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The teacher who struggled all her life with conventions and fought for the weak: "I promised that only I would pave the path of my life" - voila! news

2023-03-11T08:11:12.118Z


Shoshana Ron, who immigrated to Israel from Uzbekistan at the age of two, fought all her life for society. She did not give up on her students as a teacher, took care of the conditions of employment of female teachers in Israel, helped immigrants with their absorption in Israel and managed the association Brit Mochi Bukhara. About two weeks ago she passed away at the age of 91


Shoshana Ron in her youth (photo: courtesy of the family)

After more than twenty years of teaching, Shoshana Ron could no longer accept the status of teachers in Israel, and especially not the status of female teachers.

Their power was weak and in her opinion they were not treated as they deserved.

She decided to act to change the situation and established a list that ran in the elections for the teachers' union.

"The riots are against male control," one of the newspapers wrote at the time.

She and her friends succeeded in introducing a representative to the Teachers' Union and were partners in improving the employment conditions of teachers in Israel.



This chapter symbolizes the life of Shoshana Ron, who in her youth set goals and struggled to achieve them, while fighting against the conventions of the conservative society in which she grew up and while caring for the weak.

Two weeks ago she passed away and she is 91 years old.



Ron was born in 1933 in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan.

The families of her parents, Michael and Rina Aharonov, belonged to the centuries-old community of Bukhara Jewry.

The Bolshevik revolution in 1917 harmed the status of the Jews of Bukhara and the regime imposed severe restrictions on trade, which was the main economic branch in which they were engaged, and they were forbidden to continue to maintain independent systems of culture and education.



Her parents' families were also harmed, her father was banned for three years due to his Zionist activities and the mother's family, which belonged to the local aristocracy and owned a prosperous candy factory, was financially harmed and the father was murdered by members of the Soviet regime in front of his family.

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Shoshana's parents got married after her father was released from prison.

Her mother had already finished her academic studies and was a civil engineer by training and her father was an expert in making shoe models.

The couple decided that they had to flee outside the borders of the Soviet Union, as did many of the Bukhara Jews, including members of their families.



When Shoshana was two years old, she went with her family on the long and dangerous journey together with other people.

As their destination - the Land of Israel.

The family arrived in Turkmenistan, where they hired Kurdish border smugglers and continued through hidden paths to escape the Soviet soldiers, with Shoshana carried on her father's shoulders.



After four days they reached the border with Iran.

Before they could cross the border, they were robbed by a gang, which almost certainly received advance information about their arrival from the smugglers.

After a year in which they lived in Tehran, the family received entry visas to the Land of Israel and in August 1936 arrived in Tel Aviv.

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Shoshana Ron speaks before the teachers' union conference (photo: courtesy of the family)

In the new country, her parents were unable to find work in their professions - her father did not have the capital to establish a business designing shoe models and the mother could not find work as a civil engineer.

They rented a shop selling fruits and vegetables and worked there.



When she was seven, Shoshana experienced a particularly difficult event: the bombing of Tel Aviv by Italian planes in September 1940, an event in which over a hundred people were killed.

Hebron Street, where the family lives, was badly hit and Shoshana said that a shell fell a few meters away from her.



After that they moved to the Florentine neighborhood.

The neighborhood was mainly made up of immigrants from Bukhara and Thessaloniki and a few Ashkenazim.

She described the period of residence in Florentine as "an extended family idyll. The families lived in a density that is hard to imagine today, and despite this, life was conducted in an atmosphere of real evil, especially among the women."

She described a period of a difficult economic situation and contentment with little and at the same time a special atmosphere of holiness on weekends and holidays that were celebrated with great pomp and splendor, while maintaining the customs that brought her to Bukhare.

Shoshana Ron speaks to teachers about the erosion of their wages (photo: courtesy of the family)

In her childhood and youth she experienced many historical events;

She remembered the day when British policemen murdered the leader of Lehi, Avraham "Yair" Stern, in the apartment where he was hiding in her neighborhood. As a child, she worked after school hours at the Bialik school, at the "Plotus" candy factory on Mizrahi 2nd Street. In one of the apartments in the adjacent building Stern hid. "A woman in a dressing gown came out and shouted: 'They will kill Yair, they will kill Yair,' and indeed we immediately heard a bunch of shots, following which the British came down with a stretcher on which was a human corpse covered with a blanket," Shoshana said.



At the age of 15, she stood with thousands of people on Sderot Rothschild in front of the Tel Aviv Museum, at the moments when the independence of the State of Israel was declared.

"I am thankful for my luck that allowed me to live rare and fateful moments in the life of the state. And such was the moment when David Ben-Gurion announced the establishment of the state," she later wrote.

