Lady Judith Montefiore: A Brief History

From aish dot com:

It was, in the words of Charles Dickens, “The best of times and the worst of times.” While revolution and political strife roiled Continental Europe, Britain in the 1780s and beyond was home to progressive social change, and to a growing community of educated, cultured Jews who flocked to England.

This group of highly educated, ambitious Jews called themselves the “Cousinhood” – brilliant Jewish families who built empires of business and service, married into each other’s families and created a new, vibrant Jewish community. One of the most prominent of these immigrant Jews was the Dutch-born Levi A. Barnet Cohen who moved to London in the 1770s and eventually became one of a dozen Jews newly elected to Parliament, without compromising his Orthodox Jewish faith. He married a brilliant Jewish woman named Lydia and together they raised an observant Jewish family. Their daughter, Lady Judith Montefiore, became a great – and little known – patron of Jewish life.

Judith used her wealth to support poor Jews, helping build the Jewish Ladies’ Loan and Visiting Society, a Jewish orphanage in London, and educational programs for girls at Jews’ Hospital. Moshe also rose in British society. He was knighted in 1837 (Judith gained the honorific Lady then); that year he was also elected the Sheriff of London – only the second Jew ever elected to that post. Yet despite the Montefiore’s high social position, they were dogged for years by anti-Semitism and snide anti-Jewish remarks.

read more here @ aish dot com

An obituary 1,700 years old has been translated

An obituary 1,700 years old has been translated - CNN.com

A 1,700-year-old obituary, which is unlike anything researchers say they have seen before, has finally been translated. The inscription, written in ancient Greek on a small limestone tablet reveals a woman's name, her religion and what she was like as a person.

Lincoln H. Blumell, who specializes in ancient scripture at Utah's Brigham Young University, translated the epitaph. Plucked from Egypt, the document had been sitting in the Rare Books Department at the University of Utah's J Willard Marriott Library since it was donated in 1989. It commemorates a woman named Helene who cared for and loved orphans.

In peace and blessing Ama Helene, a Jew, who loves the orphans, [died]. For about 60 years her path was one of mercy and blessing; on it she prospered.

Read more here at: CNN online edition

2,500-Year-Old Find Gives Rare Insight into Women's Roles in Ancient Israel

2,500-Year-Old Find Gives Rare Insight into Women's Roles in Ancient Israel

Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologists recently discovered two rare ancient seals in the City of David in Jerusalem.  Archaeologists found the seals inside a 2,500-year-old building.

“Inside this building as a result of very gentle work that include also sifting of the finds, sifting of the airs in order to find all the tiny artifacts, we discovered among other stuff two Hebrew seals; one with the name of a man, Sa‘aryahu ben Shabenyahu and another one with the name of a woman, Elihana bat Gaelm,” IAA archaeologist Yana Tchekhanovetes told CBN News.

“It’s very exciting to know that in ancient times were strong woman in Jerusalem living here. Even though we don’t have any idea who was this lady and why she deserved such a special right in this society,” she continued.

Three Women & Hadassah

From Naperville Sun:

A hundred years ago, New Yorker Henrietta Szold traveled to Palestine and saw they had no access to medical care. She returned to the United States and started Hadassah, now the largest Jewish women’s organization in the world.

More recently, when Marlene Levine moved from Columbus, Ohio, to Minnesota for her husband’s job, she called on the Hadassah membership to help her make friends. After a move to Naperville, she is now the president of the DuPage/Will Hadassah chapter.

And Melanie Benjamin wanted to, “Tell the stories of strong women, who tried, but not always succeeded to live the lives they were told they couldn’t live because of their gender, the time or their condition.”

Book: Jewish Womens' Customs

From Haaretz:

The clothes and the jewelry, like the covers of the prayer books and the inscriptions on the women's amulets, tell the story of Jewish women down the generations. Aliza Lavie has traced their history and customs and collected every detail she could in order to shed light on the role of women in Jewish ritual and in the community. The result is a new book, "Minhag Nashim: Masa Nashi shel Minhagim, Tekesim, Tefilot Ve'siporim ("Women's Customs: A Journey of Jewish Customs, Rituals, Prayers and Stories" (Yedioth Books, Hebrew).

