A tale of two shuls

Today I went shul-hopping on the streets of north-west London.

Shul A: A partnership minyan, where women were singing aloud and melodiously, leading those parts of the service permitted to them according to certain interpretations of halacha (Jewish law). Depending on who you ask, this prayer gathering is Orthodox, heretical, Reform, inspiring or, worst of all – full of those – don’t say the ‘f-word’ – feminists who want to be like men. 

A woman carried the sefer torah around the women’s section, then passed it over to a man to carry around the men’s section. The sky didn’t fall down, I didn’t spot anyone slipping down a slippery slope, and the service continued in much the same way as a regular Shabbat morning service elsewhere.

The same but also different. Different because some of the women were active participants in the service, and were that much more inspired as a result. No hysteria, no one turning into men. Clearly women who were serious about wanting to play an active role in Judaism. As someone who generally finds shul boring, I enjoy being part of the buzz of this minyan.

Shul B: A synagogue where I spent a lot of time in my childhood, a staunchly Orthodox congregation, where the women sit in the “Ladies’ Gallery” up above observing the men doing all the fun stuff (if anything related to shul can be considered fun) in the sanctuary down below. From my recollection, if women joined in any of the singing, it was never louder than a barely audible whisper. No feminists here.

I didn’t actually attend the service, I came at the end to the ‘social hall’, invited by an old friend who was holding a family celebration there. I did feel a slight out-of-body experience at setting foot in this place after many years away, peregrinations into other types of Judaism and many twists and turns in my life journey. However, what struck me immediately was that I still felt at home in this setting.

I may not look like the glossy sheitel-wearing, fancy shabbat-outfit wearing super frum women who bustled around me on the women’s side of the kiddush (nor have I any desire to do so) – but I still know this world, and I was happy that I made the decision to come and say ‘mazal tov’ to an old friend.

It seems that however far you move away from your home setting  – whether physically or emotionally or religiously – when you come back, you can still feel an uncanny sense of familiarity.

The moral of the story:

Today I slipped seamlessly between two Jewish communities with completely different practices and opposing philosophies and guess what, nothing happened. The sky did not fall down. In my own chameleon-like little way, I just ignored the “they” vs “us”, this community speaks the truth vs that community is heretical, we are right vs you are wrong, general dynamic of Jewish communal life these days.

How many people actually do this kind of yo-yoing between different communal settings? Where are all the other chameleons who dip in and out of different worlds, who are able to blend a variety of different Jewish identities and still feel at one with themselves? Why do people seem so stuck on defining themselves using one rigid label and will not venture even slightly to the left or to the right?

How about just picking yourself up and walking through the doors of a community that you’ve never set foot in beforehand, that may represent ‘different values’, and see what happens. Rather than the sky falling down, chances are you’ll probably just be yawning before too long, willing the service to come to an end so you can get your teeth into a good fried fish ball.

The Orthodox feminist revolution has finally arrived – in London

Here’s a piece I wrote that was just published in The Forward for a U.S. readership about  about finding life back in London surprisingly cheering after a few years living in New York – from a Jewish (Orthodox) feminist perspective.

Also includes an interview with JOFA UK ambassador, Dina Brawer.

Enjoy the read 🙂

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By Rebecca S…

June 21, 2016        

Courtesy of Dina Brawer  ————- Dina Brawer, Orthodox Jewish British feminist

Landing back in the Jewish community of my home town of London, U.K., after five years living overseas, I have the heady sensation of being caught up in a full-blown feminist revolution.

Back in 2010 when I left for a four-year stint in the U.S. (followed by a year in Kenya), London felt like a neglected backwater languishing decades behind the great world centers of Orthodox feminism in Israel and the U.S. Women were relegated to the “ladies’ gallery,” looking down at all the action taking place in the men’s section of the synagogue, and “feminism” was still a dirty word in the Orthodox Jewish community.

There were some signs of grassroots activity — women’s megillah readings on Purim, monthly Rosh Chodesh women’s prayer services, and a training program set up for women to become community educators. But as for any perceptible change in women’s participation at synagogues affiliated with United Synagogue, the country’s largest network of mainstream Orthodox synagogues, it all felt a bit tame and apologetic.

A friend mentioned a partnership-style minyan (prayer groups that retain adherence to Orthodoxy but allow women to lead certain sections of the prayer service and the weekly Torah portion), which someone was setting up in their North London home. Apparently, you needed a masonic handshake to gain entry, though, given how controversial such a minyan was considered then.

