Nicole to the rescue
By blood and origin she is Australian. Her citizenship is Israeli. She is a lawyer by profession. As to her calling, she belongs to the entire Jewish people. As to her heart, she belongs entirely to those she has helped. She is Nicole Maor.
Nicole Maor
Last week, the Director of IRAC’s Legal Aid Center for Olim (LACO), Nicole Maor, was honored as one of Ha’aretz’s “66 Israeli Women You Should Know”. Nicole has worked at IRAC since 1992. Over these years, I have watched her in awe as she and her team helped over 80,000 people make Israel their home.
Nicole is the Golden Girl of the Reform Movement. A founding member of Netzer, the Reform Zionist movement in Sydney, she lives her values of tikkun olam. She made aliyah in 1989, and she lived on in Kibbutz Lotan for six years, where she met and married her husband. After moving to Tel Aviv, she began her miraculous work at IRAC.
There is a one-page law that outlines the eligibility for immigration to Israel. However, this broad law focuses on ideology, and has spawned hundreds of rules and regulations, creating a maze of bureaucracy. Nicole’s gift is in her ability to navigate this maze, finding the truth in the details of every story she encounters and fighting determinedly to ensure that justice prevails. Examples include the convert whose Judaism was not recognized because he inadvertently called a shofar a trumpet in a hearing before the Interior Ministry, or the 73-year-old French woman, who had no documents to prove she was Jewish besides an article in Yad Vashem which mentioned her father’s name.
Nicole’s commitment, boundless energy and independent thought bring honor to the IRAC team. We have no need to advertise LACO, because LACO receives 6,000 phone calls a year on the merit of her success stories alone.
“Many women have done well, but you surpass them all.” (Proverbs 31:29)
Mazal tov, Nicole Maor. We need people like you. There are so many seeking aliyah who fall between the cracks due to the severity of a fixed viewing of things. All the more unfair when one considers the extreme difficulty for many Jews in the Diaspora of producing conventional proof of their identities, this due to past dispossession and assimilation. One should not have had to grow up in a traditional Jewish family setting to ensure aliyah.
Happy indeed to meet her……