Miriam Sharvit, founder and director of the Sichur Machshavot college for design and art for religious and ultra-Orthodox women, says in an interview with Channel 7 that the blessing and encouragement she received from her father, Rabbi Shlomo Moshe Amar, helped shape her career. Amar, the Chief Rabbi of Israel and rabbi of Jerusalem, gave her a canvas and oil paints for her 10th birthday, and later arrived at her bat mitzvah with a Singer sewing machine.
Sharvit says her father told her to develop her artistic side and that there is no such thing as a woman who should not work in art. “It’s love, it’s aesthetics, it’s feminine,” she recalls him saying. She says the support was not about earning a living, but about building character. That upbringing led her to study drawing with well-known artists and complete advanced degrees in design.
She says her college, founded about 26 years ago, helped turn design from a marginal subject into a respected, profitable profession for thousands of religious women. According to Sharvit, more than 800 graduates a year join the design, advertising, architecture and hi-tech industries. She says she also teaches students herself, including design thinking and other related subjects, because the work began with a childhood passion in her home.
Sharvit says the path was not easy, especially at first, because parts of the traditional educational establishment were uneasy with international design concepts and public exhibitions. In the first year, the school held large exhibitions that drew about 5,000 women and girls from religious and ultra-Orthodox communities. After a seminary director who had once been her principal complained that the events elevated design and aesthetics too much, she moved the next exhibition to a smaller hall, only to again see about 5,000 attendees. She says that showed her there was enormous demand, and that design and art can exist within Jewish law and modesty, as a practical, livelihood-producing form of beauty rather than showy display.
