Anat Hoffman - Women of the Wall

Anat Hoffman, one of the founders of Women of the Wall and someone who continues to fight for justice and equality in her capacity as Executive director of IRAC (the Israel Religious Action Center) visited Beth Am this week.


In a city where women are traditionally consigned to a subordinate role, Ms. Hoffman led in the battles for the right of women to pray at the Western Wall and for women's equal pay for equal work. She is promoting the film, Praying in Her Own Voice, which documents the contentious struggle of Women of the Wall for the right to wear prayer shawls and read aloud from a Torah scroll — acts that are permitted by Jewish law, but are fiercely objected to by the Orthodox authority that has jurisdiction over this national symbol and public space.

WATCH AN EXCERPT FROM THE MOVIE:
Praying in Her Own Voice



Anat Hoffman had many wonderful things to teach us at Beth Am this weekend.
Just a few quotes from her speech show her wonderful insight that has marked her journey to represent women's right to pray at the Kotel in Jerusalem:

"SHEMA is a powerful word. It takes the discipline, 'Shema', to save all aspects of life in Israel."

"Religious Reform is an oxymoron in Israel"

"Israel is too important to be left to Israelis"

Speaking of Hebrew, the language, she said,"Our language is smarter than the people who speak it."

How to help:

Join ARTZA - part of the dues goes directly to IRAC.

Buy a 'Women of the Wall' Tallit - details on how to do this will follow or email anat@irac.org.

Learn more about what is happening and spread the word to others you know.

Howard Selznick takes amazing notes all all events and has shared his thoughts with us about the presentation at Torah Study as well as insight from his daughter who has experienced the Women of the Wall directly:

Rabbi Marder introduced Anat Hoffman as a “pistol.” Based on what she had
to say, she was more of a shotgun. Her discussions about Women of the Wall at
Torah Study and Shabbat Services were a series of ugly incidents between the WOW and the intransigent Israeli government that was all too influenced by the religious parties.

The journey of WOW can be likened to the Torah portion Ma’sey, where the colorful place names of the Israelite sojourn through the desert are listed. WOW began with a group of American and Canadian Jewish women who couldn’t understand why women were not allowed to do three “T” (Hebrew “taf”, ת ) activities that men could do at the Western Wall: wear Tefilin, study Torah, and Tefilah (pray) out loud. After all, women are not required to wear Tefillin, although there are no sanctions if they do. A woman touching the Torah does not make the scroll ritually impure. A woman can pray with lips moving but silently, like Hannah at Shilo.

After many petitions, court cases, and thousands of pages of legal materials, the issue is still not completely resolved in nearly 20 years. Anat was almost cynical: this is Israel, among the most innovative technical and entrepreneurial nations on earth and the least progressive for the Jewish faith. What a contrast! In fact, innovations in religious practices invariably occur in the Diaspora, not in the Jewish homeland. Why? It’s those evil religious parties and those evil secular Israelis who don’t care about the evil religious parties who seem to run the religious lives of Israel. There is Orthodox Judaism or secularism. Reform Jews? Hah! They aren’t real Jews but some other religion. The Orthodox cannot fathom the bumper sticker: “there is more than one way to be Jewish.”

Even after her horror stories about government bureaucracy and obstinacy, she still loves Israel. It’s her family. Everyone still loves family members despite their quirks and foibles. If Israel had none of these problems, where would she get her speech materials?

From Joanna Dulkin’s “Shalom from Jerusalem”, 17 February 2002

A piece of news I didn't miss (it helped that I heard directly from a conversation with a friend who was there): the Women of the Wall reached an exciting milestone. The group read Torah at the Western Wall itself, in the women's section, for the first time in its 13-year history. They decided not to wear their tallitot and tefillin (one small step at a time!), but nonetheless were able to conclude the service where they were as opposed to the usual practice of going up to the nearby archaeological gardens [Robinson’s Arch] to read Torah and finish the service. Haviva Ner-David, an Orthodox Jewish feminist scholar, teacher and member of Women of the Wall who read Torah this last Wednesday morning, wrote this over email:

"It was a rainy, cold morning, and there were hardly any other people at the kotel at 7 am. It seemed like a shame to schlep the Torah all the way up to the Rovah as we usually do, especially with so few people around, and especially since there is a plexiglass stand in the Ezrat Nashim [women's section] now with an awning, while in the Rovah we would have had to protect the Torah with umbrellas. So we just read the Torah at the kotel. Only two (out of the perhaps forty or so) haredi women yelled at us (which is a sign, I think, that they are getting used to the idea of women's tefillah), but the police let us continue. Aliza Berger and I read. It was awesome! After 13 years of praying for this day, it really seems like a cause for celebration. A ray of light in all this darkness here in Israel lately."

For those of you who are not familiar, Women of the Wall is an organization of Jewish women that was formed after the International Jewish Feminist Conference in 1988, to fight the legal and sociological battle to allow women to organize in prayer at the Western Wall. Traditionally, women are not counted as a member of a minyan, prayer quorum of ten. With less than a minyan, a group is unable to read Torah publicly or say certain central portions of the service. So it follows that traditionally, an assembly of 10 women is not able to conduct communal prayer. Nowadays, more women's prayer groups are springing up everywhere, but at the end of the 80's, this was a much less prevalent occurrence. So when this incredible group of women held services on the women's side of the Western Wall in December 1988 it caused widespread rancor from both sides, especially the men's side of the Kotel; they heckled, yelled, and threw chairs at the women. Since then, the WOW have fought for and received police protection, and has become a fixture for change in the country and the world (not still, apparently, without controversy, as you can read in their fascinating history at http://www.womenofthewall.org/chron.html). The group, through their continuing presence and court battles, has made it clear that they're not going away. Now, throughout the world there is a critical mass of traditionally observant women who, within the bounds of Jewish tradition, are actively questioning it.

Joanna Dulkin is the daughter of Laura and Howard Selznick. This is an excerpt from her weekly journal written while spending an academic year in Jerusalem. She is currently a cantor at Sha’are Zekek synagogue in St Louis.