News
| By Einat Fishbein | "Ha’Ir Tel Aviv" Magazine, Januray 01, 2004 |
Heroes of Ha’Ir - Taking Action
A former high-tech worker who founded and runs a hotline for migrant workers, Sigal Rozen is a Hero of Ha’Ir in the category of Society, for her unwavering struggle, personal example, and proven successes.
In the summer of 1998, I was writing the “New Tel Avivians” column in this newspaper. The expulsion of foreign workers was gaining momentum, and people were being thrown into jail and forgotten there for months. Every week, more and more callers, their voices breaking, were leaving messages on our answering machine in all sorts of languages. But except for another few words in next week’s paper, there wasn’t much that could be done. And then, in between the indignant African accents and the sounds of weeping in Spanish, a few Hebrew voices began to pop up here and there. “Old-time” Tel Avivians who were seeking ways to help. In August, we published the phone number of one of them, who began visiting the workers in prison. That same day Sigal Rozen—a high-tech worker with more than your average social awareness, newly married and expecting her first child—opened up the paper and didn’t even realize that her life had changed course at that moment. Nor could anyone know how many other lives were about to change. “I was like everyone who reads about injustice in the paper and gets infuriated,” she says. “But I always said to myself: ‘What can one little person do?’ I had never volunteered, I wasn’t familiar with organizations, I wasn’t politically active. When I read about that volunteer, I started to understand that individuals can change things.” She made a commitment to devote two hours a week to visiting Ma’asiyahu Prison or manning the phone line provided by Hannah Zohar in the waiting-cum-smoking room of “Kav Laoved” - The Worker’s Hotline offices. After her first week, she found herself rounding up passports on her work time and convincing employers to pay the salaries of their jailed workers. After giving birth, she never went back to her old job; instead she and a few friends set up the “Hotline for Migrant Workers”, which she runs to this day. The next five years were filled with thousands of arrests, dozens of Supreme Court briefs, and a cell phone that never stopped ringing, in an undertaking so consuming that it’s hard to believe one woman was able to handle it all. But while offering one-on-one help to workers, Rozen was also learning the political ropes. She managed to persuade the Labor Ministry to bring supervisors into the jails to arrange the salaries of the expelled workers, and today, volunteers from the organization represent the detainees in the Administrative Deportees Tribunal established as a result of pressure from the Human Rights organizations. The organization numbers some 200 volunteers, among them jurists and interpreters in all languages. They have filed complaints with the Police Investigations Department over police violence in the course of arrests, appealed the expulsion of community leaders, and through focused and impressive work with the media, made the public aware of how the government’s expulsion policy is being carried out. Yet all these successes do not leave room for even a moment of satisfaction, since the status of migrant workers has continued to deteriorate in recent years. Rozen compares it to climbing a mountain while rocks are rolling down on you; after each barrage, you have to grab hold and inch your way up a little further. “My only consolation is thinking how terrible it would be if we weren’t here.” A half a year ago, in the States, I heard about two women, guests of the U.S. State Department, whose report on trafficking in women in Israel had impressed and appalled those who read it. In the wake of the report, Israel was classified as a state that is not acting to prevent human trafficking. The U.S. forced Israel to begin taking immediate steps in this area, and a parliamentary committee of inquiry was established here. It took me time to realize that the person who had done all this was the pregnant woman from the phone in the smoking room. By then, Sigal Rozen was already on her way back home, to her daughter and her cell phone, only to find that Israel had decided in the meantime to expel the children of migrant workers.
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