Historically, Jewish activity centered around men. The burden of obligation fell on them: checking the house for chametz before Pesach, carrying the lulav on Sukkot, standing next to the mohel at their sons' ritual circumcision and praying in the main chapel of the synagogue.

The new book surveys customs from East and West, from North Africa to Europe. Many of the rituals, naturally, have to do with pregnancy, childbirth and the mikveh, the Jewish ritual purification bath. She describes, for example, amulets that women wore when one of their number went into labor, and that were placed in the beds of infants. In Morocco, women were guarded during labor and ceremonies against the "evil eye" were held that included readings from Scripture and the singing of piyutim, or liturgical songs.

Bat Mitzvah Turns 90

From Philly dot com:

It was a simple walk from her seat to the front of the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, a New York City synagogue. But when 12-year-old Judith Kaplan was summoned by her rabbi father to read from her Bible and recite some blessings, the act was revolutionary.

On a March Saturday in 1922, two years after women in America got the right to vote, Rabbi Mordecai M. Kaplan broke tradition. He had, in essence, held a coming-of-age ceremony for his daughter, what boys at 13 had celebrated for centuries.

Of course, what Judith performed was not, in fact, identical. She didn’t read directly from the Torah, nor would the ceremony afford her the same synagogue privileges as males. But it did mark a giant step toward religious equality. Ninety years ago this month, it was the first American bat mitzvah.

Chained Women

From the Jewish Daily Forward:

Purim is a holiday that is about women’s power, in its different forms. Thinking about the roles of Queen Vashti and her successor Queen Esther in the Purim story highlights some of the dilemmas that women have faced throughout history. I therefore think it’s particularly apt that Ta’anit Esther is International Agunah Day, the day the marks the harrowing struggle of “chained women,” or women denied divorce.

Vashti and Esther were both married to a man, the same man, for whom women were objects to be adorned and used. This was arguably the prevailing culture at the time, but there are also gradations in the exploitation of women.

Women face the insider/outsider dilemma all the time. Should we work hard and sacrifice our integrity (and money) to meet social expectations of female beauty in order to reap the significant social rewards of beauty and sexuality, or should we challenge the system, refuse to turn ourselves into seductresses, and force the world to deal with “real women,” as we are?

In Judaism the insider/outsider dilemma is faced in the most harrowing way by agunot, women who cannot get a Jewish divorce because the system relies on male volition. To stay in the Jewish legal system, agunot give up right to live independently, or to give birth to a Jew, or to be free. They can be free at any moment, but that would entail giving up their status within the Jewish legal system.

Yocheved Horowitz - Israel's Rosa Parks

From Haaretz.com:

On a sunny afternoon early this week, an ultra-Orthodox woman boarded a bus in the enclave of the Gur Hasidic community in Ashdod and took a seat in the second row. The bus, Egged line 451, was headed for Jerusalem. It quickly became clear that this simple, everyday act - choosing a seat to her liking - was enough to transform her presence in the bus into a palpable challenge to the rest of the passengers. I sat down across from the woman, fearing the worst.

Not only did the woman, whose name is Yocheved Horowitz, blatantly ignore the tacit agreement among the bus' riders to adhere to the most stringent religious practices - in this case, an unwritten rule that men sit in the front and women in the back. And not only did she not conform to the seating arrangements dictated by men - that is, those in authority. This was also a woman who, judging by her appearance, seemed to come from within the community.

Now Horowitz turned around and said loudly and clearly: "What do you mean by 'men's area'? A geographical area?" she wondered. "What is mehadrin? Are you talking about an etrog, a lulav?" she queried, referring to two of the principal symbols used during the festival of Sukkot. "Nowhere in rabbinical law does it say that it is forbidden to sit behind a woman, not in the Shulchan Arukh and not in the Yoreh De'ah [two classical compilations of Jewish law]. What is written in the Torah and in rabbinical law is that it is forbidden to humiliate sons and daughters of Israel."

Magdalena Grodzka-Guzkowska - A Lucky Woman

From CBS News:

Magdalena Grodzka-Guzkowska's journey of self-discovery is pieced together from interviews with her and people close to her, emails made available to The Associated Press, information provided by Yad Vashem, her memoir "Lucky Woman," and documentary footage.

