52 minute read
COMMENTARY
The Would-Be Rabbis
Women who opened doors for those who followed By Rabbi Andrea L. Weiss
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This spring, as we prepare for Purim and Passover, we also celebrate the 50th anniversary of the ordination of Rabbi Sally Priesand, the first woman ordained by a rabbinical seminary. But had history unfolded a bit differently, we might be marking the 100th anniversary of women in the rabbinate. Like the biblical Esther and Miriam, the women who yearned to be rabbis decades before it was possible acted with courage as they opened the doors for Priesand and the many others who followed.
In 1921, after three years of study at Hebrew Union College, Martha Neumark asked the administration for a High Holiday pulpit assignment. Her request instigated a lengthy debate about whether women could be ordained as rabbis. As historian Pamela Nadell recounts in Women Who Would Be Rabbis, HUC’s faculty and alumni eventually concluded that “women cannot justly be denied the privilege of ordination.” However, the Reform rabbinical seminary’s board of governors voted to maintain its policy and restrict ordination to men.
While this debate played out at HUC in Cincinnati, the Jewish Institute of Religion opened in New York City in 1922. Irma Levy Lindheim and two other women enrolled in the inaugural class, but they were not admitted as rabbinical students. When Lindheim petitioned the faculty to become a rabbinical student, JIR changed its charter and committed—at least on paper—to “train, in liberal spirit, men and women, for Jewish ministry, research and community service.” However, after completing much of the curriculum, personal circumstances led Lindheim to discontinue her studies before the final year.
Her classmate Dora Askowith— who entered JIR in 1922 with a doctorate from Columbia University—spent several years taking classes alongside male rabbinical students. She was motivated to deepen her Judaic studies knowledge, not to “enter the ministry,” yet she hoped that her presence at JIR would, in her words quoted in Women Who Would Be Rabbis, “open the road for women who might be desirous of being ordained.”
Although neither Lindheim nor Askowith took that path, both ascended to leadership positions in Hadassah: Askowith as an early member of Hadassah’s central decision-making body, and Lindheim as the third Hadassah national president (1926-1928). Lindheim followed Hadassah founder Henrietta Szold, who studied at the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary in the early 1900s, though Szold was required to confirm that she had no rabbinical aspirations when she enrolled.
Helen Levinthal Lyons, president of her local Hadassah chapter in Westchester County, N.Y., merits distinction among the early 20th century Jewish women who sought access to a seminary education. In 1939, she became the first woman to complete the rabbinical curriculum at JIR (which later merged with HUC). In spite of this accomplishment, she was denied the opportunity to extend her family’s rabbinic line to a 13th generation when JIR founder Rabbi Stephen S. Wise refused to ordain her. According to Nadell, he insisted that “while Helen did excellent work, the time was not ripe for the JIR to ordain a woman.”
The time for the first female rabbi ripened in Germany in 1935, when Rabbi Max Dienemann privately awarded a rabbinic diploma to Rabbiner Doktor Regina Jonas. Jonas taught Torah and comforted people in Berlin as the Nazis rose to power and after she was deported to Terezin in 1942. She was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944.
Not until 1972 would a rabbinical seminary formally ordain a woman. For her HUC-JIR rabbinical school thesis, Priesand researched the “Historic and Changing Role of the Jewish Woman.” Decades earlier, Lyons had written about “Women Suffrage from the Halachic Aspect.” Aspiring female rabbis often looked
Premature Report A December 25, 1920 news item in the ‘Lawrence Daily JournalWorld’ announced that Martha Neumark would become the first female rabbi.
to the Bible, Jewish history and Jewish law for inspiration and affirmation.
The stories of Esther and Miriam, the biblical women at the center of the Purim and Passover stories, respectively, highlight characteristics exhibited by these would-be rabbis. Just as women like Neumark and Lyons took initiative in embarking on a sacred calling not yet open to them, Miriam the prophet repeatedly takes initiative. She stations herself by the Nile to see what will become of her baby brother, Moses, and she grabs her hand drum and leads the women in song and dance after the Exodus from Egypt and the parting of the Red Sea. And like these pioneering women, Esther exhibits wit and courage in her efforts to save the Jewish people from Haman’s decree. She goes before King Ahasuerus uninvited and then enacts a plan that leads to Haman’s undoing. As Mordecai advises Esther, sometimes people are placed in prominent positions to accomplish things that may seem daunting, but ultimately lead to the greater good.
Fifty years after Sally Priesand became Rabbi Priesand on June 3, 1972, I am the one who stands before the ark, hands outstretched to ordain each new rabbi and cantor at HUC-JIR. This momentous 50th anniversary invites us to expand the celebration and recognize the many bold and persistent Jewish women who have stepped up in countless ways, proving just what can happen when women are given the chance to fulfill their God-given potential.
Rabbi Andrea L. Weiss is Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Provost and an associate professor of Bible at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. She served as associate editor of The Torah: A Women’s Commentary and created the American Values, Religious Voices: 100 Days, 100 Letters campaigns in 2017 and 2021.
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Transforming the Rabbinate Over 50 Years
From scholarship to spirituality, women reshape
Jewish leadership | By Debra Nussbaum Cohen
When sally j. priesand became the first woman to be ordained by a rabbinical seminary, at the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion on June 3, 1972, some hoped and others feared that it would start a revolution.
Instead, it has been an evolution.
Over the past five decades, the rise and integration of women into the rabbinate has transformed many aspects of Jewish life.
“We’re at a tipping point where we have as many women in the active rabbinate as we do men. It’s more or less equal,” said Rabbi Hara Person, president and CEO of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the professional organization of Reform rabbis known as CCAR. Of the group’s 2,200 current members, she said, 810 identify as female.
“Women’s voices and ideas and creativity have become central,” Person continued. “At one time, it was marginal, maybe even discounted or minimized. Today, women are in leadership and decision-making roles. Women are out in the front, leading the rabbinate.”
