Haifa — At an age when most kids are busy learning how to ride a two-wheeler, Dana Myrtenbaum first began to hone her skills as an advocate for the people who needed her.

“We moved to Israel from Kishinev, in Moldavia when I was 5 and I served as a translator for my parents and grandparents,” Myrtenbaum, now the 35-year-old head of Itach-Ma’aki - Women Lawyers for Social Justice, says during an interview in her organization’s tiny office, which she shares with several other women.

“I was their representative to the Israeli authorities, sometimes pretending to be a lawyer on the telephone,” she says of her now-deceased immigrant parents, smiling, somewhat sadly, at the memory. “I think this was the origin of my commitment to social issues.”

Myrtenbaum’s commitment to helping the underdog has only grown during her relatively short but stellar career.

While Myrtenbaum, who is passionate about her work and equally at ease in Hebrew, Russian and English, could have landed a high-paying job in a fancy law firm, she decided to move to a poor neighborhood in Haifa, where she opened a small private practice on a shoestring budget. She worked concurrently for the Justice Ministry’s Public Legal Aid Office, and served as legal counsel to the Project Against Trafficking of Women to the Sex Industry in Israel of Isha L’Isha (Woman to Woman)-Haifa Feminist Center.

After spending the 2003-2004 academic year as a New Israel Fund Law Fellow at the American University College of Law, where she earned a master’s degree, Myrtenbaum became the coordinator of Itach-Ma’aki, the job it seems she had been training for all her life.

The organization, founded in 2001 by a group of feminist legal activists, “was created to enable the voices and life experiences of women from marginalized communities in Israel to be heard in the legal and public arena,” Myrtenbaum says.

Itach-Ma’aki focuses on empowering immigrant women, particularly from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia; single mothers; working women who live near or below the poverty line; women working in the sex industry (they frown on the term “prostitute”); victims of violence and women whose ethnic, religious or national background causes them to be disenfranchised.

The organization runs a hotline as well as workshops on the law and rights. It files petitions to the Supreme Court and argues cases before the lower courts. It tries to give women in vulnerable communities the practical tools to become agents of change in their own cities, towns and villages. Although Israel has enacted some excellent legislation to prevent discrimination against women, major problems remain, Myrtenbaum says.

“The laws tries to equalize citizens, but life isn’t equal. It doesn’t take into account that different people, particularly women, live in difficult circumstances.”

Myrtenbaum relates the experience of a single mother of young triplets who receives no government assistance “because she owns a car, and the law prohibits someone living on public assistance from owning even an old car. This mother had to make a decision between a car and government aid. Why is that?” she asks.

The mother in question participates in Itach-Ma’aki’s “Women Legal Leaders” program, which began last fall. The groundbreaking project, which is being done in cooperation with Haifa University’s law school, has brought together 16 female law students and 16 women activists (half of them Jewish, half Arab/Druze) from disadvantaged or otherwise disenfranchised communities.

As a first step, the community activists participated in a 60-hour course consisting of presentations and lectures, fieldwork and field tests, in which they learned how Israel’s legal system works and how to best use it. The 16 law students studied feminist theory and the effects of social stratification.

During the second phase, the grass-roots activists, together with the students, divided up into small teams. With practical guidance from the New Israel Fund, they were taught how to galvanize others in their communities, how to interest the media in their projects, how to work with other organizations and how to network and raise funds. During the third and final phase, Myrtenbaum and her staff have instructed the teams to develop seven seed projects. One project — the first of its kind in Israel — is establishing a nonprofit organization to help sex workers find alternative housing and employment, and is producing a Russian-language manual of rights. At the urging of one of the community activists, a judge in Eilat permitted a sex worker to go through the process of rehabilitation rather than serve jail time.

A second project promotes a holistic approach to preventing spousal abuse, while a third is working to decrease the alarming amount of violence within Ethiopian immigrant families. “The men in our community have lost their status in the family,” explains Salamwit Beecha, an Ethiopian activist from Haifa, during her team’s meeting on the balcony of the Haifa University cafeteria. “In Ethiopia, when a man told his wife or daughters something, they did it. Here, women are educated. They learn Hebrew. The men have less power over them, which they understand as less respect. Several men have murdered their wives during the past year alone.”

During a meeting dealing with the obstacles Druze women face during the divorce process, Myrtenbaum explains that “Druze women usually lose custody of their children when they get divorced, as well as their property. The norms in their society dictate that the wives automatically be sent back to their parents’ house. They are essentially banned from their community.”

The motley mix of team members — two young Arab Israeli law students wearing sleeveless blouses; a young, modestly dressed Orthodox Jewish law student; a 40-ish secular Jewish community leader in pants and an Arab community leader, also in her 40s, wearing a Muslim head scarf — have taken a number of steps to assist their Druze counterparts. They have convinced the mayor of an Arab town to provide a municipal tax discount to single mothers, established a support group for divorced Druze women and asked the Druze Religious Court to help women better understand their legal rights.

The women describe the kinds of people who have sought their help following their decision to open a small office at the Haifa Family Court.

“It’s ironic, but of the 42 people who have sought our legal advice, just two have been Druze women,” says Sarit Danielli, the secular community leader, with some disappointment. “A lot of men have been asking for our help.”

“The problem is that most Druze women aren’t aware they have the right to sue for custody and property in the civil courts,” Myrtenbaum says, referring to the fact that the Druze religious court has sole jurisdiction over the divorce itself, but not the legal issues surrounding it. “But even if they do know their rights, they usually don’t go to the civil courts because Arabs often don’t trust the Israeli legal system,” she adds.

Glancing at Myrtenbaum and her teammates, Raeda Biadi, the Muslim community leader in the turquoise head scarf, says that the project to empower Druze women “is the realization of my dream. It grew out of my own pain.”

For 16 years, Biadi endured severe physical abuse by members of her own family.

“There was no one to help me,” she says, her voice almost a whisper.

“If there had been a program like this, a support group like the one we set up, when I was in this position, I wouldn’t have suffered so much,” Biadi says.

Falah, who is herself a role model for other Druze women, believes that women like Biadi are “an inspiration to the younger, more educated law students.

“They learn a great deal from these women with so much life experience and vice versa.”

“The legal leaders get a lot from the law students, who are organized and energetic,” Myrtenbaum adds. “The women empower each other.”

___________________________________________________________________