Decades after she helped save the rabbi and about a dozen others, mostly children, by teaching them Christian customs, Grodzka-Guzkowska discovered documents in an old suitcase showing that her father and other close family members were Jews. Growing up she knew vaguely that one of her great grandmothers was Jewish but nothing more about those roots.

Notable Passing: Paula Hyman

From JTA:

Noted Jewish feminist Paula Hyman, who served as the first female dean of the Seminary College of Jewish Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary, has died.

Hyman died Thursday at the age of 65.

She was the Lucy Moses Professor of Modern Jewish History at Yale University, a position she held for 25 years, including more than a decade as chair of the Jewish studies program.

Hyman served as dean of the Seminary College of Jewish Studies from 1981 to 1986, as well as an associate professor of history at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Prior to that she was an assistant professor of history at Columbia University for seven years; she received a doctorate from the school in 1975.

She published extensively on topics including Jewish gender issues, modern European and American Jewish history, and Jewish women's history as well as feminism. She wrote several books on French Jewry.

Hyman was a founder in 1971 of Ezrat Nashim, a group of Conservative Jewish women who lobbied extensively for changes in the Conservative movement's attitude toward women, including ordaining them as rabbis and inclusion in a minyan.

She was awarded a National Jewish Book Award in 1999 and received honorary degrees from The Jewish Theological Seminary and Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

Hyman regularly spent time in Israel, lecturing in Hebrew and English at the Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University and Ben-Gurion University.

Pucellina of Blois

From the Jerusalem Post:

In the second half of the 12th century, a Jewish woman named Pucellina, presumably of Italian ancestry, had dealings with the nobility in the town of Blois, located in Champagne. Most likely she was a moneylender, not an unusual profession for a medieval European Jew with funds; colleagues of hers were lending money to members of the nobility as well as to the church.

A distressing incident, namely a false blood-libel claim, transpired on May 26, 1171, ending in disaster for Pucellina. A male servant was supposedly watering his horse by the bank of the Loire when he noticed a Jew nearby. According to his account, this Jew was tossing the body of a Christian boy he had murdered into the river. The servant was convinced that the entity thrown into the water was a corpse because his horse was so startled that it refused to drink.

This “witness” immediately reported his sightings to his master, who realized that he had been afforded a perfect opportunity to undermine the local Jewish community. In particular, he could undermine Pucellina, to whom he had a strong aversion; this arrogant Jewish woman had the gall to consider Count Thibaut (of Blois) her patron.

Fleet Street Editor: Rachel Beer

From the Jewish Chronicle Online:

Until very recently if you Googled the name Rachel Beer you would not come up with anything very much, certainly nothing to suggest that she did what no woman has done before or since - edit both the Observer and the Sunday Times. Indeed, for eight years she was in editorial control of both papers.

Israeli writers Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, who have written a book, The First Lady of Fleet Street, about her life, only happened upon her by chance on a visit to London. The Jerusalem–based married couple discovered the story during a visit to Highgate Cemetery.

Koren recalls: "We took a guided tour of the cemetery five years ago and came across the grave of a man called Julius Beer. He had built a mausoleum to block the view of the Victorian aristocrats who had ostracised him. It was an act of revenge. The name sounded Jewish but if he was Jewish what was he doing in Highgate Cemetery? We started looking for information and one thing led to another - we unearthed the story of his daughter-in-law, Rachel."

The Enigma of Stephanie Rosenthal

From the Jerusalem Post Magazine:

We are all used to the phenomenon of the wandering Jew, and to finding a Jew in almost every nook and cranny. But who would have imagined that in the 1920s, a Polish Jewish woman was writing a best-seller in Chinese that was said to be “going like matza water” because half a million copies had been sold.

Prof. Irene Eber, an eminent scholar of Chinese literature and history and of Jews in China, was reading a fascinating travelogue by Mejlekh Ravitch, a Yiddish poet from Warsaw, written while he traveled in China for six months during 1935. Ravitch mentioned having met a landsman, one of the few women writers in the country. This discovery set Eber on a search to uncover the identity of her landsman as well.

