Though the majority of religious Israeli women opt to perform national service instead of military service after high school, in Roni Esh’s community of Kibbutz Saad near the Gaza Strip, the norm is to enlist in the Israel Defense Forces. 

“I’m a kibbutznikit, it has for years been the accepted thing to do. Someone who does national service is more eyebrow-raising. Doing the army is the obvious choice,” Esh told eJewishPhilanthropy last week.

But before enlisting in the military, Esh wanted a framework that would offer her religious and emotional support before and throughout her service. After visiting a number of such programs, she settled on the Hadas Army Program for Women, which is run by the Modern Orthodox Ohr Torah Stone network at its Midreshet Lindenbaum in Jerusalem. 

Similar to a hesder yeshiva for men, which combines military service with religious study, the Hadas program provides “intense Torah study before, during and after” IDF service for its 310 participants, who are spread across three campuses, in Jerusalem, Lod and Carmiel, according to Ohr Torah Stone.

Recently, philanthropists Jeremy and Ann Pava, who have long supported Ohr Torah Stone, pledged $1.5 million from their Micah Philanthropies toward the program, which is being renamed the Pava Hadas Army Program in their honor. According to the Pavas, it may be their single largest grant. 

“Or Torah Stone brought us this, knowing our interest in advancing women’s opportunities,” Jeremy Pava, the chairman of Micah Philanthropies and a founding trustee of the Harold Grinspoon Foundation, told eJP last month. 

“And at the same time, we have a niece — a young Orthodox niece — who opted to go into the army instead of doing national service. So we were seeing it in our own family,” Ann Pava, president of Micah Philanthropies, said. “And really, after hearing from Rabbi Kenneth Brander [Ohr Torah Stone’s president and rosh yeshiva], we understood that there is an influx, a huge number of Orthodox young women who are deciding to choose army service now more than ever. So we thought that this is a really good time to support a program like this.”

According to Jeremy Pava, the couple — who have mainly focused on initiatives in the United States — have taken greater interest in funding projects in Israel over the past 16 months. “Since Oct. 7., all of Israel is on our agenda more than ever before. So this is a piece of that,” he said. 

Since the founding of the state, the majority of religious women have not served in the military, in light of both a long-standing exemption for women who “declare that they lead a religious lifestyle” and recommendations from many religious leaders to avoid IDF service, seeing it as a corrupting force. In 2017, Rabbi Yigal Levinstein, a prominent figure in the religious Zionist world, declared in a lecture that the military was “driving our girls crazy. They draft them. They go in Jewish and they’re not Jewish when they come out.”

Despite this opposition, religious female enlistment has been on the rise. According to a study published by the Jewish People Policy Institute think tank this week, roughly a third of religious women enlisted in the IDF from the 1970s to the 1990s; that dropped precipitously in the following decades to less than 20% from 2010-2014. Over the past decade, the number has risen to the point where 36.1% of religious women performed military service from 2014-2023.

Ohr Torah Stone’s program was created even before this rise began, Brander told eJP. “The Pava Hadas Program is trying to make sure that we answer the needs of the women who want to serve. We want to make sure they’re spiritually prepared. We want to make sure that they’re physically able to do it. We want to make sure that we give them spiritual accompaniment through the army,” he said. 

“About 20 years ago,[Ohr Torah Stone founder Rabbi Shlomo] Riskin and Rabbi Ohad Tehar-Lev [who runs the program] wanted to find a way that Orthodox women who wished to serve in the IDF had the wherewithal to do it in a way that would allow them to be prepared properly in their own learning [and have] mentorship and spiritual guidance throughout their time in the army,” Brander said. “We were the first institution that offered spiritual infrastructure for women serving in the IDF. We founded that whole idea. Now — thank God — there are other institutions that have followed suit.”

The participants in the Pava Hadas Program serve in noncombat units in the military’s Education Corps, the Intelligence Corps, Israeli Air Force or Field Intelligence Corps, during which time they have weekly meetings with a religious advisor — this was initially a male rabbi, but for the past few months has been a female rabbanit — who visits the participants on their bases, answering questions, leading classes and generally checking in on them.

Esh, who recently completed her military service and returned to Midreshet Lindenbaum for further religious study, said these visits were a lifeline. “During basic training and in my [intelligence] course, it was very meaningful,” she said, explaining that during these times commanders deliberately keep their soldiers at arm’s length, a practice referred to, in Hebrew, as “distance.” 

“Suddenly with all the IDF’s distance, here comes someone who asks how you are doing and really listens. They are saying, ‘You are doing something that I believe in, and I will help you do it in the best way possible,’” Esh said.

The program also hosts regular retreats for the participants and runs a number of open WhatsApp groups in which they — and any other soldier who wants to — can ask female halachic experts religion-related questions.

“Rabbis in the army will tell you that [female soldiers] are asking these women more questions because they’re not embarrassed [to ask another woman]. And actually, these [female experts] are getting questions from men as well,” Brander said. 

Esh said that in her experience most of the time these are practical questions about Shabbat observance or kashrut. She recalled when the IDF launched Operation Breaking Dawn on Aug. 5, 2022, against the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terror group in the West Bank in Gaza, when the Tisha B’Av fast day began the following night. “What do you do with Tisha B’Av when ‘Breaking Dawn’ is breaking out. Do I fast or not?” she said. “But sometimes the need is not for halachic questions but something more spiritual, for some to say that it is all right, that you still have a place in the Torah even with the halachic challenges, that you’re still a part of the spiritual world.”

Brander echoed this sentiment: “The vast majority of them serve in the intelligence units, and there they are recommending which targets should be bombed and things of that nature… They are doing the research to find terrorists. These women are working 24/7. So I think some of them feel that they just want to get grounded again in Torah.”

With the new $1.5 million gift from the Pavas, Ohr Torah Stone hopes to expand the Pava Hadas Program, which Brander said is currently reaching its maximum capacity due to limited facilities. 

“I see this massive growth as really showing the hard work of my colleagues in the Midreshet Lindebaum program, and it shows that interest has risen in serving in the IDF,” he said. 

Ann Pava said she and her husband did not consider the $1.5 million donation to be the end of their support for the program. “Our goal is to make sure they’re successful. And if they are successful, to continue to help them to be successful, not to just walk away at some point,” she said.