Maharat Hired At DC Shul, With Help From JOFA Leader

One of the first three graduates of Yeshiva Maharat will serve in a clergy position at an Orthodox congregation in Washington, D.C., thanks to a grant from a board member of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance.

Ruth Balinsky Friedman, who will earn the title maharat at the yeshiva’s graduation on June 16th, will join the staff of Congregation Ohev Shalom – The National Synagogue, working with Rabbi Shmuel Hertzfeld.

Maharat is an acronym for Manhiga Hilkhatit Rukhanit Toranit, one who is teacher of Jewish law and spirituality. Friedman’s position will be partially underwritten by Zelda R. Stern, a JOFA leader and philanthropist. In a statement, JOFA said the grant would allow Friedman to serve “as a full member of the clergy,” beginning in August.

“She’ll be teaching and guiding and working with people of all ages, helping our congregation become closer to Hashem,” Rabbi Hertzfeld told The Jewish Week. “Everything will be in accordance with interpretation of Halacha.”

Last week, the Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America released a statement welcoming greater halachic study and participation in religious life by women but declaring that women as clergy is “a violation of our mesorah,” or tradition.

In response, Rabbi Hertzfeld said “They never called me to ask what she is doing. If they did, I would say everything is in accordance with mesorah.”
He said Friedman as maharat could have a role at events such as weddings or funerals, as permitted by halacha, but could not lead prayer services. “We are not egalitarian,” he said.

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Meet Nigeria's Jews

If you thought the wonders of the Internet were best characterized by videos of cats on treadmills and Words With Friends, consider the experience of Shmuel Tikvah ben Yaacov. The web introduced him to his heritage.

Shmuel, an Igbo (pronounced Ebo) from Southeastern Nigeria, grew up understanding that he was Jewish, but he knew little religious and cultural history. (Tradition has it that the Igbo are descendants of Gad, founder of one of the lost tribes of Israel.) But when the Internet came to Nigeria, Shmuel began researching, and what he learned convinced him of his Jewish heritage and inspired him to help build the country's small Jewish community.

Writer/director Jeff L. Lieberman's Re-Emerging: The Jews of Nigeria is a fascinating portrait of a group that, until recently, had little contact with Jewish communities around the world. Despite a lack of resources and the Israeli government's disinclination to recognize the Igbo as Jews, Shmuel and his fellow community members are committed. And after a visit from a sympathetic American rabbi, Shmuel reveals his dream: to attend the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Despite the visa difficulties that ensue, Shmuel is determined to become a rabbi: "The community here needs my service."

The New ‘Morethodox’ Rabbi

Asher Lopatin succeeds Avi Weiss at an influential seminary, offering a pluralistic version of Orthodoxy

Avi Weiss has always been known as an unapologetic revolutionary. As a young Orthodox rabbi in the 1960s and ’70s, he was instrumental in helping build the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, a movement predicated on the idea that established Jewish institutions were doing too little to help their brethren behind the Iron Curtain. In 1985, he led a group of Jews in a guerrilla Shabbat service at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, a historic and intentionally symbolic episode organized in protest of President Reagan’s visit to a war cemetery at Bitburg, where members of the SS were buried, during a state visit to Germany. Four years later, months before the collapse of communism across Eastern Europe, Weiss and six others were physically attacked after they scaled the walls of a Carmelite convent that had been built at Auschwitz and conducted an impromptu Torah study session in objection to the Catholic presence at the site of so much Jewish death. Weiss’ arrest record is legendary and stretches from New York to Oslo, Norway, where he was detained in 1994 while demonstrating against Yasser Arafat’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize.

In 1999, Weiss broke with Yeshiva University, his intellectual home and the headquarters of Modern Orthodoxy, to start his own rabbinic seminary in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx, Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, under the banner of what Weiss termed Open Orthodoxy: the view that stringent observance of Jewish religious law in the modern world should co-exist with ideological flexibility on a range of questions, particularly concerning the role of women and Jewish denominational pluralism. Four years ago, Weiss took his rebellion one step further and founded Yeshivat Maharat, a women’s seminary, headed by his protégé Sara Hurwitz, the first American Orthodox woman to be ordained.

In January 2010, Weiss caused the biggest uproar of his career by changing Hurwitz’s title from maharat—an acronym for the Hebrew phrase denoting a teacher of Jewish law and spirituality—to the far more straightforward rabba, the feminized version of rabbi. The move drew an immediate outcry, including a statement from the Agudath Israel, a leading central authority of American Ultra-Orthodoxy, declaring that Weiss could no longer be considered part of the Orthodox fold: “These developments represent a radical and dangerous departure from Jewish tradition and the mesoras haTorah and must be condemned in the strongest terms.”

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The Imaginarium Atop the Warsaw Ghetto

You enter a modern glass building and descend into a forest of sorts—"a space of historical imagination." You wander those woods, modeled after those encountered by early Jewish merchants when they first came to Poland. Later you find yourself lost on a bustling prewar street, which may lead you to a concert of contemporary, folk-infused Jewish music.

If you happen to be at the grand opening of The Museum of the History of Polish Jews this may describe your experience. Today marks the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the Polish capital has scheduled the day's momentous ribbon-cutting in its honor.

NYU Professor Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett created the museum's core exhibit—an interactive, multimedia gallery that weaves 1000 years of history, culture, and religion from source materials such as drawings, photographs, films, and everyday objects.

The museum, which has been in the works for 2 decades and is located on the site of the former ghetto, tells a new story of Polish and Jewish history—not necessarily a good story and not necessarily bad, but a story that links the two histories right up through today.