The wife of every president of the state has promoted a particular interest or cause.
To mention a few: Nina Katzir was particularly concerned with the soldiers who were wounded in the Yom Kippur War, and Ophira Navon campaigned on the part of the mentally or physically disadvantaged.
Sonia Peres was angry with her husband for not spending his twilight years with her, and never set foot in Beit Hanassi as the President’s Residence is called in Hebrew, while Nechama Rivlin invited children to come to the residence and to bring their pets to romp on the spacious lawns while the youngsters planted shrubs and flowers on a patch of grass she allocated to them.
Shortly after Michal Herzog, wife of the current president, began to feel comfortable in her new environment, she was asked by a Jerusalem Post reporter what she planned to do.
Herzog replied that she didn’t know yet, partially because in terms of law, there is no rule applying to the president’s spouse. “I wasn’t appointed, and I wasn’t elected, so I have no specific role,” she said.
Since then, a lot of people have referred to her as Israel’s First Lady, but there is no official position as such. Hebrew press releases that emanate from the President’s Office refer to her as “Eshet HaNassi” – the wife of the president – though a series of British-born presidential spokespeople who deal with international media have given her the honorarium of First Lady in English-language press releases.
She is actually a lot more than that. Herzog is a criminal lawyer and professional mediator who moved from the sphere of law to that of philanthropy, managing philanthropic foundations and serving on the boards of various organizations which inter alia support people with disabilities, care for at-risk youth, provide employment opportunities, and encourage open dialogue.
GIVEN THE wide span of her activities, it would be interesting to know whether, during a little over three and a half years in which her husband has been the president, she has come across anything that she did not know before.
The question was posed to her in the course of an interview that she gave to The Jerusalem Post in advance of International Women’s Day, which has evolved into International Women’s Month.
As it happens, there is something, though she was perhaps subconsciously aware of it before. Even though Herzog is a strong believer in women’s rights and in having more women be included in the decision-making process in general, she had not previously understood the importance of soft power.
Throughout their marriage, she and her husband have done many things together. When she saw the volume and variety of work that he does on a daily basis, she realized that she had to do more to help him, so they decided that they were a team and that whenever she could alleviate his burden, she would do so. In addition, she would also take on extra work for herself.
The presidency was not new to her. Her father-in-law Chaim Herzog was Israel’s sixth president, and during his ten-year tenure from 1983-93, she and her husband had often been guests of her in-laws. Early in her marriage, they had taken her with them on a state visit that included New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong, Kenya and Sri Lanka, so she was reasonably certain when she moved for a seven-year presidential period from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem that she knew what to expect.
“But nothing prepared us for what we experienced,” she said, as she described the roller coaster of emotions that accompanied most of the first half of his term.
“The presidency was different. The media was different. The way people spoke to each other was different. There was relaxed respect for public service. People allowed themselves expressions that they would never agree to say out loud before,” she said.
But most who came to meet with the president were polite and quietly spoken, though there were extremists on both political sides.
THEORETICALLY, the president is the most unifying factor in the nation – and it’s certainly what Isaac Herzog has aimed to be. But the nation was well on the way to polarization when he took office, with mass protest and counter protest rallies over judicial reform that were taking place all over the country, each growing larger, louder, more violent and more intolerant of their opponent’s.
Then came October 7. The Herzogs were in their private home in Tel Aviv. They heard the radio announcements and the sirens like so many others in the country and quickly swung into action.
Since then, they’ve barely had time to sleep. They meet with thousands of people a week – hostage families; bereaved parents and siblings whose loved one were murdered by Hamas; families of soldiers who fell in battle; hostages who have been released; wounded soldiers in hospitals; evacuees, army and other security top brass – in addition to all the regular presidential duties and meetings around the country.
They traveled to many of the areas physically affected by the war, and were among the first officials to visit Kibbutz Be’eri and promote its rehabilitation. Michal Herzog accompanies him most of the time unless she has engagements of her own, like hosting a group of female soldiers. She hosts or attends gatherings of women representatives of just about every form of group diversity that exists in Israel.
Listed on her calendar are more than a dozen International Women’s Day events in different parts of the country, including in the Arab community, a women’s health conference, and The Jerusalem Post’s Women’s Leadership Conference on March 25 at the Carlton Hotel, Tel Aviv.
