Author Archive: New Israel Fund
Cracks In The Walls of Jewish Patriarchy
By Letty Cottin Pogrebin, October 2013 When my mother died in 1955, I was 15, and though I had been educated “like a boy,” and was a pious little synagogue rug rat and one of the first girls to become a bat mitzvah in Conservative Judaism, I was not permitted to count in the shiva…
Belonging: A Transformative Journey
By Paula Jacobs, October 2013 As I write these words, I’ve just returned from Jerusalem where I prayed with Women of the Wall for Rosh Chodesh Heshvan. With this experience still fresh on my mind, it’s an inspiration for personal reflection. Growing up in Boston in the 1960’s, I was privileged to receive an intensive…
Remaining Awake Through A Great Revolution
By Rabbi David Rosenn, October 2013 My wife and I signed up for the requisite natural birthing classes when we were about to have our first child, and it made me curious about my own mother’s experience giving birth. “Are you kidding?” she said to me. “I was out cold during the whole thing. That’s…
The World Must Change
By Rabbi Menachem Creditor, October 2013 On March 16, 2010, extremists threw chairs at my sister and my life as a Jew, as a Rabbi, as a person changed forever. Judaism is much, much better than that. Thanks to NIF’s support of Women of the Wall, the world is changing again, and for the better….
A Touch of Patriarchy
By Leanne Gale, October 2013 I still remember the first time I prayed with Women of the Wall. I wasn’t particularly afraid to go: after all, I was simply returning to a place I had been countless times before, to offer prayers I had memorized for as long as I could remember. As a young…
That Was Then, This Is Now
By Norma Kipnis Wilson, October 2013 As a little girl I believed that I could do anything that the boys could do, and I did. Particularly in sports. As I grew up I realized the limitations for girls were not self inflicted, but were very real in everyday life in society. Change was necessary. What…
Cheering Vashti
By Alexandra Stein, October 2013 I grew up in a Reform congregation in Washington, DC that fully embraced the feminist movement. Our Cantor and one of our Rabbis were women, and on Purim, we not only booed Haman, we also cheered Vashti – because she knew that her body was her own and she did…
A Member of the Israeli Women’s Movement
My connection to my Jewish heritage was strengthened when my husband David (z’l’) and I visited Israel in 2008 and 2013. Because of gender equality in American Judaism, David and I shared a love for Judaism that eventually became spiritual. Our involvement in synagogue life grew because we were able to participate together in many…
How Jewish Gender Equality Changed My Life
By Sara B. Leviten, October 2013 When Beth David Congregation, a Conservative shul in Miami, FL, voted to have equal rights for men and women, my connection to my Jewish heritage was strengthened. I was one of 18 women in an Adult Bat Mitzvah class in 1977. The six months of study for the ceremony…
An Eye Opening Shabbat
By Amiee C. Kushner, October 2013 As a young woman who grew up in the ’80s with a feminist mother in the Bay Area, discrimination was always something that was to be strived against, but rarely did I actually experience it. As an adult there was always an orange on my Seder plate, women on…
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