Actress Emma Bitan’s Journey From Self Doubt to Faith and Self Acceptance

“I looked at the director of the acting school and couldn’t believe it. I had already gone through an extreme crash diet and lost 30 kilos in three months, and he simply looked me in the eyes and said, ‘It’s not enough. You need to lose more.’ At that moment, I felt as though the world was asking me to simply disappear.”

With these painful words, actress Emma Bitan, 48, looks back on her difficult struggle with self image. It was a battle that began in the rehearsal rooms of Beit Zvi, the School of Performing Arts, continued through crushing loneliness on Fifth Avenue in New York, and eventually led to an unexpected introduction and a marriage proposal on a bench in Uman.

Today, Bitan is religious, a mother of three, and lives in Harish. She is no longer trying to make herself smaller. Quite the opposite. She is here to make her voice heard, and this time, no one will silence it.

Bitan grew up secular in Rishon LeZion and never imagined that she would travel all the way to New York and experience numerous disappointments before growing spiritually and meeting her husband. Her connection to Judaism had always been casual. “We fasted on Yom Kippur, but watched movies and played outside,” she recalls. As for Breslov Hasidut, she encountered it almost entirely “by chance.”

While serving in the army, she noticed a sticker on her officer’s binder that read, “Na Nach Nachma Nachman Me’Uman.” Even then, the sticker caught her attention. But beyond asking about it and receiving a vague answer from the officer, who probably did not know much herself, it ended there.

After completing her military service, Bitan went straight to Beit Zvi. Although she had dreamed her entire life of becoming an actress, she quickly discovered that the road ahead would not be easy.

“I knew I was a little full figured, but then people started criticizing me and saying that actors could not get accepted into theater and stage work if they were fat,” she recalls.

She did not see herself as fat, but the social pressure and her dream of performing took their toll. “I went on an extreme crash diet with pills, and in three months I lost 30 kilos. It was crazy. Everyone who studied with me during the first semester didn’t recognize me when I returned for the second.”

But even that was not enough. “The demand was to ‘disappear,’ to force myself into an impossible standard of thinness,” she says. She remembers one particularly defining moment. “One day, one of the school administrators came over to me and, without any embarrassment, said, ‘You lost a nice amount of weight, but you need to lose more.’ He put me into a kind of loop with myself because I couldn’t understand where he got the nerve to say something like that to me.”

The most difficult periods of Bitan’s life gradually led her through a deep inner process in which she learned to stop and truly listen to herself without compromise. Despite her dream of succeeding as a professional actress, the voice of that administrator stayed with her and would not let go. It was not only about losing weight, but went much deeper than that. She was also being told to become less dominant, even in the way she used her voice.

Then a director came along who helped her see herself differently. “She told me, ‘Anyone who doesn’t like you won’t work with you, whether you’re thin or heavy. You are very dominant onstage. You are a leading role, like Lady Macbeth. You will never be able to play a secondary role, and you shouldn’t change that. Someone criticized your dominant voice? I actually want that voice.’ And then it clicked.”

Were you able to accept yourself at that point?

“Not really yet. I could accept myself, but not love myself. Those are two different things. I can accept that I’m a redhead without liking it. At a certain point, I said, ‘This is what there is,’ because I no longer had the strength to fight it.”

“Suddenly I Was Called to Audition for a Commercial, and I Got the Part”

Anyone who meets Emma encounters a combination of sensitivity, depth, and sharp humor that leaves little doubt that this is a woman who has been through a great deal. The first thing she brings with her is truth, spoken without embellishment and without any desire to impress.

Perhaps that honesty was born somewhere between the many audition rejections she experienced after finishing Beit Zvi, her endless struggles with her weight, and her search for the person with whom she would build her life. “I couldn’t understand how everyone around me was getting married and I wasn’t. It was very difficult for me.”

That search eventually took her all the way to New York.

After Beit Zvi, she tried to get into various auditions, but nothing worked out. She found herself making a sharp professional turn and working as a security screener at Ben Gurion Airport. During that period, she was suddenly invited to audition for a commercial and got the job.

“The commercial appeared on all the major platforms at the time, and everyone saw it. It created a huge buzz. Suddenly there was a flood of messages, and I was invited to more auditions. But then, I decided to go to New York.”

At the time, anyone working as a security screener at Ben Gurion Airport could apply for a security position with El Al and request a station somewhere in the world. Bitan asked to work in New York, and it was there that her relationship with the Creator truly began to take shape.

“That was the first spark when I began talking to God,” she says. “I wanted so badly to be accepted for work in New York that I started praying. I knew there was a God in the world, but I didn’t call Him Hashem.”

Her prayers were answered, and she found herself on her way to work at Newark Airport in New Jersey. But once there, a different kind of challenge began. “I wanted to get to New York, so Hashem gave it to me, but in the way He thought I needed to receive it. What I had imagined was completely different.”

From the performance "In the King's Court." Photo: Adva Kakon

What did you think would happen?

“First of all, I thought I would get into acting school, but I didn’t understand how intense the competition was. It was even greater than in Israel. Also, there were a lot of people around me, but I felt terribly lonely. That was when I understood the huge difference between being alone and being lonely.”

