Author Archive: New Israel Fund
From Exclusion to Community
By Charlotte Glazer Baer, October 2013 In my big Atlanta Conservative shul, I was the best student in my Hebrew class. I had a good, strong voice, knew all the prayers and chants and led Junior Congregation services every Saturday – until I became Bat Mitzvah. After that, I was no longer allowed on the…
Do Not Treat Women as Lesser Human Beings
By Morton Deutsch, October 2013 Throughout my personal life and my professional career, I have worked to support equality and justice in the relations between men and women as well as among the difference racial, ethnic, and religious groups. As a Jew, I have felt the hurts and humiliations that can be experienced when one…
From exclusion to inclusion
By Helen Stein, October 2013 In 1995, I traveled to Israel with my (male) research assistant. Our first stop, after we got off the plane and through customs, was the Kotel. We approached the Wall naively, without noticing that my kind was not welcome everywhere. Suddenly I was surrounded by 5 or 6 screaming young…
Women in Zionist Pioneering History
By Nachum Meyers, October 2013 When Aryeh Malkin left the Bronx, Lisa Engels took over our Hashomer Hatzair (youth guard) education. She too lived on Kibbutz Ein Dor. Our separate groups of boys and girls were joined and we had discussions on gender equality that led us young male chauvinists to appreciate the role of…
Mixed Messages
By Rachel Mann, October 2013 I grew up with mixed messages. My parents encouraged me to succeed academically, and I always felt my prospects were limitless; when I grew up, I could be anything my brothers could be. With one exception. In our Conservative non-egalitarian synagogue, my brothers, once of age, could read Torah and…
The Day the Bat Mitzvah Marched with the Torah
By Rabbi Ralph P. Kingsley, October 2013 One of the memorable moments of my thirty-one year rabbinate at Temple Sinai of North Dade was the day that a Bat Mitzvah carried the Torah during the Hakafah on Shabbat morning for the first time. Not only was her face aglow, but so were the faces of…
Reading Torah
By Judy Roitman, October 2013 I am the daughter and granddaughter of cantors (my grandfather was the great David Roitman). I was raised in a Conservative-leading-towards-Orthodox home, with many Orthodox relatives. When, as an adult living in Lawrence, KS, I first witnessed a woman reading the Torah during services, I began to cry. Something integral…
Coming of Age, Again
By Cathy Swerdlow, October 2013 I became a Bat Mitzvah at a Conservative synagogue in New York State in 1965, but it took me years to realize that my ceremony and that of the boys in my class were not equal. You see, I conducted the Friday evening service only. And, after reciting the Kiddush,…
Men and women together at the Kotel 1967
By Andrew Kaplan, October 2013 I’m an American who served with the Israel Defense Force in the Golan Heights during the Six Day War. A few days after the war ended, I was in East Jerusalem, which at that time was still under martial law. I immediately went to the Western Wall, which of course,…
Davening in Monsey
By Michal Boyarsky, October 2013 As a child, I attended a shul in ultra-Orthodox Monsey, New York. Ours was the odd one out in that neighborhood: other families walked to shul, the men dressed in black-and-white suits and black hats, the women wearing dark dresses and thick stockings. Our family drove fifteen minutes to get…
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