Minister’s aide fired shortly after maternity leave, while husband serving in Gaza
Move from Communications Ministry comes as Knesset drafts law on job discrimination against reservists’ wives; Karhi says woman was offered identical job in different office
Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi fired his office manager while the father of her newborn daughter was off fighting in Gaza, according to a Tuesday report.
The 29-year-old woman, referred to pseudonymously as Maayan, had returned from maternity leave on October 1, six days before Hamas’s shock attack on southern Israel that triggered the ongoing war in Gaza — where Maayan’s husband was then sent to fight. She had to use up her vacation and sick days to care for her daughter, then went back to work in November. In January, she told the Ynet news site, she was fired, after six years on the job.
Upon her return to the ministry, Maayan said, she was sent to a different office, where “for days on end I came to work and did nothing.” A month later she went back to Karhi’s office, but in late January she was informed by the minister’s chief of staff that she would be terminated.
Her termination, Maayan said, caused a furor in the office, after a human resources worker berated the chief of staff for firing a young mother married to a reservist in active duty. Maayan said that the chief of staff then “lost it and yelled at me, ‘Take your things and leave the office.'”
The next day, Maayan said, she was summoned by Karhi himself, who apologized on behalf of the chief of staff, “but didn’t question the termination itself.”
“Ultimately I feel that I had two sins: giving birth, and having my husband be drafted,” she was quoted as saying, adding, “The minister in the government that sent him to Gaza is the one who ended up firing me.”
The Communications Ministry told Ynet in a statement that Maayan had been removed from her role for “professional reasons,” and that “the minister — with great sensitivity — offered [Maayan] an identical position, under the same conditions, as an office manager in the office of the [ministry’s] director general,” which she had turned down.
In a potential wrongful termination suit against the government office, Maayan is being represented by Shvut Ra’anan, a lawyer with the Reservists’ Wives Forum. The Forum was founded amid the war to advocate for reservists’ spouses’ rights, particularly in the workplace. It has demanded that certain workplace protections afforded by law to reserve soldiers also be applied to their spouses.
A law to that effect drafted by coalition whip Ofir Katz was discussed on Sunday in the Knesset’s Labor and Welfare Committee.
