Tag Archive: pluralism
Colorado girl’s Kotel experience
By Melinda Robin, October 2013 When I was 17, I came to Israel as part of Young Judaea Year Course…the only kid from Colorado. We boarded the bus at the airport, exhausted from the long flight. First stop, prior to arriving at our dorms and getting settled – the Kotel. Imagine the power – our…
A Dream Fulfilled
By Rabbi Marion Shulevitz, October 2013 As a very little girl, I loved going with my father to our Conservative synagogue in Detroit. I loved sitting next to him, pretending I could read the Siddur, and when I got old enough, reading with him. In the children’s service, I was thrilled to be called up…
Fish and Bicycles
If you start reading a NIF News column with that title, you might just be A Certain Age
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…
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