The Saturday Profile
By JODI RUDOREN
JERUSALEM — SHE is a crusading lawyer who serially sues rogue nations, terror groups and international banks to show, as she put it, “there is a price to Jewish blood.” She is a mother of six who, while seven months pregnant with triplets, astonished an Israeli court with a motion requesting a hearing be moved to her home. (It was denied.).
Yet it took Nitsana Darshan-Leitner three years to figure out how to bake her own challah, the braided egg bread that is a staple of the Sabbath table.
“You take different recipes from different places, and you’re trying and you’re trying and you’re trying, and you say, ‘How come it doesn’t come out like the bakery?’” she recalled in a recent interview. “You can’t have a shortcut. You can’t let it rise for half an hour in the oven — no, hour and a half, two hours — and then you have to let them rise again after you knead them, after you braid them. If you want something perfect, you have to do it the hard way.”
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Ms. Darshan-Leitner is spending most of this month in New York. Because she is not licensed to practice law there, she is sitting among the court watchers, not at the lawyer’s bench. And she is missing several Fridays of baking challah.
For Orthodox Jews like Ms. Darshan-Leitner, challah is one of three commandments required for women. It is a ritual process in which a piece is removed and burned, and a blessing recited.
“It’s a time that God is listening, so you can say a personal prayer or personal wish,” she explained. She thinks of sick people, she said, and also “about my cases.”
A version of this article appears in print on January 24, 2015, on page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: Crusading for Israel in a Way Some Say Is Misguided . Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