More than 1,500 women have been ordained across the Jewish world in the past 50 years, according to a survey of leaders of all the movements, from Orthodox to Renewal. Female scholar-rabbis now teach at and, in some cases, run rabbinical schools. Through books and other platforms, they have broadened the understanding of Jewish history,
Tipping Point Rabbi Sally Priesand (far left, at the New Jersey temple she led for 25 years) paved the way for women, including Rabbi Andrea Weiss, the provost at HUC, who ordained Rabbi Samantha Frank at Temple Emanuel in NYC in May 2019. Collectible Legacy Priesand was featured on one of the original ‘supersisters’ trading cards in 1979.
ritual and theology. Gender-inclusive language is now the norm in all prayerbooks in the mainstream liberal denominations. Women in the rabbinate have also raised questions pertinent to all clergy about issues like work-life balance.
Yet serious challenges remain, and, for some, progress has been too slow.
Many pioneering rabbis say that the constant surveillance and commentary about what they wore; verbal digs from male rabbis, board members and congregants; and, sometimes, outright verbal, physical and sexual harassment remain bitter memories.
Nasty remarks were frequent, recalled Rabbi Amy Eilberg, who in 1985 became the first woman ordained by the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary. She remembers comments like: “Oh, do I get to kiss the rabbi?” and “The rabbi is wearing open-toed shoes.” Eilberg, now 67 and living near San Francisco, moved to chaplaincy and pastoral care after one year with a congregation and has since focused on providing spiritual direction and teaching mussar, or Jewish ethics.
Though inappropriate remarks and behavior continue, it has diminished in recent years, according to many in the field. As Person noted, “Women are much less likely to take it today than they were at one time.” “Culture has changed. The putting-down remarks, the microaggressions, those have become unacceptable. They were rampant in the early years,” said Pamela Nadell, professor and Patrick Clendenen Chair in Women’s and Gender History at American University and author of Women Who Would be Rabbis: A History of Women’s Ordination, 1889-1985.
Today, the non-Orthodox movements are paying new attention to sexual harassment and misconduct in the rabbinate, including misconduct directed at female rabbis and rabbinical students. A 2021 report from the Reform movement’s HUC found a history, going back decades, of sexual abuse, harassment and discrimination by powerful leaders, including presidents and chancellors, against female students.
For its part, the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly is in the process of conducting its own study, said Rabbi Jacob Blumenthal, CEO of both the RA and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, the denomination’s congregational arm. Last fall, the RA for the first time began publishing the names of rabbis sanctioned for ethics breaches, shifting the culture of secrecy that until now protected rabbis guilty of sexual misconduct.
Today, female rabbis face discrimination primarily when it comes to pay disparities between men and women as well as in their quest for top congregational jobs and for equitable family leave policies, experts say.
A study by the Conservative rabbinical body in 2004 found a $40,000 difference in mean compensation between male and female rabbis. Fifteen years later, a 2019 study showed that the largest gap remains only for newly ordained rabbis, with women fresh out of seminary earning an average of 18 percent less than men. The study, which is not available to the public
50 Years
though selections from the report were shared with Hadassah Magazine, found that among rabbis with five to 10 years of experience, men make an average of 3 percent more. The small number of women serving the largest congregations actually earn slightly more than their male colleagues—on average, $170,500 compared to $168,700.
In the Reform movement, an across-the-board 18 percent wage gap exists for women, according to Rabbi Mary Zamore, executive director of the Women’s Rabbinic Network, a 600-member organization that was founded in 1990 to advocate for female Reform rabbis. She noted that in the past three years, “we’ve seen a nice narrowing [of the wage gap] for assistant rabbis and senior rabbis at the larger congregations.”
Meanwhile, the Reform Pay Equity Initiative, which was formed five years ago by 17 organizations, is working to create a uniform family leave policy to be used in all rabbinic contracts, rather than have each negotiated individually, which often works to the rabbi’s disadvantage.
Rabbi sandy eisenberg sasso started rabbinical school at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 1969 as part of its second class because, she said, the institution’s president at the time feared that admitting a woman in its inaugural year would be too controversial. During her time at RRC, Sasso, now 75, wanted to research women in Judaism, but “there were no books” on the subject, she said. “When I asked questions or was asked to speak about women and Judaism, I could find no material.”
As the number of female rabbis has grown, their intellectual and creative contributions have also expanded. Libraries are now filled with volumes written by female rabbis and scholars, from Torah commentaries to books on women in Torah and long-forgotten pioneers who have been rescued from the ash heap of history. Among those neglected innovators is Regina Jonas, widely considered the first ordained female rabbi, who received a private ordination in 1935 because the German seminary where she had studied refused to grant her semicha. Jonas was murdered in Auschwitz nine years later.
Change in the religious realm happens slowly, noted Sasso, who was ordained in 1974 and served for 36 years as co-rabbi with her husband, Rabbi Dennis Sasso, at Congregation Beth-El Zedeck in Indianapolis. “When everything around us is changing and topsy-turvy, and the ground is not firm, we assume religion will be the place we can escape to,” she said. “People are less comfortable with rapid change in religion. That’s why women doctors and lawyers were accepted before rabbis.”
Sasso retired from the pulpit in 2013 and, after the 2016 election, started a grassroots political group called Women4Change Indiana. Today, she runs the Religion, Spirituality and the Arts program at Indiana University’s Arts and Humanities Institute. She also is a prolific author of Jewish-themed children’s books, including Regina Persisted, about Jonas, and a new work, Sally Opened Doors, a story about Priesand slated for publication this spring.
Regina Jonas
Another major issue for female rabbis today, said Nadell of American University, “is the challenge that American women face in all professions: How do you balance family life and an extremely challenging career in a country that does not have adequate childcare?”
For some of the trailblazers, family life didn’t seem like an option, and becoming a rabbinic leader came at a cost.
“I always thought I would get married and have children and planned a nursery next to my study,” said Priesand. But once she began working in a synagogue, “I realized I just couldn’t do it. I could never have both a career and a family and do both well. So I chose my career.” “I made decisions based on what was best for women in the rabbinate,
50 Years
not necessarily what was best for me,” Priesand continued. “I was very conscious of the fact that people were judging women in the rabbinate through me.”
Now 75, Priesand is retired from Monmouth Reform Temple, the New Jersey synagogue she led for 25 years and where she continues to attend services regularly. Her first rabbinic job was at the prestigious Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in Manhattan, where she worked for seven years as assistant and then associate rabbi.
Finding a position as a senior rabbi, however, was extremely challenging, recalled Priesand. “People just weren’t ready yet” for a woman to fill the senior position at a large synagogue.
Today, the job of being a rabbi is changing, at least in part because of female rabbis advocating for greater flexibility.