When Ben-Gurion came to visit the Aharonov family's neighbor, Arthur Ben Natan, who was the Director General of the Ministry of Defense, Shoshana and her mother met him face to face, and her mother even brought the guest some of her dishes. "Mom almost fainted from excitement," Shoshana said. with her for half an hour. "If you met Stalin, would he treat you the same way?", her father smiled when they told him about the meeting. In



the War of Independence, the neighborhood was on the front line, and Ron remembered the difficult sight of a neighbor who was killed after her apartment was hit by shelling.

In her youth she dreamed of becoming a singer, but her family opposed it, for reasons of tradition.

She secretly studied voice development and vocal repertoire.

At the age of 17, she won a scholarship to study music in New York, but her family forbade her to go there.

"From that moment on I promised myself that when I reach the age of 18 and stand up for myself - I and only I will pave the path of my life, and that's what I did," she said.



She enlisted in the IDF, contrary to what was customary at the time in her Bukhari religion, and during her service she completed the matriculation exams and upon her release was accepted to the Hebrew University, studying political science and international relations. Later she also studied for a degree in general and Jewish history studies and was qualified to teach. In 1958 she married Amnon Ron and the couple



founded his home in Jerusalem.Over the years they had four children: Ofer, Einat, Tamar and Oren.


Shoshana began working in teaching, initially working in the evenings, as a teacher of youth who were expelled from the education system, and a year later as a 7th and 8th grade educator.

In the 1970s, she was among the teachers who participated in a pilot based on the theory of "restorative teaching," developed by educator and Israel Prize laureate, Professor Carl Frankenstein.

His educational year aimed at focusing on students who were harmed from birth and were integrated into various special education frameworks, and in many cases also suffered from deprivation and cognitive-scholastic weakness due to an environment that does not challenge learning.

According to Frankenstein, the students were called "cultivating" students and he believed that there is potential in every child, and it can always be restored.

Shoshana believed in Frankenstein's educational teaching, applied it and said that she saw a blessing in the commission.

"Teachers against the male control under the leadership of the Teachers Union" (photo: official website, Historical Jewish Press)

In the early 1980s, she entered the public sector and began to work to improve the status of the teacher and the conditions of his employment, focusing mainly on the public of female teachers.

After two terms in the teachers' union, she realized that she had exhausted herself in teaching and took early retirement.



Before she had time to rest, she was contacted by the Histadrut to ask her to help with her admission.

It was the year 1990 and large waves of immigration from the Soviet Union came to Israel.

Shoshana, who was a Russian speaker, willingly accepted and was appointed to the position responsible for absorption coordinators in the working councils throughout the country.

She made sure that the immigrant was accompanied from the moment he got off the plane, through registration with the health insurance fund, bank, the Ministry of Education and up to concern for employment and education.

At the end of five years she moved to work in the public inquiries department of the Histadrut and after five years in this position she retired.



But this time too, before she had time to rest, she was asked to manage the Bukhara Expatriate Alliance Association.

Until then, she had not been involved in the life of the community, and apart from the customs that were practiced in her parents' house, she knew nothing about the community.

To begin with, Shoshana learned the historical story of the Bukhari community, its contribution to Zionism and the beginning of the Bukhari's immigration to the Land of Israel at the end of the 19th century in what was called the "Capture of Zion" immigration.

She was proud of her legacy;

The neighborhood they established in Jerusalem, its democratic management, while managing welfare institutions and a network of solidarity that included free education and health for the needy and pensions for teachers.

"We were 11 years ahead of Herzl, since he published his social concept in his book 'Altneuland in 1902,'" she explained.

She took pride in distributing scholarships for higher education to the youth of the community and in an academic course taught at Bar-Ilan University to study the history of Bukhara Jews and its cultural and Zionist heritage.

Shoshana Ron at the scholarship distribution ceremony of the Bukhara Expatriate Alliance (photo: courtesy of the family)

The alliance under its management accompanied new immigrants and assisted them in the absorption processes.

She emphasized that there was never a report on the immigration crises of Bukhara immigrants "and no claims of 'I deserve it' were heard from them."


The association established a specialized home for the needy and initiated treatment for youth at risk and in distress.

In addition, the Alliance for the Expatriates of Bukhara launched a project to connect old and new immigrants, by holding meetings for individuals and groups.

At the same time, Shoshana edited the newspaper for Bukhara expatriates.



In 2013, she was awarded the title of Tel Aviv-Jaffa City Darling for the series of projects that led to the absorption of immigrants in the south of the city and her concern for the integration of the unemployed into the labor market.



After 17 years in the position, she finally retired, at the age of 84. "On the last day of my work at the Brit, I left there with my head held high and my back straight. My heart is proud of feeling supreme happiness, I finally discovered where my roots are - I am a member of an old generation that was resurrected and has a significant part in the history of Zionism Land of Israel," she wrote.

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Source: walla

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