The founder and director of the Tru Birth Center wants women to feel empowered by their natural birth experience

ASfar back as I can remember, I wanted to be a doctor. I actually found a diary I wrote in fifth grade that said I wanted to be an Obstetrician Gynecologist. I didn’t write OB-GYN; I spelled the whole thing out. No shortcuts for me! Throughout my schooling, I was always in pursuit of that. It impacted the classes I took in high school and what I studied in college.

In college I met my husband, also from the Detroit area, and during our junior year, we studied together at Hebrew University. Both of us came from more secular backgrounds, and it was during that year that we had our first exposure to Shabbos.

When it came time to apply to medical school, my guidance counselor told me that the competitive environment combined with government quotas made it unlikely that I’d get into an American medical school. Ben-Gurion University had a collaborative program with Columbia University, and I applied to Ben-Gurion and was accepted. That’s when we really started our journey in Israel.

My husband and I got married in June and moved to Be’er Sheva in August, which in 2000 was a completely different place from what it is now. It was so hot. I felt the warmest there I’d ever felt.

My anatomy professor in medical school was Modern Orthodox, and we spent a lot of Shabbosim in their house. That was the first exposure to a kind of Yiddishkeit that I could identify with. By my third year of medical school, my husband was really very interested in becoming frum, and he ended up going to Aish HaTorah.

This wasn’t exactly in my life plan, but at the same time, I’ve always been a seeker of truth. Even though I realized it was going to change my life, I couldn’t turn away because I could feel that this was authentic. By the time we moved back to the Detroit area for my residency, we were full-fledged baalei teshuvah. The Detroit community was so welcoming and warm, and became a sort of extended family for us during those first years back in America.

After my residency, I was planning on staying in Michigan. That’s where our families were, that’s where our community was, but this was in 2009 when the economy crashed, including all the car companies in Detroit. The contract I’d almost finalized with the hospital was retracted because they just didn’t know what was going to happen financially with all the car companies being in such bad shape. So that was, I guess, Hashem’s way of pushing me out of Detroit.