Spirituality and Religious Life

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Collection
Sally Priesand at Hebrew Union College with Rabbinical Students

Sally Jane Priesand

On June 3, 1972, when Cincinnati’s Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion ordained Sally Jane Priesand rabbi, she became the first woman in America to become a rabbi and the first in the world ordained by a rabbinical seminary.

Post-Biblical and Rabbinic Women

IIn antiquity, the treatment of women drew from patriarchal biblical traditions. Despite a few notable exceptions, women had minimal legal rights but were active participants in alternative Jewish sects and could hold office. As rabbinic material was codified, control over women increased, although the literature was not exclusively restrictive towards women.

Poland: Early Modern (1500-1795)

Polish Jewish Women played a complex role in their society and culture during the early Modern Period. This role was usually gender segregated, but upon a closer look, was more gender flexible than one might think.

Cynthia Ozick

Poetry in the United States

The contributions of Jewish women poets to American literary history and political activism, as well as to the enrichment of Jewish culture and practice, are astounding. Many Jewish women poets write with a strong sense of social responsibility and a desire to create poetry that can shape reality, drawing on the Jewish teachings of  tikkun olam.
Old Yishuv, People Praying at the Western Wall

Old Yishuv: Palestine at the End of the Ottoman Period

Women of the Old Yishuv saw their immigration to the Holy Land as serving spiritual sanctification at the expense of material suffering. Jewish women lived restricted lives as the result of child marriage, high infant mortality rates, and being confined to the domestic sphere in the Old Yishuv.
Anne Frank

Modern Netherlands

Like Jewish women everywhere, Dutch Jewish women struggled with issues of assimilation, emancipation, and equality as both Jews and women. This article summarizes the conditions and challenges facing Jewish women in the Netherlands and the paths to progress and change they sought—education, work, activism, and literature, among others—from the nineteenth century to the present, including after the particular decimation of Dutch Jewry during the Holocaust.

Nahat Ruah Le-Nashim (Women's Spiritual Satisfaction)

Jewish law presents the concept of Nahat Ruah Le-Nashim as the legal basis for granting women the option to perform commandments from which they are exempt, thereby bringing them spiritual satisfaction.

The Jewish Family in Early Twentieth-Century United States

As poor Jewish immigrant families poured into the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, concerned social workers, rabbis, sisterhood presidents and journalists sounded an alarm about the state of the Jewish family. Women often bore the blame for what was seen as the weakening of the Jewish home, and communal organizations devoted much attention to strengthening the Jewish family.

Deborah Marcus Melamed

Deborah Marcus Melamed encouraged Jewish women to form their own relationship with Jewish practice through her 1927 book The Three Pillars, an interpretive guide to rituals and customs. Melamed also served as vice president of the Women’s League for Conservative Judaism from 1920 to 1930 or 1932.

Medieval Ashkenaz (1096-1348)

The Jews of medieval Ashkenaz are known for their prolific rabbis and for the Ashkenazic customs that became characteristic of many European Jewish communities. During the High Middle Ages, the women in these communities had many important roles women within the family and in the communal, economic, and religious life.

Ludomir, Maid of

A series of traumatic events motivated the Maid of Ludmir to begin practicing male ritual Hasidic observances as a young adult, and she became renowned for her miracle-granting abilities. Although she was able to hold a position of religious power in the Hasidic community without the help of powerful Hasidic men in her family, her story ultimately upholds gender expectations.

Portrait of Tehilla Lichtenstein

Tehilla Lichtenstein

Tehilla Lichtenstein co-founded the Society of Jewish Science with her husband as an alternative to Christian Science, creating a small but passionate following and carving a place for herself as a congregational leader.

A highly decorated ketubah (marriage contract) from Greece.

Legal-Religious Status of the Married Woman

Rabbinic law defines the criteria and requirements for traditional marriage, marital rights, and divorce. However, the rabbinic marital system poses many problematic issues for women, especially for agunot, women trapped against their will in marriages by their husbands.

