Rachel Azaria

Rachel Azaria
Date of birth	(1977-12-21) 21 December 1977
Place of birth	Jerusalem, Israel
Knessets	20
Faction represented in Knesset
2015–	Kulanu

Rachel Azaria (Hebrew: רחל עזריה‎, born 21 December 1977), is an Israeli politician. She currently serves as Deputy Mayor and member of the Jerusalem City Council,^{[1][2][3][4][5][6]} and as a member of the Knesset for Kulanu.

Early life and education

Azaria is the daughter of an American mother and an Israeli father of Tunisian descent. She was educated in the National Religious school system. After serving in the Israel Defense Forces,^[7] Azaria studied at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she earned a BA in Psychology and Humanities, with honor, and a Master's Degree in Conflict Resolution and Peace Studies. She won the Tami Steinmetz Prize for her master’s thesis on the self-perception of the founders of the first Israeli settlements in Samaria.^[8] She was a member of the debating team at The Hebrew University, participating in debates in the European and World Championships. She participated in the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Young National Religious Leadership program from 2001-2003. ‫. She speaks perfect English.^[9][10]

Career

Beginning in 1998, Azaria has been engaged in environmental activism. She serves as a member of the Board of Green Course, Israel’s largest volunteer environmental organization. She has also been involved in issues related to Israel's national health basket, the Ashkelon coal plant, and the social impact of government economic plans.

Azaria was Director of Mavoi Satum from 2004-2007. It is a nonprofit organization which assists Jewish women who have been denied a gett, a religiously accepted divorce, by their husbands. Under her leadership, the number of women who received a get with assistance from organization tripled, and Mavoi Satum won recognition as the main advocacy organization in this field in Israel.

Azaria was a founding member of the Yerushalmim political party in 2008 and has served as its Chair since then.^[11]

In 2008 Azaria was elected to the Jerusalem City Council. In her first term she held the early childhood education and community councils portfolios. But in 2011 The Jewish Daily Forward interviewed Azaria about punishment she had suffered on the council for standing up for legal rights of women. Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat stripped her of her portfolios to punish her for petitioning Israel’s High Court of Justice to enforce a an earlier ruling requiring police to prevent illegal gender segregation on the streets of Mea Shearim, an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Jerusalem.^[12]

After her reelection in 2013 she was appointed Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, and now serves as head of the Yerushalmim faction on the Jerusalem city council. As of January 2015, she holds the education portfolio and women’s rights portfolio. As leader of the Yerushalmim party, Azaria has promoted “Community Kashrut,” an effort to make kosher certification on food items a matter of trust between food establishments and their customers. Yerushalmim expects the project to open the kosher market to greater competition and to dislodge the monopoly the Chief Rabbinate of Israel exercises in Israel as the only source of kosher certification.^[8] A poll conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute in April and May 2014 of which institutions were most and least trusted by Israeli citizens showed that the Chief Rabbinate was one of the least trusted.^[13]

Azaria is internationally recognized for her feminist activism. She was personally affected by illegal gender discrimination when she ran for Jerusalem City council in 2008 and found the company responsible for placing ads on Jerusalem’s buses refused to run a campaign poster with her picture because ultra-Orthodox Jews believe women's pictures should not be visible in public places. She petitioned the court to force the buses to carry her ads. She has been engaged in the campaign to fight the types of exclusion inflicted on women by the Haredi Jewish community in Israel, such as banning women from singing in public, separating women from men on the city sidewalks, forcing women to sit at the back of the and eliminating pictures of women in advertising.^[14]

In 2014 she helped to shepard Jerualem through a difficult and sometimes violent period. Three Jewish teens were murdered, and in an apparent revenge attack, a young Arab was burned alive by Jewish extremists. As a representative of the community, Azaria spoke to a peace rally saying, "We all, Haredim, secular, religious Zionists and Palestinians are against violence, in our city and everywhere."^[15]

In January 2015 it was announced that she had joined Moshe Kahlon's Kulanu party, and would seek a Knesset seat under the party's banner.^[16] While Israelis are allowed to hold dual citizenship, a Basic Law passed in 1958 says that Knesset members cannot pledge allegiance as parliamentarians unless they revoke any foreign citizenship, and although Azaria had never lived in the United States, she had American citizenship through her mother, which she revoked before joining the Knesset in March.^[17]

Personal

Azaria is married, has four children, and lives in Jerusalem.

References

External links

• Rachel Azaria on the Knesset website