“Women have helped all colleagues with issues of institutional culture,” including work-life balance issues, said the Conservative movement’s Blumenthal. “These aren’t just priorities for women, but often women speak in a stronger voice, and it’s a help to our entire profession. There is no one way for women or men to be a leader but notions of leadership are changing because we have a more diverse field of rabbis.”
That diversity has expanded in recent years to include rabbis of color, rabbis with disabilities, openly gay rabbis and transgender and non-binary rabbis.
In part because of work-life balance concerns, rabbis—both men and women—are increasingly opting for careers as educators, Hillel directors, chaplains and nonprofit leaders rather than pulpit positions in congregations.
It is different today than it was in the time of Reconstructionist founder Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, when the expectation associated with becoming a pulpit rabbi meant “a rise to status, maybe even a national voice, along with significant pay,” said Rabbi Deborah Waxman, CEO and president of Reconstructing Judaism, which includes the Reconstructionist rabbinical seminary and its congregational arm. “I don’t think that’s the future [young rabbis] necessarily want or expect.” dreaming what was possible.”
Since its first class in 2013, the women-only Yeshivat Maharat, which is an acronym for Hebrew words meaning a female leader of Jewish law, spirituality and Torah, has ordained 49 women, with each deciding her own title. They include rabba, rabbanit, maharat and rabbi. Nine more women are slated to be ordained in June. Most work as educators, chaplains and in other non-pulpit roles, though a few serve in assistant and associate positions at synagogues.
Maharat Ruth Friedman, for example, was in Yeshivat Maharat’s first cohort and serves as clergy at Congregation Ohev Shalom-The National Synagogue in Washington, D.C. Rabbanit Hadas Fruchter is the only Yeshivat Maharat graduate to lead her own congregation, the South Philadelphia Shtiebel, which she founded in 2019.
For all the challenges faced by women in the rabbinate, the rewards have been great, pioneers agree.
“I’ve seen tremendous change,” said Eilberg, despite the fact that there remains “understandable outrage that women are still being paid less and respected less.” Just because there have been female rabbis for 50 years, she added, “doesn’t mean sexism has been eradicated. It’s alive and well.”
At the same time, she said, “there was never any question about whether what we are doing is meaningful.”
There are very few careers, Priesand agreed, “where you can touch people’s lives in such meaningful ways.”
1,500
ESTIMATED NUMBER OF WOMEN ORDAINED AROUND THE WORLD, WITH MORE THAN HALF, 839, BY THE REFORM MOVEMENT
70%50%
OF REFORMORDAINED WOMEN HOLD PULPIT JOBS OF CONSERVATIVEORDAINED WOMEN HOLD PULPIT JOBS
Source: Survey of movements, from Orthodox to Renewal
The first women in the major liberal denominations paved the way not only for female rabbis worldwide but also for Modern Orthodox women to join the rabbinate—a much newer phenomenon.
“Seeing women as rabbis became more normative and allowed young Orthodox women to see themselves in that role,” said Rabba Sara Hurwitz, 44, president of Yeshivat Maharat, which she co-founded with Rabbi Avi Weiss of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, who ordained her privately in 2009. “This allowed us to begin Debra Nussbaum Cohen, author of Celebrating Your New Jewish Daughter: Creating Jewish Ways to Welcome Baby Girls into the Covenant, is a journalist living in New York City.
Then and Now: The 'Four Firsts' Weigh Challenges to the Jewish Community
Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso
When I was preparing for my 1974 ordination, I wanted to write
a Ph.D. dissertation on women and Judaism. I was advised that would be a mistake and was counseled to write about something “important.” The issues that were important during the 1970s were about Jewish survival, the security of Israel, the rescue of Jews from the Soviet Union and other endangered communities. These were unifying concerns that mobilized American Jews. Secular feminism had a strong presence in America but discounted Judaism as patriarchal. Jewish feminism was just emerging and often viewed as divisive, a threat to Jewish continuity. The havurah movement raised questions about the traditional structure of Jewish life and leadership.
Fifty years later, the impact of Jewish feminism has been enormous, reshaping much of Jewish life and expanding in recent years to include gender diversity. The challenges today concern polarization. As we embrace diversity, we search for a unifying center. Will focusing on important secular and universal causes be enough to hold the Jewish community together when arguments over Zionism and issues of Jewish identity tear us apart? With the rise of social media and diminishing congregational membership, what will be the structures that sustain Jewish living? Will insularity cause us to regress and make us irrelevant? Will loss of all boundaries and individualism cause us to disappear as a community?
Jewish feminism has taught us to widen the tent but at the same time to respect boundaries. We valued the tradition even as we transformed it. The inclusion of marginalized groups enriched, but did not necessarily negate, Jewish tradition. The challenge for the next generation is how to ensure that the boundaries that protect us are not barriers to personal and communal transformation. Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso is rabbi emerita of Congregation Beth-El Zedeck in Indianapolis and director of the Religion, Spirituality and the Arts program at the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis Arts and Humanities Institute.
Leading the Way (from left) Rabba Sara Hurwitz (Orthodox) and Rabbis Amy Eilberg (Conservative), Sandy Eisenberg Sasso (Reconstructionist) and Sally J. Priesand (Reform) were the first to be ordained in each of their movements.
Rabbi Amy Eilberg
The year that I was ordained by the Conservative movement, 1985,
was one both troubled and celebratory for American Jews. We watched with trepidation as Israel attempted to disengage from Lebanon, only to see the formation of Hezbollah, causing grave concern to Israel and to American Jews. At the same time, many younger Jews began to shift from seeing Israel as a vulnerable state surrounded by enemies to seeing it as an occupying power. The divide in the Jewish community’s views of Israel that we know so well today began to spread and intensify.
My ordination also marked a triumph in the Jewish feminist movement, which had decisively emerged as a transformative force in American Jewish life, spawning new works of theology, liturgy and midrash. The floodgates opened, bringing a cadre of new female leaders and new sources of learning, creativity, passion and compassion to the Jewish community.
Challenges remain. The goal of equality of opportunity and respect for Jewish women in the rabbinate is certainly not complete. Today, it is LGBTQ Jews and Jewish leaders who must be included and embraced. The community is just beginning to recognize the needs of the 10 to 15 percent of the American Jewish population who are Jews of Color. And in 2022, the Jewish community must also look beyond itself, working to protect democracy, to stand in solidarity with other targeted communities and to vigorously defend the planet from climate disaster. Rabbi Amy Eilberg currently serves as a spiritual director, peace and justice educator and teacher of mussar, a classical Jewish system of spiritual development.