Legal-Religious Status of the Moredet (Rebellious Wife)

A woman who is deemed a moredet is severely disadvantaged in her legal standing. There are various ways in which a women is considered a moredet, and all legal processes dealing with rebellious wives put women at a legal disadvantage.

Legal-Religious Status of the Jewish Female

Gendered language in the Torah resulted in centuries of debate about a woman’s role with regard to commandments. The sages’ construction of a woman and her values was very negative, probably relating more to their vision of the ideal, which was male oriented, and applying its opposite to females.

Matilda Steinam Kubie

Matilda Steinam Kubie directed her energies toward the support and growth of charitable institutions that sought to better the lives of those in the Jewish community. She helped many organizations extend their reach through her leadership and her savvy use of advertising.

Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook

Although he credited women for their emotions and intuition and valued them for their essential position in the family, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook generally regarded women as inferior to men. He believed women should not be educated but rather should be limited to the home and to serving as their husband and family’s housekeeper.
Curator and Canadian Jewish communal leader Marcia Koven

Marcia Koven

Marcia Koven was the founding curator of the Saint John Jewish Historical Museum, one of a number of museums dedicated to Jewish history in Canada’s Maritime Provinces. Her work inspired other Jewish museum projects in Atlantic Canada, and she held a number of other leadership roles related to Jewish life and history.

Rebekah Bettelheim Kohut

Rebekah Bettelheim Kohut

Rebekah Bettelheim Kohut made her mark on the American Jewish community in the areas of education, social welfare, and the organization of Jewish women. Grounded in her Jewish identity as the daughter and wife of rabbis, Kohut had a public career that paralleled the beginnings of Jewish women’s activism in the United States.

Kolech: Religious Women's Forum

Kolech (Hebrew for Your Voice): Religious Women’s Forum was founded in Jerusalem in 1998 with the aim of raising the standing of women in Jewish religious Orthodoxy. Among its achievements are a monthly pamphlet discussing the weekly Torah portion, halakhic issues, homiletics, and various Torah subjects; international conferences; and a guide for rabbis and communal workers on how to act when approached by women. Kolech is also active in the work of the Israeli Parliament, concerning certain laws which affect women.
Home page from early iteration of Ritualwell with many images including Jewish ritual objects, food, and a map of Israel

Kolot: Center for Jewish Women's and Gender Studies

Kolot, the first Center for Jewish Women’s and Gender Studies established at a rabbinical school, was founded in 1996 to bring the insights of Jewish feminist scholarship to the training of rabbis, both in a revised curriculum and through innovative projects. Among these projects, Kolot developed ritualwell.org, a widely used feminist website of new Jewish rituals and liturgy, and a program to enhance self-esteem in teenaged girls, Rosh Hodesh: It’s a Girl Thing!

Irene Caroline Diner Koenigsberger

A distinguished chemist credited with discovering the molecular structure of rubber, Irene Caroline Koenigsberger refused to patent her work, making her discovery available to all. She was also an important figure in the Washington, D.C. Jewish community, cofounding Temple Sinai and the B’nai B’rith Hillel at George Washington University.

Gerda Klein

Gerda Weissmann Klein

Holocaust survivor Gerda Weissmann Klein has used her experiences to educate countless people through her books, television appearances, and motivational speaking. Among numerous other awards for her work, Klein was appointed to the United States Holocaust Commission by President Clinton in 1997, and in 2011 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama.

Francine Klagsbrun Carries the Torah, 1991

Francine Klagsbrun

Author of more than a dozen books and countless articles in national publications and a regular columnist in two Jewish publications, Francine Klagsbrun is a writer of protean interests who has made an impact on both American and American Jewish culture.
A smiling woman stands behind a planter box watering flowers

Kibbutz Ha-Dati Movement (1929-1948)

Beginning in 1929, the religious kibbutz (Kibbutz Ha-Dati) movement represented the confluence of progressive ideals of equality and collectivism and traditional customs of Judaism. As a result, women in the movement lived at a crossroads.

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