The layers of women's lives

• Published date: 08 June 2021
• Author: Rochel Sylvetsky
• Publication title: Israel National News (Israel)

After all, 2021 is a traumatic year for everyone, first due to the Corona pandemic, the restrictions accompanying it, the pain of those who fell ill and the losses of loved ones who succumbed to the virus. The Jewish world was traumatized once again by the Lag Ba'Omer tragedy in Meron which left 45 celebrants dead and 45 families and their many friends bereft and by the tragedy in Givat Ze'ev's Karlin-Stoliner synagogue. In May, barrages of lethal rockets launched at Israeli civilians by Hamas and the Islamic Jihad led to Operation Guardian of the Walls in Gaza, with the country's citizens rushing to shelters at all hours. Concomitantly, the Israeli Arab uprising, a violent, hate-filled series of pogroms in cities where coexistence was thought successful, traumatized the idealistic young families who had moved to mixed population cities, and the Israeli public, and may have destroyed any hopes of peace. A steep rise in anti-Semitic incidents in the West shocked Jews the world over

(Ed. Note:The Arab riots in Israel were eerily reminiscent of the 1929 Hevron massacre before the establishment of the State of Israel when Arabs who had been peaceful neighbors of Jews for years pillaged, raped and murdered unarmed innocents. The difference? The presence of determined Jewish self-defense in 2021 – not the police, whose inaction was also eerily reminiscent of the British Mandate police in 1929 – but Jews who came from all over Israel of their own volition to defend their brothers, and Jewish builders who joined forces, came and rebuilt burnt synagogues.)

If the number of articles and columns already posted about the above subjects are an indication, it won't take long before a plethora of books are published about Meron, the Guardian of the Walls operation, the Arab riots, Western anti-Semitism. Among them, there will be no shortage of personal stories of those who suffered and lived through these events as well as those who, sadly, did not survive them.

However, just a few minutes of reading Layers suffice to realize that this book contains intensely personal stories, relevant because individual challenges arise and continue to demand attention independent of local or international events.

Shira Lankin Sheps' internet site The Layers Project Magazine, where women were welcomed to tell their stories, was the catalyst for the book, acting as an incubator of sorts.

This type of book seems a product of the internet age in which the new norm is a propensity, probably...