When we hear of kids being removed from their homes, instead of asking, “Why is this happening?” we should be asking, “What can we do to help?”

I will never forget the sight of the abandoned babies and children I saw in the streets of Iran, where I grew up in the 1980s. In the absence of a social welfare safety net, impoverished parents who could not or would not take care of their children would routinely dump them outside and leave them to the mercy of passersby. These sights shocked me to the core, and as a child I pledged to myself that when I grew up I would one day help children like these.

My family moved to the US in 1988, when I was eight, and we integrated in the Jewish community of Los Angeles.

I met my husband, Bijan Refael Zangan, when I was 24, and after our wedding we moved to Israel, where he learned in kollel and I studied for my master’s in psychology while working for Efrat, an organization that encourages women not to terminate their pregnancies. Unlike almost all the young couples around us, however, we did not effortlessly move on to the next stage, parenting. Rather than mope about my own childlessness, I tried to occupy myself productively by getting involved with local seminaries and volunteering to help busy mothers by watching their children while they were out working.

When my husband received a job offer from Touro College in Los Angeles, three years after we had gotten married, I told him that it was too hard for me to continue living in a community of young families and working with women who didn’t want their unborn babies. So he accepted the offer.

Upon returning to Los Angeles, I began to work as a therapist while pursuing a doctorate in psychology. One day, when I walked into one of my classes, the non-Jewish professor asked me if I belonged to the Orthodox Jewish community. When I said yes, she asked me if I knew about a Jewish friend of hers who had been murdered by her husband. “Why wasn’t the community there for her?” my professor demanded.

Apparently, this woman had been the victim of domestic violence for years, but she had been afraid to call the authorities or seek help because she was scared that her children would be placed with non-Jewish families.

The story itself was devastating to me, and hearing the professor blame the community for complicity made me feel personally ashamed.

Something has to be done about this, I thought.

I bought copies of Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski’s book about domestic abuse, The Shame Borne in Silence, and asked local bookstores and shuls to put it on their shelf. (Of Rabbi Twerski’s many titles, this crucial one somehow is consistently absent from many Jewish libraries and book collections.)

In the meantime, my husband and I had been married for six years and still had not been blessed with children, which was a source of deep sorrow for both of us, but especially for me. Yet my husband continually encouraged me not to fall into despair. “The yetzer hara tries to distance us from Hashem by magnifying what we don’t have,” he would often tell me. “The yetzer tov, on the other hand, tells us to focus on what we do have and share that with others.”

Basically, what he was telling me was that I had two choices: I could brood over the fact that I was childless, or I could take the kochos of mothering that I so badly wanted to utilize and express them in other ways.