50 Years
Rabbi Sally J. Priesand
The year I was ordained, 1972, was a pres-
idential election year, with Richard Nixon running for re-election against George McGovern. There was a lot of talk about whether Jews voted as a one-issue community that put Israel above everything else. I addressed the subject in my first Yom Kippur sermon in the main sanctuary of Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in Manhattan, where I held my first rabbinic position following ordination. Rabbi Edward E. Klein, my senior rabbi, taught me to use a free pulpit (meaning the rabbi is free to say whatever he or she wishes) to motivate and inspire people as Stephen Wise had intended. In my sermon, I suggested that we face an election as individuals and not as a Jewish community, considering all issues of the campaign and choosing the candidate we think best for America. I still feel the same.
Another major challenge faced by the Jewish community then was how best to welcome women into every aspect of synagogue and communal life. This issue continues to challenge the Jewish world. Female rabbis are not compensated equally to male rabbis. Respect for rabbis is called into question when male rabbis are addressed as “rabbi” and female rabbis are called by their first name. Some organizations continue to sponsor all-male panels. Large congregations hesitate to hire women as their senior rabbis. Sexual assault, gender bias, discrimination and bullying are just beginning to be dealt with. I congratulate the Reform Jewish
Rabba Sara Hurwitz
In 2009, around the time I was ordained,
I began noticing a pervading sense of disillusionment with the role of women in Orthodoxy. community for putting these issues, and others like them, on the front burner, and I am grateful to the Women’s Rabbinic Network and the Women of Reform Judaism for playing a leadership role. Rabbi Sally J. Priesand is rabbi emerita of Monmouth Reform Temple in Tinton Falls, N.J.
A 2016 study by Nishma Research found that among Orthodox Jews who had left the fold, 37 percent said that women’s roles in Judaism propelled them to opt out. Although women have reached the highest echelons of leadership and equity in every industry, they are othered or hidden in Orthodox synagogues. Women who are seen as leaders in all aspects of their lives have lower tolerance for invisibility, so they and their daughters are leaving. Yeshivat Maharat, which educates and ordains women, was created to push the boundaries of the Orthodox community. Seeing women on the bimah, in the classroom and as leaders of organizations helps the next generation remain connected to their roots.
Today, the challenges have shifted. The pandemic has accelerated the fact that, across all Jewish communities, synagogues are less central to people’s lives. People are finding ways to connect with like-minded individuals across the globe; proximity is no longer the defining way people create communities. The locus of today’s Jewish life needs to shift from legacy organizations, such as large synagogues and large communal institutions, although these do serve a purpose, to focusing on local microcommunities that gather based on shared interests. Whether people are embracing our global community or seeking local grassroots support, rabbis as teachers of Torah and as pastoral listeners will continue to play an important role in the lives of the Jewish people. Rabba Sara Hurwitz is president and co-founder of Yeshivat Maharat and serves as clergy at the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale in Riverdale, N.Y.
Building Community Far From the Madding Crowd
By Debra Nussbaum Cohen
Jewish life is different outside of urban centers like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami, and the rabbis who choose to work in remote, relatively small congregations are a special breed. They face career challenges that don’t exist for their peers in larger communities. Most work part time because their synagogues can’t afford a fulltime salary. Kosher food and Jewish cultural events are rare and, among the many tasks they perform, editing their synagogue newsletter appears to be a common one.
But there are also benefits unique to Jewish life in a smaller community, including a closeness and connection with congregants that rabbis at larger synagogues often don’t have time to develop. Hadassah Magazine spoke with three female rabbis working in different regions of the United States to find out what their roles—and their lives—look like.
RABBI SARA ZOBER, RENO, NEVADA
When rabbi sara zober and her husband, Rabbi Benjamin Zober, were looking for their second congregation—the pair had met as rabbinical students at the Reform Hebrew Union CollegeJewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati and were ordained in 2017—they had certain requirements. One was that they both be hired for part-time positions. Another was that the town had to have “at least a minor league baseball team,” said Sara Zober. “Some people need a good Jewish deli, and we need baseball games. Reno fit the bill.” Last summer, she and about 50 other Jewish fans enjoyed the first Jewish Heritage Night at a Reno Aces game. And she took home a baseball cap with the team’s name written in Yiddish.
The Zobers had specifically sought a smaller congregation, which they
Benefits Rabbi Sara Zober (above and opposite page, marching with her children in a Reno pride parade) sought a small congregation.
found in Temple Sinai, with its 160 member households. Although an estimated 4,000 Jews live in the Reno area, just a few hundred affiliate with any of the three local congregations, which include a Chabad house and a Conservative synagogue.
“We decided it made sense to work together in a smaller place so we could be available to our kids and not burn out,” said Zober, who is in her late 30s. The couple has three children, ages 10, 11 and 13.
An upside to being in a relatively small community are the strong ties among members, she said. “Every simcha is a big simcha, and every tragedy is a collective tragedy,” she said. “Everyone whose funeral I do I know well. When someone new moves in, it’s so welcoming and warm. In Reno, everyone has to know and count on one another.”
That is true for interdenominational cooperation as well. Zober and the Chabad rebbetzin run the women’s chevra kadisha, or burial society. “If we’re not the chevra kadisha, there is no chevra kadisha,” Zober said. A group of male volunteers takes care of burial preparation for the men.
Collaboration extends to The Hebrew Cemetery of Reno, which also is overseen by volunteers. It is the only Jewish cemetery in northern Nevada, so it is used by all three congregations. When conflict arose over the questions of burying cremated remains and non-Jewish spouses, “it took a lot of negotiation” to resolve it, Zober said. “We ended up with yes” on both issues, “but had to make other concessions.” A new addition will have an Orthodox section in it, boundaried from the rest of it with no cremains and no non-Jewish spouses, she said.
At congregations with limited staff, tasks that go beyond what is generally considered the job of the spiritual leader fall to the rabbi. Zober, who is also principal of the synagogue’s 40-student Hebrew school, stayed late recently to vacuum cookie crumbs off the floor of the small social hall and mop the bathroom floors. In addition to editing the congregation’s newsletter, she inventories the supply closet and goes through the markers to discard those that have dried out.
