Visual Project Management | Grant Work: Ezras Nashim - Helping Women
I ideated, researched, wrote, and won a National Geographic Society funding proposal grant to document the first ever all-female EMT corps in the United States, Ezras Nashim, a project I produced via photography, video, extensive interviews, and reported text in the initial pandemic months of 2020 and 2021—and published in The New York Times at its completion. This is a local (to Brooklyn, NY) continuation of my larger project on the fascinating all-female societies across the world, its start having been sponsored by Leica Camera North America and Getty Images/Panasonic Lumix.
- Ezras Nashim: Helping Women
Although men's coronavirus death rates used to double women's, the majority of pandemic collateral damage still befalls women. Women have become increasingly vulnerable in this catastrophe, as the majority of the United States' frontline healthcare and minimum wage workers, its impacted small businesses, and the pandemic's jobless. And this isn't all that ails our female population: violence against women is up across the world, and access to oft-shuttered reproductive services is down.
And so, helping women win equal access to basic human rights, like physical health, emotional comfort and one’s choice in vocation, is ever more crucial.
One organization that aims at all three is an all-female EMT volunteer corps in Brooklyn, New York—the first of its kind in the U.S.—comprising Jewish Orthodox women called Ezras Nashim (or “Helping Women” in Hebrew,) which formed after its counterparts in the influential all-male Hatzolah EMT corps revolted against working alongside them. Despite this, they gathered to offer emergency care especially to observant women, who'd thus far experienced emotional trauma or avoided medical care when without the option of female EMTs.
Indeed Ezras Nashim formed in spite of virulent opposition from their all-male competitor EMTs, interconnected industry decision-makers, and conservative community members—thus changing the idea of women’s role in the personal and professional spheres of the Orthodox community, and enabling religiously modest women to receive crucial medical care from other women.
This project aims to increase awareness of the often hard-to-access culture of the Orthodox Jewish community, and to remind that the age-old battle women face—women not being taken as seriously as their male colleagues—can meet avenues of hope and progress. Within it, I intersect the themes of community, challenge, resilience, healthcare, and women’s rights at a time when pandemic realities force us to refocus on the imperative aspects of equality and the survivability of human existence.
The ideal audience for this project is comprised of two opposites: people who do not know much about the Orthodox Jewish community, and the people who do. It would be important to the unfamiliar viewer to learn more about a community that has not seen much exposure via traditional media outlets; and for those familiar with, or from the community itself, to see representation of women fighting for equality, for the comfort of fellow women, and for the preservation of community culture, all within one organization. This is consequential to showcase, as Jewish Orthodox women are usually not represented in any imagery in ultra-traditional Orthodox media—meaning that even advertisements specifically targeted toward women and articles about women do not contain portraits or imagery of women. This project therefore begins to fill the empty spaces young and adult women in the community encounter when they seek recognition, whether on paper or in the world beyond.
![EMT trainee Adina Sash, 34, carries an Ezras Nashim donations piggy bank around Borough Park in Brooklyn, right past the competing all-male EMTs' Hatzolah ambulance on December 06, 2020. Ezrash Nashim is the first all-female EMT corps aimed at servicing Orthodox Jewish communities of women. On the importance of Ezras Nashim, Sash says, “When you have a community that filters education and access to information, especially about a woman’s agency over her body, then it becomes even more important to equip those very women with the choice of where to turn in an emergency. Especially if the emergency is relevant to her reproductive system, having to confide in males in the community is tricky. Whereas women can help other women navigate those issues better.”In addition to volunteering as a nurse for Ezras Nashim, in 2019 Sash ran for City Council in Brooklyn's 45th district as an Orthodox Jewish woman -- in a community that expects women to adhere to entirely different standards than male candidates, such as never showing their face in community newspaper ads, based on a religious tradition that directs men to shield their eyes from potentially improper images of women -- and says she considers herself a feminist. {quote}There needs to be more acceptance for women getting education in the Orthodox community, and the community is split on this. There is a 'If it’s not broken, don’t fix it' mentality because [all-male competing EMT organization] Hatzolah already exists, but there are others who understand inclusion of women leads to better care overall.{quote} On her motivations to run for office, to which she says she faced a lot of opposition from the community, she says: {quote}Making girls in the community aware that in addition to starting a family, there is importance to being part of the political process, challenges the narrative that it’s a mans job to run for office.{quote}(Photo by: Yana Paskova for The New York Times/the National Geographic Society)](http://storage.lightgalleries.net/4bd5ec03b1d55/images/Ezras_Nashim_009_thumb.jpg)
