BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

Domestic Violence Awareness Month is an opportunity for us to speak out in our communities. Giving voice to our stories helps enlighten the uninformed and empower victims who feel they’re suffering alone. Throughout October – Domestic Violence Awareness Month – JWI will be encouraging you to raise your voice in different ways. Each day at the JWI Blog , we will present a personal account of domestic or relationship abuse. Here's one story: Former Washington Post executive Leslie Morgan Steiner is a best-selling author with degrees from two Ivy League schools, three adorable children and a loving and successful husband. If you met her on the street you might never guess her secret: that she was once married to a man who beat her with abandon on a regular basis — an experience she recounts in the memoir Crazy Love . Steiner says when she first met her ex-husband, whom she calls "Conor," on the New York City subway, she had no inkling that he was capable of such abuse. ...

When Kay Day began to take her 12-year-old daughter Rebecca to doctors in South Carolina for a mystery illness, both mother and daughter became very frustrated. Different doctors offered a variety of diagnoses for the girl's recurrent abdominal pain. Some doctors suggested radical treatment options. At least one doctor believed her daughter suffered from depression and needed anti-depressants. Her pain was all "in her head." The family was about to make an unexpected move to Jacksonville, Fla., and even some family members wondered if the middle-school student wasn't just upset about the move. The result of what became a year of turmoil is Day's first nonfiction book, “Killing Earl.” After six months of unsuccessful treatment, Rebecca was on home-bound instruction from her school and had lost 15 pounds. The family couldn't complete their move to Florida until Rebecca was well. Complicating matters was the fact that Rebecca named her pain “Earl.” Fortunately, D...

As a survivor of sexual, emotional & psychological abuse - I am posting this in the hopes that everyone will read and forward to their Rabbis - Thank you. Barbara Message from The Awareness Center: CALL TO ACTION: Request to all Rabbis on behalf of Sexual Violence Awareness Month Please forward the following message to every rabbi you know! Each week many of our rabbis send out weekly messages and prayers to their congregants. Considering April is Sexual Violence Awareness Month and also a month that represents freedom to the Jewish people, The Awareness Center is asking that all rabbis to send messages of healing, empowerment and growth to those who are who are suffering the life long effects of surviving sexual violence. All survivors of sex crimes are veterans of a war. The messages sent out should be about honoring survivors as if they were hero's of a horrendous war battle. The only true victims are those who lost their lives as a results of the wounds inflicted upon them...