Still, she said, the benefits outweigh the challenges. “The joy of being in a small city is that we only have each other.”
The flip side, though, is that in a congregation like hers, everyone is in everyone else’s business—even the rabbi’s. “When I go to the grocery store,” she quipped, “congregants literally look in my cart and comment on the bok choy.”
50 Years
RABBI SONJA PILZ BOZEMAN, MONTANA
Bozeman is a world away from Freiburg, Germany, where Rabbi Sonja Pilz grew up and lived until just six years ago.
But Pilz, who is 37, married and a mother of a toddler, is enjoying the change. She is also introducing Jewish-themed nature activities at her synagogue, Congregation Beth Shalom, making the most of the big-sky, outdoorsy culture of the area. For Tu B’Shevat in January, 30 congregants aged 3 to 87 hiked on a nature trail while reflecting on themes and symbols of the holiday.
Pilz was ordained at the Reform
Perspective and Compromise Rabbi Sonja Pilz (right, at an event with Rabbi Sally Priesand) would like to help her congregants in Montana ‘create a Jewish life that is as deep, vibrant and as spiritual as possible.’
movement’s Abraham Geiger College in Berlin. She moved to New York to study with liturgy scholar Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman at the HUC campus in Manhattan. For six years, Pilz lived in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, working as editor of the CCAR Press, the publishing arm of the Reform movement, and teaching ritual and liturgy at HUC.
She had once considered becoming a professor of Jewish studies. But while she was part of the Egalitarian Jewish Bridge Chavurah in Freiburg, in southwest Germany’s Black Forest, she was involved in many aspects of congregational life, including teaching Torah, preparing b’nai mitzvah students and serving on the chevra kadisha. Over time, she was drawn to the idea of pursuing all those roles as a congregational rabbi and opted for rabbinical school.
When board members of the 40-year-old Beth Shalom first offered her a position several years ago, Pilz was single and turned it down. “There was no way I could pack up and move to Bozeman by myself,” she recalled, noting the remote, frigid locale. A couple of years later, she was married and pregnant, and the board offered her the job again. This time, she said yes, and began her position in July 2021.
About half of Beth Shalom’s 130-member households are retirees, many from large cities like New York City and Los Angeles, drawn to what she described as a “rapidly growing, increasingly expensive hipster town” close to Yellowstone National Park. People come to the area “because they want more space, not because they want to lead the most Jewish lives in the world,” Pilz said, adding that they come with “many different perspectives on what Jewish life is supposed to be.”
Her goal, she said, “is for the people who are here now to create a Jewish life that is as deep, vibrant and as spiritual as possible.”
Living in Bozeman, she said, “is a different kind of rabbinic challenge than it would be living anywhere else. But I am well prepared, coming from diverse, fractured Europe. Options here are rare, compromises have to be made and life has to be lived.”
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RABBI NANCY TUNICK FLORENCE, ALABAMA
Music drew rabbi nancy Tunick to Nashville, Tenn., as it does for countless musicians each year. A former Warner Bros. Records executive, Tunick now has her own music promotion and marketing business. Music also connected her to Temple B’nai Israel in Florence, where she started more than 20 years ago as a cantorial soloist for the High Holidays and now serves as its part-time rabbi, though she still lives 100 miles away in Nashville.
B’nai Israel, which has 40 member households and is denominationally unaffiliated, is near the city of Muscle Shoals, Ala., where Aretha Franklin and the Rolling Stones once recorded. Not surprisingly, this spiritual leader weaves music through her rabbinate.
“Music is the centerpiece of our worship services,” said Tunick, who during the pandemic has led the services remotely from her home piano. The 55-year-old mother of two teenagers—who lost her husband to a heart attack a year ago—wrote her own tunes for most of the prayers at B’nai Israel.
Each tune, she said, was written for a specific congregant or occasion. Tunick also composes a song for each life-cycle event celebrated by congregants. The wedding of a young woman whose own baby naming Tunick led is scheduled for 2023, which will make the bride the first congregant to have two original songs composed for her.
The congregation is sometimes joined by local musicians connected to Muscle Shoals studios. “We have a community of creatives, many excellent musicians who live in the area and periodically contribute to the service,” said Tunick. “It allows us to combine traditions and musical contexts so that the music is influenced by the community.”
Although she studied with cantors, Tunick didn’t pursue cantorial ordination. She was, however, hired as a cantorial soloist at B’nai Israel in 2000, leading High Holiday services with a part-time rabbi. In 2008, the
In Tune Rabbi Nancy Tunick says that her relationships with congregants in Florence, Ala. (top), transcend the synagogue.
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congregation, which is over 100 years old and started as an Orthodox shul, invited her to become their sole spiritual leader. A few years later, with their financial backing and moral support, Tunick attended the Jewish Spiritual Leaders Institute, a small, nondenominational ordination program in New York City designed for people already working as congregational leaders. She was ordained as a rabbi in 2013.
The congregation, most of whom are over 65, is tight-knit, said Tunick. Before the pandemic, she said, members went out to dinner together after services on Friday nights. When they go to the symphony, they also go with each other. “You are involved in congregants’ lives in ways that transcend synagogue,” she said of her own relationships. “There is a blurry line between clergy and family and friend. That changes the dynamic. We are in this together.”
They worry about the future together as well. When congregants’ children go to college, “they don’t come back,” she said. Occasionally, new Jewish professors at the University of North Alabama or doctors at the local hospital join.
Streaming services on Facebook during the pandemic has expanded their reach. Between 100 and 200 people watch every service, Tunick said, and some as far away as England and Mexico have become dues-paying congregants.
“There is definitely a feeling of optimism” that the livestreaming, which will continue post-pandemic even as they return to in-person services, will contribute to congregational growth, she said. “The board feels like that model could support the congregation for many years to come and allows the aging community to have some hope.”
Rabbi Lauren Henderson
Envisioning the Rabbinate Through a Different Lens
By Rahel Musleah
Tarlan rabizadeh had wanted to become a rabbi ever since she was a teenager, but only much later overcame the objections of her parents, Jewish immigrants from Iran, and the expectations of her traditional Persian community in Los Angeles.
