arabs of Shuafat, who blocked the road to Jerusalem and cut the water lines. Supplies could only be obtained by giving large bribes to the British police. That is how we got matzah for Pesach.”
So wrote Abraham (Wexler) Timor, Hagana commander of Neveh Ya’acov, many years later in a newsletter to his eight children and 120 grandchildren and great grandchildren.
I found it on the coffee table in his modest house in Moshav Nehalim, a place he’d helped to found, during a shiva call. A few days earlier, Abraham had passed away peacefully in his bed at the age of 96.
My mother-in-law, Shirley Ragen, passed away yesterday in Jerusalem at age 85 after seven torturous years succumbing to a merciless illness which left her unable to speak, walk, or move her limbs. But the last period of her long life, was not her worst. The worst happened when she was eighteen and the Nazis came to her home in Uzhhorod (now in Ukraine), beating her little brother senseless, and carting away herself, her three sisters, two brothers, parents, and beloved grandmother.
The worst was the cattle car ride, and the platform in Auschwitz in which she and her sisters were separated from their mother, never to see her, or any other member of their family alive again. The worst was the year spent in a concentration camp starving, trying desperately with her older sister Zipporah to keep their youngest sister Malka alive. I remember …
I have just sat down after the fading notes of the siren have finally disappeared. It is another Memorial Day for Israel’s Fallen. We have lost 22, 684 sons and daughters. For a little country like Israel, that is an enormous and incalculable loss. Over the years, I have told all those ready to listen Israel’s well-kept secret: there is no Israeli army. There is only my son and your daughter, and the neighbor’s kids. Every loss is the loss of not only an individual, but of generations: the children who will never be born, the grandchildren that will never snuggle in the laps of grandparents.
It is the destruction of not only young lives full of promise, but of their families: mothers and fathers whose lives are forever shattered, grandparents who must bear the unthinkable, young girls who lost …
In an election year, we need to be really careful about what we send out and what we say about all candidates who might become the next leader of the free world. But we also need to arm ourselves with information.
I was very interested in the e-mail circulating quoting Newsweek and Snopes about the “lies” being spread about Mr. Obama. I investigated. Interestingly, the debunkers debunk all kinds of things I never heard of, like Obama not saying the Pledge of Allegiance, or using a Koran instead of a Bible in his swearing in ceremony. I never even heard those, and I am glad to hear they are lies.
But there are a number of other things circulating that haven’t yet been “debunked” and these are far more worrying because they are true. Like the fact that Mr. Obama’s …
I once lived in what shall remain an unnamed city in the Western world, in which one of the most prominent organizations was called: Parents of Murdered Children. In this place, the kidnapping and molestation and murder of children was endemic, so much so that I wouldn’t let my children go out of the house alone. Ever.
In this city, a woman’s car once broke down on the highway. Within ten minutes, a car picked her up, and she was subsequently raped and murdered. And I wondered: What kind of people live in this place that within a ten minute period a rapist-murderer would be passing by?
And now I live in a place where all around me, every minute of the day, in every part of this land, there is a hidden saint and hero.
December 2012 - Naomi's play Women's Minyan was performed by the West Boca Theatre Company at the Levis JCC in Boca Raton, Florida. Read some reviews.
18 November 2012 - Naomi participated in the Salon du livre de la Communauté de Neuilly-sur-Seine at the Hôtel Marriott in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France.
17 November 2012 - Naomi spoke at an evening organised for Emounah-Boulogne at the Synagogue de Boulogne in Boulogne, France.
11 November 2012 - Naomi participated in the Salon des Écrivains du B'nai B'rith at the Mairie du 16ème in Paris, France.
5 November 2012 - Naomi spoke at the Cockfosters and North Southgate Synagogue in London, England.
October 2012 כמיהה לעדן יוצא לאור בעברית , ומיד קופץ למספר ראשון ברשימות רבי-המכר בישראל
29 April 2012 - At the First Annual Jerusalem Post Conference at New York's Marriott Times Square Hotel, Naomi was a featured panelist along with Mr. Ron Prosor, Israel's Ambassador to the United Nations, Professor Alan M. Dershowitz, Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and Mr. Malcolm Hoenlein, Executive Vice Chairman of the Conference of Presidents. The subject was the media war against the delegitimization of Israel.
15 March 2012 - Sotah was published in Italian as L'amora proibito. Read a
review (in Italian). March 2012 - Jephte's Daughter was published in an Italian paperback edition, as Una moglie a Gerusalemme. October 2011 - The Ghost of Hannah Mendes was published in French as Le Fantôme de Dona Gracia Mendes.
Read a
review (in French). October 2011 - The Tenth Song was published in paperback.
May 2011 - Four-time Tony nominee Tovah Feldshuh directed a staged reading of Women's Minyan at New York's Westside Theater. The reading was produced by One Circle Productions, in partnership with Safe Horizon.
April 2011 - The Tenth Song was published in Hebrew, as השיר העשירי.
January 2011 - Israel Supreme Court declared gender segregation on buses illegal, but said women may continue to "voluntarily" move to the back of the bus.
January 2011 - Jephte's Daughter was published in Italian, as Una moglie a Gerusalemme. October 2010 - The Tenth Song was published.
October 2010 - Jephte's Daughter was published in French, as fille de Jephte.
November 2010 - The French edition of Sotah was awarded the Prix WiZO for 2010.
June 2009 - Sotah was published in French.
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