ASKED TO share her thoughts about a state commission of inquiry into the bungling that resulted in the October massacre, the taking of hostages and the sexual and violent assaults – she thinks it’s imperative and long overdue. The purpose is not to apportion blame, but to get to the core of what went wrong and why, first to prevent it from happening again, and secondly to bring about closure for all those families who lost loved ones. If they don’t have closure, they will suffer the effects of post-traumatic stress, and will not be able to function properly.
“It’s very important,” she insists, saying that it is second in priority after bringing the hostages home. Third is mental health, about which she has spoken to Health Minister Uriel Busso, who is trying to find a way to shorten the training period for mental health therapists so that more of them can be available to treat more patients in their home communities, rather than in the nearest big town or city.
Also connected to mental health is the reluctance of abused women to relive their ordeal by telling the stories over and over again to successive physicians. Someone came with the idea that abused women be given a purple card after they tell their story the first time, and when they get past the first physician, they hold out the card to other physicians who are immediately alerted that this is a super sensitive case, and not to question them but to check their files in the computer.
This is now law, and Herzog is happy to have helped push it through.
Another health-related development was actually started before October 7 at Sheba Medical Center, but is now working on a much larger scale: National Service young women are being trained to give basic treatments to patients to free up nurses and physicians for more serious cases.
Michal Herzog has no doubt that the root of the October catastrophe is in male officers refusing to take notice of the warnings of young female observers who saw that something was stirring on the other side of the border, but whose reports went unheeded.
Does she consider herself a feminist?
She doesn’t think of herself as an advocate for women’s rights, but she is disturbed by the absence of gender equality when she attends an event in which there are several people on stage expressing opinions – and not one of them is a woman.
Although Israel has famously had a woman prime minister (Golda Meir), there has never been a woman head of state, although there has been an interim president: Dalia Itzik when she was speaker of the Knesset. President Moshe Katsav, who was under investigation by police at the time, recused himself from the presidency. According to law, when the president is out of the country or unable to fulfill his duties for other reasons, the Knesset speaker takes over. She was acting president for the first half of July, 2007 – the shortest stint of four acting presidents.
Herzog thinks that Itzik did well in the role, and that it’s time for a woman to be elected.
Does she see herself as a candidate? After all, no other woman in Israel is better equipped for the job.
She’s had many positive experiences so far, but doesn’t fancy spending another seven years in the President’s Residence when her husband completes his term.
Meanwhile, there’s a lot to do, particularly with the families of the hostages, who at every meeting ask the Herzogs to help them all stay together regardless of religious, lifestyle and background differences.
Toward this effort, there are regular sessions of Time to Talk where participants exchange feelings and impressions on a variety of subjects in a civilized manner, while getting to know each other better and forming closer relationships. They have been through so much together, so often, that Herzog is confident that there is more that unites them than divides them, and that they will stay together as extensions of each other’s families.
THERE ARE many organizations working all year round to help the underprivileged, the needy, children with life-threatening illnesses, wounded soldiers, bereaved families, victims of violence and many others. Very often, there are several organizations working for the same cause, but instead of working in cooperation with each other, they work in competition. Herzog believes that this is detrimental and that cooperation is always the best way.
During the week of our interview, one of the meetings she attended was for a cooperative effort in which three different organizations that care for abused women came together to work out how to help women who had been hospitalized as a result of violence, from the day after they leave hospital. She has attended similar meetings between several NGOs working for a particular cause and a group of funders who are interested in the same cause. Because everyone gathered around the table is more or less on the same page, less time is wasted, discussion is more fruitful and the end results are productive and beneficial.
In Herzog’s book, cooperation is always the best way, especially “when NGOs and funders come together.”
With International Women’s Day as the backdrop for our interview, it was par for the course that Herzog would be asked to name her women heroines.
She unhesitatingly replied “the women from the Gaza border communities,” explaining that after the horrors they experienced – bereavement, evacuation, uncertainty – they continue to carry on and not give up. To her, they are an inspiration, as are Diaspora Jewish women who conduct information campaigns and conduct fund-raising drives for Israel’s vital humanitarian needs.