Tamar Shwartz, the CEO of Women’s Spirit, a Hadassah Foundation Core grant recipient, recently sat down with Hadassah Foundation Board Member Stephanie Garry for a wide-ranging conversation. Since 2007, Women’s Spirit has promoted the economic independence of women survivors of physical, sexual, emotional, and economic abuse in Israel. In 2024, the organization won the President’s Award for Voluntarism for contributing to Israeli resilience during the Israel-Hamas war. Women’s Spirit has received multiple grants from the Hadassah Foundation and is one of 18 current grantees, 11 of which are based in Israel. Since 2000, the Hadassah Foundation has awarded almost $12 million to 113 organizations that improve the lives of women and girls in Israel and the United States.
We encourage you to watch the video above. Condensed and edited highlights are below:
What Women’s Spirit Does
We help women go through a two-and-a-half-year process where they meet with a volunteer mentor every week. The women we help get a coach and mentor, along with help opening a bank account and training for a career. In addition, we offer workshops and lectures in Israel and around the world to spread awareness about economic violence. And we advocate in the government on issues that affect abuse victims.
Economic Violence
There are a few types of economic violence. One is that the husband controlling the bank account doesn’t let the woman have access to their money. Another form of economic abuse is that the husband is making debts and then the woman has to pay them off. I always say that with economic violence, the blue signs are not on your body, they’re in the bank account.
The Impact of October 7 and the Israel-Hamas War
Every citizen in Israel has suffered since October 7, but women victims of violence suffer more than the average Israeli person. Even if you’re in a city that is not on the border and hasn’t been damaged in the war, women victims of violence have post-traumatic disorder, and when Israeli television and social media is 24 hours of war, war, war, it triggers them. Second, more women than men were fired or let out of work on unpaid leave after October 7. Even for the women that still had jobs, many couldn’t go to work because schools were closed. And then you have men coming back from reserve duty in Gaza feeling stressed and violent as a result. Violence went up, and in the first months, women were afraid to complain. Our hotline was quiet. Why? Because women said, there is a war, people are dead – how can I complain about my personal troubles? But now we have more than double the number of people coming to us for help. It’s also very important to emphasize that it’s not that the clients are in war and we, the staff and volunteers, are in another country. Many of us have children in the army, and we have volunteers that lost children in the war and at the Nova festival.
Women’s Spirit’s 330 Volunteers
We train volunteers over four months how to do the whole process of economic and occupational rehabilitation with women that suffer from post-trauma. Once the volunteer starts, in addition to meeting with the client she has to come to personal supervision with a social worker. If you are not coming to supervision and talking about what you hear, if you are not reflecting, then you can get secondary trauma.
Activism in the Aftermath of Tragedy
Three years ago, I lost my daughter to cancer. And since then, we did a few things to commemorate her memory. We established a scholarship at Bar-Ilan University, where she learned mathematics. And we made a documentary film about her shiva. The film is called “Live Like There Is Tomorrow,” and we recently screened it at Yale University, where she had been accepted into a PhD program.
While my daughter was ill, before the chemo, she froze her eggs so she could become pregnant later. When she realized that she wasn’t going to make it, she told me she wanted to donate the eggs. After she died, I came to the hospital where her eggs were being stored and told them I wanted to donate them. The hospital said I couldn’t because my daughter hadn’t signed a document, even though she was never given the opportunity to sign it. They told me to go to the Ministry of Health, and they said there was nothing they could do. Whenever someone tells me, “No, it can’t be,” I always say, “Why not?” So I struggled and eventually took it to the Supreme Court of Israel. It was a three-year process, and finally, we got the permission to donate the egg to a woman who is starting the procedure of IVF. I also got them to change the regulation, and the policy of the Ministry of Health now is that every young woman that freezes her eggs will be asked to sign a form specifying what happens to the eggs if she passes away – if she wants to donate them or if she just wants to throw them away. Now it’s a regulation, and I am calling all the hospitals to make sure they heard about this regulation and that they are implementing it.