This weekend is Jewish Women’s Aid Shabbat – our community’s annual Shabbat to raise awareness of domestic abuse. Below is the information we have received from Jewish Women’s Aid about this important moment:

This year the theme for Jewish Women’s Aid Shabbat is ‘Exploring Healthy Relationships’. The goal is to open conversations across our community about what makes a relationship healthy – or unhealthy. We have created a Shabbat Activity, looking at different characteristics of a relationship and discussing: are they healthy, unhealthy or even abusive?

By thinking about and discussing these scenarios we hope to achieve two things:

• Encourage a thoughtful and considerate approach to relationships in our community
• Empower members of the community to recognise when their situation may not be unhealthy, but abusive

The activity is available in shul and online at jwa.org.uk/healthyrelationships and can be done at home with family, with friends or in any setting.

At the heart of JWA’s Outreach and Prevention Programme is a message about power and control because in a healthy relationship, power and control is shared, but in an abusive relationship, one partner (or former partner) exercises both of these disproportionately. Empathy, trust, respect and kindness are also very important.

Anyone can experience an unhealthy or abusive relationship but both nationally and globally, women are disproportionately affected by abuse.
• Almost 30% of women will experience some form of domestic abuse after the age of 16 (Office for National Statistics, 2022)
• JWA supports over 700 Jewish women and girls across the UK (2022)
• Most of our clients have experienced coercive & controlling behaviour, emotional and economic abuse