And then I arrived in the epicenter of Orthodox Jewish feminism in the world — Riverdale, New York, where I lived for the next four years. Attending the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, a synagogue where the first Rabba (Modern Orthodox woman rabbi), Sara Hurwitz, is on the clergy team, and where it’s no big deal for women to read from Torah scrolls on their side of the mechitza on Simhat Torah, or recite Kaddish during services, I saw how women’s active participation could be a seamless part of Jewish communal life.

Rebecca S… — London’s Hampstead Synagogue, including the “ladies’ gallery” on the left and right sides

I also saw how partnership minyans and Yeshivat Maharat, the first yeshiva to ordain women as Orthodox clergy, are creating basic facts on the ground, new norms for Orthodox communities.

Scroll forward five years and I arrived back in London fretting that I was about to go back to the Dark Ages.

How delighted I was to be proved wrong. I came back to a completely transformed landscape. JOFA (Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance) has set up shop in London, four proudly out-in-the-open and thriving Partnership Minyans are now established, and lately a group have come forward with plans to create a more egalitarian Modern Orthodox high school.

It seems to me so unexpected and exhilarating that I can walk five minutes down the road from my home in Golders Green, a largely Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in North-West London, and hear women leading sections of uplifting Shabbat prayer services run by the lively Golders Green partnership minyan.

Are British Jews finally ready to embrace change? Sally Berkovic, a prominent Orthodox feminist and author of “Under my Hat: An Orthodox Woman Speaks Out for Her Daughters,” says: “When my book was published 17 years ago, issues I touched on — women’s ritual participation and leadership…the challenges of an Orthodox feminist mother raising daughters — were all fresh and new ideas. Now, they’re virtually old hat — and part of the mainstream conversation.”

JOFA ambassador to the U.K., Dina Brawer — formerly a rebbetzin working alongside her then-community-rabbi husband, now training with Yeshivat Maharat to become the UK’s first Orthodox woman rabbi — sums up her experience launching JOFA in 2013: “I spoke to a few women already sympathetic to the cause…they all advised me not to use the word ‘feminism’ because it would be too radical for the U.K. community… or to associate with JOFA (for the same reason). I went ahead anyway.”

“I did not see that there were favorable conditions — on the contrary, but I felt that there was an urgent need for action to accelerate the growth of Orthodox women’s opportunities for involvement,” she adds, explaining how JOFA is enabling many “formerly marginalized women and girls” to find a new place for themselves in Orthodox Judaism.

While mainstream Orthodoxy is still resistant to much of JOFA’s philosophy, Brawer cites several important changes that the organization has engineered since its inception, including: “This is the first time individuals have felt empowered to create religious events outside the established structures, for example minyanim or ceremonies in their own homes to celebrate bat mitzvahs”.

Brawer also points out that the UK’s Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mervis has already implemented some of her suggestions, including her call for talented women to be given the opportunity to become community leaders independently of being married to rabbis. Mervis has recently launched the Ma’ayan Programme, a high-level qualification for women in laws of family purity and women’s health which, on completion, will enable them to take on leadership roles in Jewish communities.

JOFA is also running education programs for Jewish students on UK campuses, and an awareness-raising campaign about the Agunah and Gett abuse issue, among other activities.

A great time to be an Orthodox Jewish feminist in London.

Read more: http://forward.com/sisterhood/342458/the-orthodox-feminist-revolution-has-finally-arrived-in-london/#ixzz4CKuAQjU7

JOFA Conference – Jewish feminism speaks out

Am attending the JOFA Conference this weekend here in New York. This is the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance annual (biannual?) event, with probably 1000 participants and any ‘JOF’ of note (Blu Greenberg, Tamar Ross and other heavyweights, as well as newer arrivals such as Rabba Sara Hurwitz, who attracted so much news coverage in recent times because of her newly endowed title ‘Rabba’ – feminine of ‘Rabbi’)  in attendance.

It looks like a MASSIVE event, with sessions covering anything from sex slavery and human trafficking, ovulation, and Agunot (‘chained women’ who are denied a religious divorce from their husbands), to women’s leadership in Orthodox synagogues, prenup’ agreements and issues of prayer and ritual.

There’s also a film festival on the Saturday night, as well as a number of Jewish women artists displaying their work (including English artist Jacqueline Nicholls who’s bringing her wickedly subversive ‘Ladies Guild’ paper-cuts challenging rabbinic misogyny over the pond.)

Reassuringly to see  in the 21st Century, it looks like quite a lot of ‘JOF’ speakers are of the male variety. Phew, the message finally got across to the male half of the population that feminist issues are relevant to them too.