I israel
WOMEN OF POWER Female IDF soldiers shatter contemporary infantry lines By Maayan Jaffe, JNS.org
PHOTOS COURTESY ISRAEL DEFENSE FORCES
Cpl. Dylan Ostrin, of Houston,Texas, is on the IDF’s recent list of “8 Female Soldiers Who Shattered Barriers in 2013.” Today, she is an explosives instructor in the Combat Engineering Corps.
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rom the inception of the Jewish state to the present, Israel’s military has been anything but a male-dominated institution. On May 26, 1948, Prime Minister David BenGurion established the Israel Defense Forces. Less than three months later, the Knesset instituted mandatory conscription for all women without children. Today 57 percent of all officers in the Israeli army are women, according to the IDF. The IDF recently highlighted the stories of a select group of those women on its blog, in a list titled “8 Female Soldiers Who Shattered Barriers in 2013.” The article, which featured women in a variety of military roles and from diverse backgrounds, said that in recent years women
28 www.SDJewishJournal.com l February 2014
have “taken increasingly high-level positions in the IDF.” The female soldiers included in the list “challenge stereotypes,” wrote the IDF. Among those listed are two soldiers originally from the U.S.: Cpl. Dylan Ostrin, from Houston, Texas, who made aliyah at the age of seven, and Sgt. Sarit Petersen, from Maryland, who is currently in the process of making aliyah. Petersen, who recently completed her IDF term, served as a shooting instructor in the Nahal Infantry Brigade. Her job was to teach reconnaissance brigade soldiers (Special Forces) to use their weapons. Speaking from her parents’ home in Baltimore, Peterson waxed modest
about being chosen for the IDF blog entry. “There are awesome people doing awesome things in the army all the time,” she said with a giggle. A 2010 graduate of the Yeshiva of Greater Washington, Petersen said that she was “surprised” at her selection, though she was one of the first to hold her position in the IDF. Petersen trained soldiers slated for elite army units. They had already completed at least eight months of basic training, and they often had several additional months of more intense training. She said that she and her colleagues would “sit for hours and hours” planning and analyzing how they were going to take these men from “regular soldiers to