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WOMEN RABBIS INCREASE INFLUENCE IN LIBERAL COMMUNITIES
by Talya Halkin,, Jerusalem Post, February20, 2006
Spreading prayer shawls over their heads, more than 100 women came together for
evening prayers Sunday night at the Hod Vehadar Synagogue in Kfar Saba.
Speaking English, Hebrew, Spanish and Russian, young women wearing kippot stood
next to bare-headed elderly women in pantsuits.
Hailing from various denominational and cultural backgrounds, they had gathered
for an evening dedicated to studying the Jewish bookshelf and women's voices within
Judaism. Organized by the Women's League for Masorti Judaism in cooperation with
the Schechter Institute for Jewish Studies, the study day was led by a group of
women rabbis whose presence is being increasingly felt in liberal communities
throughout Israel.
Sitting later in the evening in a discussion on the place of the matriarchs in
Jewish liturgy, a small group of women listened attentively to Rabbi Einat Ramon,
the first Israeli-born woman rabbi, and the dean of the rabbinical school at the
Schechter Institute.
Archive photo: Women’s June Study Day
at Schechter
Most of the women, who had grown up in Orthodox North American
communities, admitted that it was still difficult for them to become accustomed
to the prominent role that women now play in Masorti communities.
"When our synagogue slowly moved in the direction of becoming egalitarian, I
had great difficulty with it," said one woman. "Recently, I had an aliya to
the Torah, and I stood up there shaking like a child."
"There is a certain sense of guilt involved," said another woman. "It's something
inbred. You feel like I hope daddy isn't listening."
"When you're a transitional generation, one of your creative contributions is
to suffer a little," another woman said.
By contrast, Svetlana Ben-Adi, a Ra'anana resident in her 20s who is undergoing
conversion at Hod Vehadar, said attending services led by a woman rabbi seemed
completely natural to her.
"I feel really comfortable at this congregation, since I didn't grow up in a
Jewish community where services were led by a male rabbi," she told The Jerusalem
Post.
"What these older women were saying is extremely important to me," Ramon told
the Post. "It was amazing to hear them reveal the struggles in their hearts...
"I led a feminist struggle in the Conservative movement in Israel beginning
20 years ago, as a secular Israeli who studied to be a Conservative rabbi. I
assumed the movement was egalitarian, but I found that a lot of people were
extremely threatened by the idea. Still, I had a strong intuition that egalitarianism
was really in the spirit of Israeli Zionism, whose roots are strongly connected
to feminism.
"I taught myself to live with the dissonance of a very pluralistic movement
and that I needed to very tolerant. I am really happy and proud to see the slow,
evolutionary way in which egalitarianism has evolved, without being pushed down
anybody's throat - happy with the patience both of those who worked toward it
and those who were opposed to it."
While many of the North American women at the event spoke of the gradual process
by which their own synagogues evolved to acknowledge women as community leaders,
some of those who attended had to openly oppose the norms of their community
in order to do so.
Yona, a middle-aged woman from Herzliya, has been attending services at the
Masorti synagogue there for the past 20 years, while continuing to go to the
Yemenite synagogue in her neighborhood.
"People at the Yemenite synagogue have told me that going to a place where men
and women sit together, and where women read the Torah, is like worshipping
idols - but I like it," she said.
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