Inspired by Rabbi Sharon Brous, then a teacher at the Milken Community School, the Jewish day school Rabizadeh attended, she describes the rabbinate as a “calling” that she finally fulfilled after working as an interior designer and Jewish educator. She was ordained at the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Manhattan in 2018 and is now director of student life at UCLA’s Hillel.
The 36-year-old Rabizadeh hopes to use her expertise and background to bridge the Ashkenazi and nonAshkenazi worlds. For her, “being a rabbi is really about being a translator between the two communities,” she said. It’s about “explaining and helping integrate two different cultures, both of which happen to be Jewish” but which have different perspectives “on how some of those values should be carried out.”
Rabizadeh is not alone in the circuitous path she took to the rabbinate.
Before Yael Werber decided to apply to rabbinical school, she had worked on Jewish-owned farms and in restaurants; lived in a cabin with no running water, electricity or plumbing; wrote a children’s book, Spring for Sophie; co-owned a company that sold cloth menstrual pads; went to herbalism school; briefly tried nursing school; earned a degree in speech therapy from Boston University; and taught preschool in Manhattan.
Though she was raised with a strong Jewish identity in a Conservative home in Boston, it took an “aha!” moment for Werber, now 35, to veer from the female caregiver roles she grew up with in her family and community—like teacher and nurse—to a rabbinic path. But when her supervisor in nursing school berated her, she said, for spending too much time talking to a dying 90-year-old man and his family, she realized that the care she wanted to give required a different focus.
In May, she will be ordained at the pluralistic Hebrew College in Newton Centre, Mass. “Being a rabbi was that thing I was seeking— walking with people in hard times and low places as well as in joyous times,” she said.
The stories of these women mirror those of a new generation of female rabbis being ordained by mainstream liberal Jewish seminaries across the country. Striking in their diverse backgrounds, approaches and visions for the future, current students and newly minted rabbis include Jews by choice, Jews of color and Jews who identify as LBGTQ as well as those who grew up in traditional, liberal, secular and interfaith homes. They cross denominational lines in their choice of seminaries and opt for careers ranging from congregational pulpits to Hillel, from chaplaincy to Jewish education and nonprofit work. Some are choosing new and experimental organizations; some are even creating their own startups.
Gender parity has largely evened
Circuitous Paths Rabbi Tarlan Rabizadeh (above) and rabbinical student Yael Werber pursued the rabbinate after multiple career shifts.
out between male- and female-identified students at most of the seminaries, though statistics around career choices vary. At Hebrew College, fewer than 50 percent of alumni are choosing congregational work these days, down from 70 percent 18 years ago, when the college’s rabbinical program was founded. Among newly ordained Reform rabbis, the number seeking pulpit positions is 70 to 80 percent, but even that represents a decline from past years. Officials in the Conservative movement say about half of their rabbis currently hold pulpit positions.
“Jews are entering Jewish life through so many kinds of doorways— the arts, yoga, illness, education— and we need rabbis in all those doorways,” said Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld, president of Hebrew College and former dean of its rabbinical school.
Werber said she often speaks to congregants at the three synagogues at which she has served as an intern, most recently at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in Manhattan, about “the winding path to figuring out who we are.
“My growth has not been linear,” she said. “Many people are able to relate to that feeling of not knowing exactly where they are in life, or their purpose, or their very next step. They can feel comforted when a rabbi acknowledges that fear or anxiety. Being unsure of what comes next is a normal part of the human process, especially in pandemic times.”
Kanaan goldstein hopes to become a military chaplain and help erase the stigma of mental health issues in the military. The 30-year-old, second-year student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in suburban Philadelphia was raised in a Reform home in Norman, Okla. She joined the Navy at 17, searching for independence and control after her parents had divorced four years earlier. Disciplined for an infraction of military rules, she spoke to a rabbi-chaplain for a mental health check-in. “That changed my life,” she said.
When she was stationed on the warship U.S.S. Wasp in Norfolk, Va.—“They put a nice Jewish girl on the Wasp,” she joked—she took leadership roles in both Jewish and military spheres, conducting services on board and attaining the rank of Petty Officer Second Class. In Norfolk, she sought out the local synagogue, Ohef Sholom Temple, where two female rabbis became her mentors: Rosalin Mandelberg, senior rabbi of the congregation, and a member, Connie Golden.
Issues surrounding interfaith relationships have been and might continue to be an obstacle for Goldstein, whose partner is not Jewish. She chose to study at RRC because her first choice, HUC, does not accept or ordain students in interfaith relationships.
Goldstein remains intent on achieving her goal to create space for leaders who are in interfaith relationships in the Jewish community. “The two circles of my life”—Judaism and a career in the military—“are distinct bubbles, yet so similar to each other,” she said. “They are both rooted in tradition, routine and history and focus on community.” The rabbinate, she said, will further equip her to bridge her two worlds.
The job market is good for rabbinical students seeking pulpits these days. While some congregations are shrinking and merging, others are booming and new ones are forming—all of which translates into an “explosion” of requests for rabbis today across denominations, said Rabbi Dvora Weisberg, director of the HUC-JIR rabbinical school.
Some of the demand is due to retirements and resignations during Covid or to congregations that delayed hiring, movement officials say.
Rabbi Jan Uhrbach, interim dean of the rabbinical and cantorial schools at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City, speculates that next-generation rabbis—women and men—who have grown up in a post9/11 environment of fear, uncertainty, divisiveness and xenophobia, are looking for positions in communities “with a strong culture of kindness, equity and social justice.” At the same time, they are seeking boundaries between work and personal life to
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make their rabbinates manageable and sustainable.
Aspiring and new rabbis are also entering Jewish life at a time of change. “Students in the rising generation know they’re going to have to build the Jewish future in entrepreneurial ways because of the massive changes in Jewish communal life in the past 15 years,” Rabbi Deborah Waxman, president and CEO of Reconstructing Judaism, said, citing declining membership in congregations as one example of the change.
“It’s painful and confusing, and there’s also a lot of opportunity,” Waxman said. “Our students are not mourning what once was. They’re using ancient wisdom to build a Jewish future.”
Rabbi lauren henderson, a JTS graduate and rabbi at Or Hadash congregation in the Atlanta suburb of Sandy Springs, Ga., envisions creating a “haimish community with a homey feeling where it’s profoundly intergenerational and the elders know the b’nai mitzvah students and everyone pitches in to make food for kiddush.” One of her models is Temple B’nai Israel, the only synagogue in Spartanburg, S.C., which her interfaith family joined when she was 8 years old.
