Barry Duke, the Angry Atheist

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FOR more than a decade, Shoshanna Keats Jaskoll, above, an Orthodox Jewish feminist, has been chronicling the gradual disappearance of women from magazines, advertisements and other media in Israel.

In reporting on her activities, Religion News Service provided a recent example: The front page of ultra-Orthodox Shacharit newspaper, inset above.

When it covered Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s address to the U.S. Congress in Washington on July 19 it erased Vice President Kamala Harris from a photo taken at the the event.

The previous month, when a photo of the new Israeli cabinet was released, ultra-Orthodox media either erased or pixellated the faces of three female lawmakers.

Image via Facebook

Yomleyom, an ultra-Orthodox weekly newspaper run by the Shas political party, went further and digitally edited the photo so a male minister was put in place of one of the women.

The outlet’s deputy editor, Rabbi Moshe Shafir, explained:

The Torah upholds the honor of women and their freedom,” he said. “We honor the women specifically because of their special merits and we have reservation from looking upon women as an object.

Modesty customs spreading

In an interview with RNS Jaskoll claimed that magazines, advertisements and other media in Israel are doubling down on images of women as modesty customs spread beyond the Orthodox Jewish world.

It’s been happening in the private Orthodox sphere, where magazines and advertisements and circulars don’t include photos of women and girls. It’s become the norm. It started with showing women in modest clothing, to blurring women in pictures, to completely taking them out.

The trend began in the 1990s as Haredi and even some mainstream Orthodox communities in Israel and abroad embraced harsher definitions of religious modesty.

For example, from 2004 to 2012, Israel’s largest transportation company, Egged, stopped running advertisements with women’s photos in Jerusalem after they were repeatedly defaced.

And in 2017, the furniture manufacturer Ikea created an alternative Israeli catalogue without a single photo of a woman.

Mind you, Ikea did the same in 2012 when it it issued a female-free catalogue in Saudi Arabia.

Both Egged and Ikea backtracked after public pressure.

Creation of a unique photo bank

Determined to return women’s images to the public sphere, Jaskoll has created a unique photo bank of religious Jewish women and their families.

Launched by the religious women’s advocacy organisation Chochmat Nashim, the Jewish Life Photo Bank has become a valuable resource for positive images of religious Jewish women, RNS reported.

Jaskoll came up with the idea after public relations consultant Rachel Moore, a friend, complained about the near impossibility of finding high-quality photos of religious women for her clients.

Typical stock photos available from Israeli and international photo banks depict women in clothes that many Orthodox Jews would consider immodest: tight pants and other figure-hugging clothing; sleeveless, often low-cut shirts or dresses; and above-the-knee skirts or shorts.

The few available stock photos of Orthodox people, meanwhile, are usually of men and boys, often in prayer, with few images of women.

To jump-start the project, Jaskoll put out an online call to Orthodox women to ask if they would agree to be photographed performing their day-to-day activities.

“The response was incredible,” Jaskoll said. Within 48 hours more than 250 women in several countries had volunteered to model or photograph others, or offered a space for a photo shoot. Photo shoots have taken place in Israel, the U.S., England and France.

The photo bank offers images in 35 categories, including parenting, Torah learning, holidays, family, business and sport. Many show Orthodox women in settings where they are often present but rarely photographed—engaging in business meetings, lecturing at a synagogue, studying religious texts, holding or praying from a Torah, playing tennis or touch football.

Since going live in late 2021, the bank has sold 22 all-access subscriptions, 129 multi-image packages and hundreds of individual photos.

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