Tagged rabba

10 years after the founding of the first Orthodox school to train female clergy, what’s actually changed?

Rabbanit Jenna Englender dances with the Torah during her graduation ceremony from Yeshivat Maharat in New York, June 17, 2019. (Shulamit Seidler-Feller/Maharat)
December 18, 2019 / Josefin Dolsten, JTA

NEW YORK (JTA) — Growing up in a Modern Orthodox community in South Africa, Sara Hurwitz never imagined that she would one day become a clergy member. The Conservative and Reform movements have been ordaining female rabbis for decades. But in the Orthodox world, women are barred from many… Read more »

Orthodox Union asks women clergy to change their titles

The Orthodox Union is asking Maharat Ruth Friedman, left, shown at her graduation from Yeshivat Maharat in 2013, to change her title in order to comply with a rabbinic ruling that bars female clergy. (Joe Winkler)
May 21, 2017 / Ben Sales, JTA

NEW YORK (JTA) — Following its rabbinic ruling prohibiting synagogues from hiring female clergy, the Orthodox Union is pressuring synagogues that have hired the women to change their titles. In February, the Orthodox Union, an umbrella Orthodox Jewish group, issued a Jewish legal ruling by seven rabbis that bars women… Read more »

With resolution against hiring women rabbis, RCA votes for confrontation
November 4, 2015 / Uriel Heilman, JTA

NEW YORK (JTA) – When America’s main modern Orthodox rabbinical association voted last week to ban the hiring of clergywomen by its members, the question wasn’t whether to endorse women rabbis. It was whether to widen the group’s well-established repudiation of female clergy or keep quiet and focus on finding common ground with modern… Read more »

Tefillin policy tip of the iceberg for Orthodox women
January 30, 2014 / Uriel Heilman, JTA
A modern Orthodox high school in New York recently announced it will allow girls to lay tefillin. Another school has quietly done so since the 1990s.

The announcement last week that SAR, a modern Orthodox high school in New York, is allowing girls to lay tefillin is helping expose an increasingly sharp fault line within Orthodoxy. For decades, it has been difficult to sort out the precise dividing lines between the varieties of Orthodoxy —… Read more »

For graduates of Avi Weiss’ academy, ordination comes with controversy
June 23, 2013 / Ben Harris, JTA
Yeshivat Maharat graduates at their ordination ceremony at Ramaz High School in New York City, June 16, 2013 (Joe Winkler)

NEW YORK (JTA) — More than three years ago, following a broad Orthodox backlash to his decision to ordain a woman with the title “rabba,” Rabbi Avi Weiss made a promise: He wouldn’t do it again. So when Yeshivat Maharat, the school founded in 2009 by the New York… Read more »