At the same time, the 34-yearold rabbi, who started her new post at the 320-family congregation in July 2020, is “exploring what 21st century Judaism looks like,” including more mindfulness during prayer. Given her family heritage, Henderson is also sensitive to issues of interfaith marriage and is studying halachic parameters that might allow Conservative rabbis to take part in wedding ceremonies where one partner is not Jewish.
For Henderson, it was not a rabbi but a Messianic Jew who compelled her to learn more about her Jewish roots. As an undergraduate at Rice University, a friend invited her to a meeting of Campus Crusade for Christ, where the speaker urged attendees to spread the gospel in order to be true friends to one another. She left that evening angry yet determined to deepen her Jewish knowledge, and she promptly joined Hillel. She began her rabbinic studies at the Conservative movement’s Ziegler School at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles and later transferred to JTS, where she was ordained in 2016.
Her experiences have shown her that “we are no longer rabbis with all the answers,” said Henderson. “I’m continually mesmerized by the richness of Jewish tradition, its boldness, how radical it can be, and its resilience. My role is to be a fellow learner alongside others, to be a curator of the evolution of Torah, and to bring my community into that larger conversation.”
For the past few months, her community has been taking part in a project called Toratah, or the Regendered Bible, in which the artist Yael Kanarek has switched the genders of every character in the Torah from male to female or female to male— including God. “We’re watching,” Henderson said, “as this new lens on Torah is being created before our eyes, in real time, and discussing each week how we understand Torah’s evolution in the 21st century.”
Despite the growing diversity, some populations remain underrepresented in the new generation of liberal rabbis. “America allowed me to become a rabbi,” Rabizadeh, the UCLA Hillel rabbi, said. But she also struggles with being a “token of diversity,” she said, noting that she was the only non-Ashkenazi in rabbinical school at HUC in Manhattan and at her former position at the eclectic congregation The Kitchen in San Francisco, part of the Jewish Emergent Network of collaborating innovative communities where she was a rabbinic fellow.
“People have asked me when I converted,” she said. Her master’s thesis at HUC involved writing a trilingual Progressive Persian Haggadah. In the future, she hopes to create a synagogue or a school to share the richness of Persian and other non-Ashkenazi traditions, or write books that are not “flat and one-sided” portrayals of what Jews look like.
UCLA Hillel’s large Persian population allows Rabizadeh to guide students who remind her of herself. “The reason Moses could do the job of leading the Jewish people out of Egypt is that he was born Jewish, but he lived in the palace,” she said. “He was both an Egyptian and a Hebrew. I feel like that, too.”
She also has faith in the power of the rabbinate. “Rabbis are more than just spiritual guides,” she said. “We’re judges and lawyers, we’re counselors and therapists. We’re paid to think and observe the world.”
Kanaan Goldstein
Rahel Musleah leads virtual tours of Jewish India and other cultural events and hopes to lead her first post-pandemic, in-person tour in November 2022 (explorejewishindia.com).
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Rabbanit Shira Marili Mirvis at home in Efrat
In Israel, Breaking Barriers in the Orthodox World
By Michele Chabin
In October 2020, when the Torah reader at Shirat HaTamar, a Modern Orthodox congregation in Efrat, realized—mid-sentence—that an ever-so-slightly scrunched letter might render the Torah unkosher, the shul’s leaders called on their resident expert in Jewish law: Shira Marili Mirvis.
Mirvis, who was then in the final year of a five-year program in women’s halachic leadership, walked from the women’s section to the bimah and carefully examined the Torah. After informing the congregation that the Torah was indeed kosher, the Shabbat reading continued.
“After I sat back in my seat in the women’s section, behind the mechitzah, I realized I was asked, and I answered, a halachic question for the whole synagogue that a synagogue’s rabbi would ordinarily answer,” Mirvis said.
Less than a year later, in May 2021, Mirvis officially began to lead Shirat HaTamar, a vibrant 42-family synagogue that was established three years ago in her West Bank settlement near Jerusalem. She is believed to be the only woman in Israel to head an Orthodox synagogue on her own.
Mirvis, 42, who calls herself a rabbanit rather than a rabbi or rabba, has most of the responsibilities of a male Orthodox congregational rabbi, including answering questions on halacha (Jewish law), teaching Torah subjects to adults and youth, reading the haftarah on Shabbat and delivering sermons. But unlike a male rabbi, she is not counted in a minyan, so she cannot lead prayers or officiate at weddings. Male congregants lead the davening and read from the Torah—just as they did before Mirvis headed the synagogue.
The synagogue’s decision to hire Mirvis was “a natural progression,” said Rami Schwartz, a Shirat HaTamar board member. “She and her family have been members of the community since day one. She shared Torah, taught classes, and people started coming to her with halachic questions. People gravitated to her and saw her as a de facto leader of the kehillah, our synagogue community.”
The bottom line, Schwartz said, is that “when people in a community have a question, they go to their community rabbi. It’s natural that we go to Shira, we trust her knowledge and humility. When she herself needs to go to her teachers for guidance, she does. That’s an important quality in a leader.”
For an Israeli Orthodox synagogue to appoint a woman as the sole religious leader “is pathbreaking,” said Adam Ferziger, a professor at Bar-Ilan University’s department of Jewish history and contemporary Jewry. This is especially true as “it implies that she is a halachic authority, which is an area, a role that even many moderate Orthodox figures would be reticent offering to a woman.”
Ferziger estimated that about five or six other Modern Orthodox synagogues in Israel have women who serve as assistant rabbis or in partnership roles with male rabbis. “It’s a slow, incremental revolution, but it’s still avantegarde,” he said.
Mirvis earned a heter hora’a— a permit to teach Jewish law, commonly known as a certificate of semicha—by passing the same exam that male rabbinical students in Israel must take before the Chief Rabbinate certifies them as rabbis. The Rabbinate, a strictly Orthodox and state-funded institution that has a monopoly over virtually all matters related to official Jewish life in Israel, does not permit women to take their semicha test.