That loneliness eased somewhat one day when she got lost on Fifth Avenue in New York and found herself walking straight into a store with a mezuzah on the door. “I heard Hebrew there, and it brought me back to life. I realized that this was what I was missing, and I asked whoever was there to help me find a Jewish place to go.”

That is how she arrived at Aish HaTorah in Manhattan and met a man named Steve. “He told me about singles gatherings that included a Torah class and dinner for five dollars. It really appealed to me, and I decided to go.” The gatherings were held on Monday nights at eight o’clock on the upper floor of the synagogue.

“I went there like a good Jewish single woman, thinking that I really wanted to catch a rich husband. But then, when I reached the second floor of the synagogue, I burst into tears. Everything gave me such a powerful feeling of belonging, as if I had come home. Everyone who came to the class was Jewish. Most of them worked on Wall Street, or were doctors or lawyers. Very successful people.”

“I Asked the Rabbi at Ben Gurion Airport for Permission to Keep Shabbat”

Steve gave a Torah class, and from the questions Emma asked, he realized that it would be best to connect her with Orthodox families who could host her for Shabbat.

“When he suggested it, I immediately told him that I was secular,” she says with a laugh. “I remember calling Steve one day and telling him that I felt uncomfortable because I was arriving at families on Shabbat by train or bus. I asked him what I should do, but he said, ‘Just come, because no one is asking you about it.’ What mattered to them was bringing me closer, not pushing me away.”

One day, she visited a synagogue and heard Shlomo Carlebach’s melody for Lecha Dodi. “I melted. I felt the Jewish soul inside me open up, and I wanted more. Slowly, I also began changing the way I dressed. I bought more skirts and modest blouses so I would fit in with the families hosting me.”

Then Pesach arrived, and Emma had nowhere to spend the Seder. She was invited to the home of a community rabbi named Henry (Chanoch) Harris, where for the first time in her life she experienced a halachic Seder.

“It was a very special Seder. They put on an entire presentation for the little children, really living ‘And you shall tell your child.’ Everything was calm and enjoyable. There were many Israelis, and everyone shared something inspiring. That was when, seeing the family atmosphere, I realized that I was in my own Egypt and that I had to return to Israel to build a family. It was a huge disappointment.”

Why?

“Because I hadn’t succeeded at the American dream that had called me there, to study acting and marry a wealthy Jewish man. I went on many dates there, and I returned to Israel feeling that I had missed out.”

Back in Israel, she enrolled in Yemima studies. At the same time, she continued growing spiritually while still working at Ben Gurion Airport.

How did that work? After all, people work there on Shabbat too.

“That’s where I experienced miracles beyond nature after I asked the rabbi at Ben Gurion Airport for permission to observe Shabbat. I told him I was becoming more religious and wanted to keep Shabbat more seriously, and that I wouldn’t write. He didn’t really believe me. Apparently, I wasn’t the first person to say things like that.

“I had just started a course to become a team leader, and everyone laughed. They said, ‘How are you going to run in a skirt if there is an evacuation?’ But I insisted, and when I received the approvals, I became the first team leader in a skirt who, of course, observed Shabbat.”

“We Sat Down on a Bench. He Took Out a Silver Amulet and Asked, ‘Do You Want to Be My Wife?’”

Not long afterward, a friend from her Yemima studies suggested that she meet Ben Zion, a Breslov Hasid who would eventually become her husband.

“When they told him about me, he refused to receive a picture, even though it was important to me that he knew that I was a full figured woman. He said he believed in a connection between souls and agreed to meet.

“When we met, I realized that he was everything I had wanted and prayed for, exactly my type. I felt comfortable with him and very much wanted to continue. Then he said, ‘I’m going to my Rebbe, but I want to meet you again.’”

Emma interpreted his words in exactly the opposite way. “In my heart, I said, ‘Men like that don’t date women like me. There’s no chance he wants me. He’ll probably come back from Uman and say goodbye.’”

But Ben Zion felt nothing of the sort. “He didn’t play games with me. We stayed in contact for two months, even while he was in Uman, and of course we observed shomer negiah (no physical touch before marriage). In Uman, he told a friend that I laughed at his jokes, and the friend said to him, ‘Go buy her a head covering.’

“He gave me that head covering when he proposed. The proposal was also in Uman. We traveled there together. We sat down on a bench, and then he took out an amulet made of pure silver and said to me, ‘Do you want to be my wife?’ I started crying.”

They had traveled to Uman as part of a group, and once they announced that they were getting married, they became the “celebrities” of the group. When they returned to Israel, they shared the news with their parents, who were overjoyed. “With Heaven’s kindness, we married three months after the proposal, on Rosh Chodesh Elul.”

Today, Bitan continues to use her artistic talents as a professional actress with Playback Theater and in the women’s theater directed by Ronit Menashe. When she steps onto the stage now, she no longer feels that she has to lose weight in order to feel worthy.

“Success for me is no longer the applause of the audience,” she says. “It is the ability to look in the mirror, accept and love what I see, and know that my voice is exactly the voice the Creator wants me to use.”

It seems that Emma Bitan has finally found the role of her life: herself, without filters.