Adina Bar-Shalom (Hebrew: עדינה בר-שלום; January 5, 1945) is an Israeli educator, columnist, and social activist. She was the founder of the first college for Haredi students in Jerusalem, and has spent years working to overcome gender discrimination
in the Orthodox Jewish community. She was awarded the Israel Prize for lifetime achievement and special contribution to society in 2014. A daughter of Ovadia Yosef, she is a member of the prominent Yosef family.
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Biography
Adina Yosef (Bar-Shalom) was born in Jerusalem, the eldest daughter of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and Margalit Fattal. From age 3 to 6, she lived in Cairo, Egypt, where her father served as deputy chief rabbi. She is a graduate of the Bais Yaakov girls' school network. As a teenager, she studied tailoring at a Bais Yaakov professional institution.
At eighteen, she married Rabbi Ezra Bar-Shalom, then taught sewing, and opened a fellowship for young brides for several years. In 1975, she began to study fashion design at the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, after her husband and her father had opposed her plans to study psychology at a university.
In 2001, with the permission of her father, Bar-Shalom founded Haredi College of Jerusalem, the first higher education institution in that city designed for the Haredi sector. The college's programming and degrees are provided by Israeli academic institutions such as Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Bar-Ilan University and others, but the study takes place in a strictly gender-segregated environment, with schedules and childcare arrangements to enable students to uphold traditional Haredi