Tag Archive: Women of the Wall
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…
A Father Comes Around
By Charles Weiss, October 2013 My attitude about what Women of the Wall were trying to achieve was something very personal. You see, my daughter is Anat Hoffman (née Weiss), the leader of the movement. At the outset, I confess, I was very ambivalent. Why go to all this trouble just to make it possible…
13 years old
By Barb Shulman, October 2013 As a Ramah-nick in the late 60s-early 70s, I was an impressionable adolescent right at the birth of the re-examination of our roles as women, Americans, and Jews. Thus, I was taught in Ramah to leyn (read) Torah, haftorah, achah, etc. but not allowed, at least initially, to actually use…
The Transformative Nature of Literacy
By Linda Lippitt, October 2013 When I was 11 and in Hebrew school, I asked our teacher what the little lines above and below some letters were (the trope notes). The answer was “you don’t have to bother with those darling.” Thirty years later, after the Bar Mitzvah of my youngest child, I decided I…
The day I Became a Woman (of the Wall)
By Rachel Cohen Yeshurun, October 2013 I’ve been living in the Jerusalem area for over 20 years. I grew up Orthodox and, being so busy with studies, work, and children, I never thought much about religion and my part in it. And then I chanced upon a Facebook post about Anat Hoffman’s arrest for carrying…
Where there’s a Will there’s a Wall
By Roberta Harris, October 2013 I was a (very small) part of that initial movement to bring women and Torah together at the Western Wall all those years ago. Without being an active feminist, I have always believed it is a woman’s right to be the equal, legally and socially, of anyone in the world….
Join Us
Join NIF's email list to receive urgent updates, smart analysis, and opportunities to get involved.