In July 2021, Mirvis received her heter hora’a from the Susi Bradfield Women’s Institute of Halakhic Leadership, a part of the Ohr Torah Stone educational network. She was handpicked to lead Shirat HaTamar by Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, the founding chief rabbi of Efrat and founder and chancellor of Ohr Torah Stone.
Mirvis was born in Jerusalem into an Orthodox Sephardi family that considered their local synagogue, which was headed by Rabbi
Pioneer Within Jewish Law Mirvis says that she wants to be the ‘halachic woman figure’ whom Jewish women—and men—can go to on a variety of issues.
Mordechai Eliyahu before he became a chief rabbi of Israel, their second home.
She insists that her desire to lead a synagogue and be a poseket halacha—a rabbischolar who rules on halacha—is motivated by her desire to serve her community, not to rock the boat of Orthodox Jewish practice.
She sees herself as a pioneer, yet firmly within the boundaries of Jewish law. “I’m not trying to break tradition,” Mirvis emphasized during an interview in her book-lined, toy-filled home in Efrat. “I value tradition very much.” At the same time, she wants to be the “halachic woman figure” whom Jewish women—and men—can go to on a variety of issues.
She said she wishes that such a woman had existed when she got married 18 years ago and a year later, when she experienced a miscarriage. “I had a lot of halachic questions and I wanted to learn what was minhag— tradition—and what was halacha, but I felt embarrassed asking a man.”
While several women had by then graduated from the yoetzet halacha program of the Nishmat Center for Advanced Torah Study, where they became experts in the area of taharat hamishpacha, Jewish law that relates to marriage, sexuality and women’s health, “they weren’t accessible to me,” Mirvis said. “Unlike today, there was no yoetzet halacha hotline.” Nor were they trained to answer Mirvis’s many questions unrelated to those issues, she said.
Mirvis’s husband, Shlomo, the founder and CEO of a tech startup company, calls himself “rebbetzman.” They have five children, ages 7 to 16.
By the time Mirvis’s father died four years ago, and an ultra-Orthodox member of a Jerusalem chevra kadisha forbade her from making a tear in her clothing as a sign of mourning at the cemetery because it would be “religiously immodest,” she knew enough about Jewish mourning practices to insist on tearing her garment. “I told him, no, I need to do this now, and I ripped my shirt,” she recalled. “Of course, I was wearing a shirt underneath.”
From its inception, Shirat HaTamar— which gathers in a kindergarten on Shabbat and holidays but has been allotted land to build a permanent structure by the Efrat municipality—follows the religious guidelines set forth by Riskin, including what women can and cannot do from a religious perspective.
Mirvis said she sometimes feels saddened by the fact that women are not counted in a minyan. “It does bother me, but I bend my wishes to halacha.”
More than anything, she said, “the essence of my role is to be available to people, to answer their questions. I see myself in charge of enhancing options to whoever wants to learn Torah and halacha.”
In addition to offering classes on different aspects of Jewish law and answering members’ questions—everything from building a kosher-for-Sukkot pergola to surrogate motherhood—Mirvis ushers her congregants through Jewish calendar and life-cycle events. She works to help prepare every prospective bar and bat mitzvah child in the synagogue, and offers halachic guidance and emotional support to members navigating the loss of a loved one.
Asked whether being a rabbanit and not a male rabbi brings “added value” to her synagogue job, Mirvis grew pensive. “I don’t know how to answer,” she said. “I think the role is similar, in that I make halacha accessible to the community.”
But, she asked, “In what way am I different? On Rosh Hashanah, I gave my dvar Torah outside due to corona, in the parking lot, to more than 100 people. I started crying, and my community starting crying. At the end of the prayers a male rabbi came up to me and said that this is the power of a woman rabbi. She will allow herself to cry in front of her synagogue. I feel comfortable crying in front of them, but I grew up in a small family shul and the male rabbi cried all the time.”
Mirvis’s congregants say she brings a perspective and experience not shared by male rabbis. “As a religious woman I always had to go to male rabbis, even when I didn’t want to, so sometimes I didn’t go,” said Renana Stern, a member of Shirat HaTamar.
Stern said that Mirvis “looks at issues from her perspective as a woman, a wife, a friend, a mother as well as an expert in halacha. Her leadership and her ability to be in touch with her emotions makes everyone feel secure to speak with her.”
Mirvis’s role extends beyond the synagogue. In Efrat, which has only two paid kashrut supervisors—both male—she has been entrusted by the municipality’s religious council with checking the kosher standards of at-home food businesses run by women. For the moment, she does so on a voluntary basis, she said, because
there is no budget for a third supervisor.
The same is true of her volunteer work, which she sees as an extension of her role as a rabbanit. She guides mikveh attendants at the local mikveh, comforts families in the Covid ward of Shaare Zedek Medical Center and works with the local burial society. She also teaches, for pay, at various educational institutions.
Despite her considerable involvement in the community, some rabbis in Efrat refuse to recognize Mirvis’s authority and have distanced themselves from her. Soon after the news broke that Chaim Walder, a well-known children’s author, rabbi and therapist in the ultra-Orthodox community, was accused of serial sexual assault, including of children, several Efrat rabbis signed a letter recognizing their community’s obligation to deal with sexual abuse. After Mirvis signed the letter, a few of the signatories removed their names.
Riskin said that graduates of the Bradfield institute and other Orthodox women’s centers of learning are being accepted for a wide range of positions that were traditionally held by Orthodox men. But Riskin, the founding rabbi of Lincoln Square Synagogue in Manhattan before making aliyah in 1983, acknowledged that there are still many Orthodox rabbis and institutions that reject the notion that women can be halachic authorities, especially in synagogues, because they don’t want to be accused of changing the religious status quo.
Many in the Orthodox world worry that “it would appear that they are accepting Reform or Conservative practice,” Riskin said. “They’re afraid of the slippery slope.”
Rabbi Kenneth Brander, president and rosh yeshiva of the international Ohr Torah Stone network, agrees. While he is immensely proud of Bradfield institute graduates, he said, calling them rabbis “can put at risk the work that we do. It scares parts of the Orthodox community, because they are sensitive to the nuances and terminologies of halacha.”
Meanwhile, Mirvis, seated at her dining room table, her computer open while thumbing through Jewish texts—a Gemara, Shulchan Aruch and Hazon Ovadia—welcomed her children as they arrived home from school. She then cited a midrash.
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Michele Chabin is an award-winning journalist who reports from Israel.
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