A Princeton woman who has long been on the front lines of the fight against domestic violence is now at the helm of a major international conference on the issue.

Joyce Rappeport, a member of the board of trustees of Jewish Women International, is serving as chair of Beyond Awareness: Effecting Change, JWI’s third international conference on domestic abuse in the Jewish community.

The event will bring together more than 400 participants from around the world from Sunday, March 18, through Tuesday, March 20, at the Hyatt Regency in Baltimore.

Taking part will be rabbis, social workers, community activists, educators, health and legal professionals, lay leaders, and survivors of domestic abuse.

“I’ve been in Washington, working on the workshops, working on the speakers, working on putting the whole program together,” Rappeport said as she sat in the sunroom of her Princeton home.

“It’s a heavy-duty conference,” she said. “These subjects are difficult. These subjects are painful. They’re exhausting.”

Two years in the planning, Beyond Awareness: Effecting Change will offer a kaleidoscope of workshops on the issues surrounding domestic violence — prevention education, bullying, stalking, murder-suicide, legal interventions, elder abuse, child sexual abuse, building community coalitions, and finding modalities for healing, among many others.

The conference will open with a screening of the documentary When the Vow Breaks, followed by text study involving the story of Miriam.

“I’m so excited we’re going to start off this conference with text study,” she said. “What we’re hoping is that the text study will leave people in a good place to take back this material to their own seders, so we’ll have a ripple effect. They’ll bring it back to their own tables. That’s really how you effect change.”

The forum will also feature keynote addresses by author/educator/filmmaker Jackson Katz and Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes, founder of the first Domestic Violence Bureau within the nation’s legal system and initiator of Project Eden, a program to help Orthodox women address the problem of violence in their homes.

“That was an important piece — to get people who could talk about the legal issues,” Rappeport said. “It was very important for us to talk about domestic violence and the law — women becoming more informed about some of their choices.”

Plenary sessions will cover the intersection of domestic violence and child custody and the issues that arise for health professionals who care for the victims of domestic violence. In addition, the conference will offer two all-day sessions — one for social workers on Children, Youth, and Parenting in the Context of Domestic Violence, the other a skill-building training session for clergy on Domestic Abuse in the Jewish Community: The First Line of Defense.

“Without that, nothing is going to happen,” Rappeport said. “Without rabbis understanding what’s out there and what their role is in giving people help, we’re not going to move forward. Without that awareness, it couldn’t change — it really couldn’t.”

Rappeport has been working to effect that kind of change for many years. A member of The Jewish Center and String of Pearls, the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation; both in Princeton, she is president of the Albin Family Foundation, a small family fund that is serving as one of the lead sponsors of the conference. She currently serves on the board of Child Care Connection, a Trenton-based preschool resource program, and on the Women’s Advisory Board of the New York-based Jewish Outreach Initiative.

Rappeport was one of the driving forces behind the creation of Project SARAH (Stop Abusive Relationships at Home) at the Jewish Family and Children’s Service of Greater Mercer County. Over the past several years, Project SARAH has sponsored a number of community programs on the issue of domestic violence — training for rabbis and days of learning for women in the community, women’s Passover seders, and programs for teens on ending dating abuse and forging healthy relationships.

“This is something I believe in and I love,” Rappeport said, referring to her longtime advocacy against domestic abuse. “My heart and my soul reach out to things that interest me — and especially to Jewish women who have had this life that seems so unbearable — to say that I’ll do what I can in an intelligent way.

“If we believe we are all created in God’s image, what does that say about all of this?” she said. “The idea that someone would beat up someone he claims to love — it doesn’t strike me as a Jewish value. I don’t know in what Torah portion we learn that that’s the way we treat human beings.”