Alice Shalvi, an Israel Prize-winning educator and pioneering religious feminist, died on Monday, two weeks shy of her 97th birthday.
Shalvi created the English department at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheva in 1969. Six years later, she became the principal of the Pelech High School in Jerusalem, a religious girls school that — breaking with convention — taught its students Talmud. In 1984, she co-founded the Israel Women’s Network, which remains one of the leading lobbies for women’s rights and gender equality in Israel.
Until her death, Shalvi also served on the board of directors of the New Israel Fund and on the board of the Israeli Shocharei G.I.L.A.T. nonprofit, which works with infants and children from at-risk families. In 2007, Shalvi was awarded the Israel Prize for Lifetime Achievement, one of the highest honors that a person can receive in Israel.
“She did so many things. She was, up until the end, an incredible, inspiring woman,” Einat Fischer Lalo, executive director of the Israel Women’s Network, told eJewishPhilanthropy. “She was a real feminist, in every bone in her body, in years when that was not an easy thing to do.”
Born Alice Hildegard Margulies in Germany to religious Zionist parents, Shalvi fled with her family to the United Kingdom in the 1930s. She studied English at Cambridge, traveling to Basel in 1946 as a representative of British Jewish students at that year’s Zionist Congress. After earning a bachelor’s degree, she went on to study social work at the London School of Economics. In 1949, she emigrated to Israel, where she met her husband, Moshe Shelkowitz (who later Hebraicized his last name to Shalvi).
As the field of social work was still in its infancy in Israel, Shalvi shifted her career focus to higher education, teaching English at Hebrew University and helping create the English department at what is now Ben-Gurion University. Much of Shalvi’s academic work focused on Shakespeare’s writings, about which she continued lecturing until recently.
In 1975, Shalvi took over as principal of the Pelech school, which was founded nine years prior and was on the brink of dissolution when she came on board. Under her tenure, the school became the highly regarded academic institution that it is today, regularly topping lists of Israel’s best high schools. First based solely in Jerusalem, Pelech now has schools in Tel Aviv, Zichron Yaakov and outside Rehovot. There is also now a boy’s Pelech school in Jerusalem. In 1991, shortly after retiring as principal, the Israeli Education Ministry awarded her its top Education Prize.
In a statement, Pelech schools remembered Shalvi as a “great woman who managed and crafted the direction of the school. May her soul be bound with the binding of life [God].”
In 1984, following a conference of U.S. and Israeli women organized by the American Jewish Congress and led by feminist activist Betty Friedan, Shalvi co-founded the Israel Women’s Network along with a number of other academics, Knesset members and activists. Shalvi served as the organization’s chair twice before retiring in 2000.
“Two years ago, she came back to serve on the board of the Israel Women’s Network,” Fischer Lalo said. “It was important for us to have her back.”
During its nearly 40 years of activities, the Israel Women’s Network has worked to combat sex trafficking and sexual harassment in Israel, as well as fighting gender-based wage inequalities.
“Our most significant achievement,” Shalvi told Hadassah Magazine earlier this year, “was in drawing women’s attention to the anomalies in pay between women and men and other forms of discrimination. And the fact that women no longer felt ashamed of the term ‘feminist.’ They no longer believed we already had equality.”
In 1988, the organization also helped spark the ongoing controversy over female prayer at the Western Wall. During a conference organized by IWN, Hadassah and the American Jewish Committee, a group of women visited the Western Wall with the intention of holding a Torah reading at the site, which met fierce opposition from many of the other worshippers. This led to the creation of the Women of the Wall, which continues to hold monthly female-led prayer services at the Western Wall and is still actively fighting in Israel’s High Court of Justice for the right to read Torah at the site.
Shalvi was sharply critical of the mixing of religion and state in Israel, particularly the role of the Chief Rabbinate.
“There’s still a lot more to be done—look at the few women in the government today,” Shalvi told Hadassah in May. “There’s been enormous progress, all over the world, with women doing significant work from which they were excluded in the past. But we are still very much professionally divided along gender roles. As long as women are the ones who bear the children, that’s not going to change. Unfortunately, society doesn’t sufficiently value the child carers and how much they are contributing to the economy by raising the children.”
Shalvi is also a staunch opponent to Israel’s continued rule in the West Bank, saying the country’s control over the Palestinians is “morally corrupting.”
In 1997, Shalvi became the rector of Schechter Institutes in Jerusalem, creating a number of programs that still exist today, including a master’s program combining art and Judaism.
Shalvi also contributed significantly to Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, which was published by her husband, who died in 2010. Shalvi continued writing articles for the encyclopedia, which is available online through the Jewish Women’s Archive, through 2021.
In 2017, Shalvi received Bonei Zion (Builders of Zion) Prize Lifetime Achievement Award by a Nefesh B’Nefesh. That year, Paula Weiman-Kelman also created a documentary about Shalvi’s life, “The Re-Annotated Alice.” A year later, Shalvi published her memoir, Never a Native, winning the 2019 National Jewish Book Council Award for Women’s Writing. She continued speaking to organizations and at public events until her death.
Asked what she hoped for Israel in its next 75 years, Shalvi said in May: “I’m distressed that there is so much internal division. If I were a fairy godmother and could do one positive thing, it would be to eliminate sinat chinam (baseless hatred) among Israelis.”
Shalvi is survived by five of her six children — Joel, Micha, Ditza, Hephzibah and Pnina (her son Benzion died in 2016) — along with 21 grandchildren and 26 great-grandchildren.
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