A native of Seattle, Ventura Israel was
born in 1915, two years after her parents immigrated from Turkey. Forged as a strong woman by the deaths of men in her family-her father’s in 1928, her first husband’s in 1970, and her second husband’s in 1989-she helped support her family during the Depression, and as a twenty-five year employee of Union Federal Savings and Loan. Both her first husband, Maurice Franco, and her second husband, Morris Israel, were born in Rhodes, Greece, and Ventura spent her religious life in Seattle’s Sephardic community. The mother of two, and a vibrant community member, Ventura currently volunteers at the Caroline Kline Galland home and at her synagogue, Congregation Ezra Bessaroth.

An independent, intelligent, and industrious woman, Tillie De Leon is the matriarch of the original Peha family in Seattle, Sephardic immigrants from the Greek Island of Rhodes. One of the first Sephardic children born in Seattle, Tillie’s ground-breaking life continued when she left her close-knit community and moved to Los Angeles to take an accounting job. Married and widowed in Los Angeles, Tillie married Albert De Leon and returned with him to Seattle. Ever hardworking and optimistic, Tillie continued her paid work until age 80, and remains active in volunteer activities.

Born in Fairbanks, Alaska in 1913 to Irish émigré parents, Meta grew up among “living libraries,” men who told stories of their lives on Alaska’s frontier. Educated in Dublin and Paris, she moved to Seattle in 1939 with her husband, Harry, where they raised three children. Meta became active in Seattle’s Orthodox community, and soon, she began compiling the oral and written histories of Seattle’s Jewish people and institutions. The Jewish Archives at the University of Washington-thanks in large measure to Meta-now houses many of these histories, including Meta’s own wonderful story among them.

‘Question Authority.’ Those two words did for me what the burning bush did for Moses: they changed my perception of reality.

B'not Esh has provided a model for how separatist feminist spaces can generate ideas and energy that spill over in to a larger community.

Our intention in turning it into a poster was to invite the world to look at a one-breasted woman and exult in her health and vitality.

This stone symbolizes for me the loving feminist reclamation of our great grandmothers' folkways.

I was making a conscious decision to change my primary identity from ‘Jewish radical feminism’ to ‘feminist Jew.’

Like my mother and her father, my grandfather, I was both a committed Jew and a feminist.

I recited these blessings as though they had been written a couple of millennia ago by the rabbis, rather than the day before, by me.

[T]he needs of Jewish women and girls in both the U.S. and Israel are still not high priorities for our community.

I believe that it took a group of women—including rabbis—to break through the Jewish cultural barrier that saw medical treatment as the only response to illness.

[T]he idea of re–writing the Haggadah seemed startling and even blasphemous. Now, 30 years later, this re–writing has itself become part of an emerging Passover tradition.

In the early years of women entering the rabbinate, many women felt were welcomed to rabbinical school on the expectation that we would act like men.

What captivated me was developing what amounted to a “unified field theory” by applying feminist methodology to explain all of Jewish history, culture, and psychology.