The ‘invisible’ women who could change UK Orthodoxy - The Jewish Chronicle

In early 1993, some 60 women in Stanmore gathered for a Shabbat-morning service, the first in a United Synagogue community.

As usual with religious innovation, British Jewry lagged behind the United States, where the first Shabbat service for Orthodox women had happened a couple of decades earlier.

Not surprisingly, the Stanmore event took place against a background of considerable controversy. The women had the blessing of their rabbi, Dr Jeffrey Cohen, who believed he had the backing of Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. But the London Beth Din raised objections and the service was eventually allowed to go ahead only under certain conditions, including that no Sefer Torah be used and that it was held off synagogue premises.

It took another 18 years before the women were finally permitted to meet on the synagogue site — when the service was now dubbed a “learning experience”, a nominal change “viewed by all participants as the Beth Din’s attempt at saving face”, according to Lindsey Taylor-Guthartz in her important new book.

Challenge and Conformity, which is based on her doctoral thesis, casts light on the religious lives of Orthodox women in the UK, which she says are doubly “invisible” — both to men in the community and to the wider world.

Her study is not only about the struggle of women for greater religious self-expression, it is also about their creative adaptability in face of the constraints male authority has put on them. “Orthodox women do not seek to overthrow or combat the system as a whole,” she explains, “but rather seek to negotiate an expanded role within it”.

The early flush of excitement around the Stammore Women’s Tefillah Group, however, did not result in a flurry of like-minded initiatives.

While an all-women’s service, founded in the independent Oxford congregation in 1988, has been going on every few months, a second United Synagogue women’s service did not start until six years ago. It was prompted partly by the potential alternative attactions of the new partnership minyanim — where women read from the Torah as well as men — and by a more egalitarian Masorti community nearby. It is a sign of the sensitivities still surrounding the subject that the rabbi of that US community asked for it not to be named.

The Rosh Chodesh movement, which organised a couple of Shabbatonim in Bournemouth in the early 1990s where a Torah scroll was used, has since lost its feminist edge, foundering on “resistance from traditionalist laymen and women, and largely Charedi rabbinic authority”. While Rosh Chodesh groups still meet, they have often been “tamed”, consisting of talks and refreshments.

But there have been advances. More than a dozen women’s Megillah readings are annually held in London on Purim since the country’s first in Cambridge in 1991, and the first in a United Synagogue congregation, in Radlett 20 years ago. In Edgware, women defied an appeal from two local Charedi rabbis to cancel their Megillah recital.

Group bat chayil ceremonies for girls on a Sunday have largely been replaced by an individual dvar Torah given by the batmitzvah on Shabbat morning, even though it might be after the end of the service and in some places only in the synagogue hall. Some batmitzvah girls have chanted Megillah Rut on Shavuot; others have gone further by leyning from the Torah in a private ceremony.

But some women have had to give up even modest gains. Dr Taylor-Guthartz records that in two United Synagogue congregations where women had previously been able to dance with a Sefer Torah on Simchat Torah, a new rabbi had put a stop to the practice.

The drive for change comes from Modern Orthodox women, who are more observant and better religiously educated than the middle-of-the-roaders she classifies as “traditionalists”. The traditionalists can feel threatened by innovation because their Jewish identity is bound up with familiar communal convention.

Overall, however, the impression is that the standard Orthodox synagogue service is frustrating for many women.

Not unexpectedly, her Charedi interviewees are most at ease with gender separation in Orthodoxy, although they are far from passive. They draw spiritual satisfaction from new rituals such as bracha parties, where women meet to recite brachot over various foods, interspersed with words of wisdom from a rabbi or guest speaker, and which can attract women from the broader Orthodox community too.

She also delves into the meaning women take from various customs and practices, such as drinking from a cup used for the sheva berachot to help find a husband or, in the case of one woman, being given her nephew’s newly circumcised foreskin to bury, also as an aid to marriage — less dramatic than the custom of actually swallowing the foreskin to promote fertility (which none of her interviewees practised).

Dr Taylor-Guthartz, who is a research fellow at the London School of Jewish Studies, is right to regard women’s issues as a “touchstone” for change within central Orthodoxy. Will the “slide to the right” and the influence of a growing Strictly Orthodox population simply strengthen the tendency to regard Charedi ideals of piety as the norm; or will the desire of Modern Orthodox women not to be silent spectators in the ladies’ gallery persuade a conservative rabbinate to be more flexible?

The partnership minyanim, unauthorised by the Chief Rabbi, appear to be more resilient than the earlier women’s prayer groups, she notes. But whatever rabbis decide, she concludes, “it is Orthodox women themselves who will play the largest part in determining their roles and position in the community”.

Challenge and Conformity — The Religious Lives of Orthodox Jewish Women is published by the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, £29.95