Leonora Galigai by Historian Yaara Bar-On

From Haaretz Daily Newspaper:

Historian Yaara Bar-On goes back to the 17th century to tell the story of Leonora Galigai, the Jewish companion of the queen of France. Her tale reflects the feminist struggle across the ages and into our own day

Galigai is at the center of a new book, "A 'Jewish Witch' in the Court of Louis XIII, King of France: The Trial of Leonora Galigai, 1617" (Carmel Publishing; Hebrew), by the historian Yaara Bar-On, the deputy president for academic affairs at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem.

It's a story of high drama, complete with a show trial, rampant prejudice, court intrigues, struggles between men and women, between princes and servants. Among the issues the writer examines are xenophobia, misogyny, the power of gossip and other phenomena that are still very much with us today. Above all, though, the book brings alive the 17th century in a way that reconfirms the relevance of its history for our own time.

Françoise Giroud - Warrior

From the Jewish Daily Forward:

To many, Françoise Giroud, born Lea France Gourdji in September 1916 to Turkish-Jewish parents, was an example of a woman who handled power with uncommon grace. Giroud, who died in January 2003 at age 86, served as France’s minister of culture. In 1953, she co-founded the influential political weekly L’Express to advance the agenda of French-Jewish politician Pierre Mendès France, who soon after was elected prime minister. Journalist for a number of leading weeklies and author of more than two dozen books, from novels to biographies (of Alma Mahler and of Karl Marx’s wife, Jenny, among other liberated women), and advocate of women’s rights, Giroud epitomized a successful career woman at a time when such were still rare in France.

Yet, as “Françoise,” an admiring, unsparing new biography that appeared from Les editions Grasset on the anniversary of her death, January 19, underlines, Giroud’s success came at the cost of genuine inner torment. The book’s author, Laure Adler, herself a noted journalist, quotes eminent French-Jewish statesman Robert Badinter, who states that Giroud was a “warrior.” And indeed, she had plenty to fight against during her long and storied career.

Female Torah Scribe

From BBC News:

Avielah Barclay is an Orthodox Jewish woman who aims to live "sincerely and 100%" inside the traditions of her faith.

She leads a fastidiously observant life, wears a head covering and a long skirt - in line with Orthodox views on female modesty - and keeps a kosher kitchen.

Yet she is, in many ways, a most unorthodox Jewish woman.

Avielah is a scribe. She writes and restores sacred Jewish texts, a job traditionally done by men.

In fact, for years she has been wondering whether she is the first female scribe in millennia of Jewish history.

Fully trained and certified, getting commissions to restore the sacred texts, and teaching students, she is aware of the importance of her work.

The scrolls she restores today will be used in ritual for generations after she is gone.

Women Writing Torahs

From Jew School:

Kadima, a Jewish community in Washington, wanted to buy a Torah written by a woman. After making inquiries, they learned that there were no Torahs written by women. So they decided to commission six women to write one.

Since the time that this Torah was commissioned, in 2003, several women have become Torah scribes (or sofrot) is and completed the writing of a Torah on their own.

Alina Treiger - Germany's New Rabbi

From BBC News:

History is being made in Germany with the ordination of the first female rabbi since World War II. Alina Treiger came to Germany from Ukraine, as the BBC's Stephen Evans reports from Berlin.

Why would a Jew migrate to Germany? You would think the ghosts would be too powerful.

Not so, according to those who have made the trip and those who welcomed them.

They are migrating for the main reasons that people in peaceful times pack their bags and seek a new start in a new country: money and work.

And that means work for those who serve them when they arrive - like rabbis, the demand for whom has expanded with the increase in Germany's Jewish communities.

It has led to a bit of history: the ordination of the first female rabbi in Germany since the Nazis killed the previous one in the Holocaust.

Dona Gracia - Ahead of Her Time

From the Jerusalem Post:

Once the wealthiest woman in the world, Dona Gracia planned to establish an autonomous Jewish community in Tiberias.

The museum conducts weekend seminars about the life and times of Dona Gracia whose story fired Cohen's imagination to the extent that she pushed for the Education Ministry to include the study of Dona Gracia in school curricula. Tzvi Tzameret, the Chairman of the Education Ministry's Pedagogic Secretariat, agreed that it was high time for Dona Gracia to come out of the mothballs of the distant past. The upshot is that Israeli high school students as well as soldiers in the IDF will now learn of her plans to establish an autonomous Jewish community in Tiberias, which from the second to the tenth centuries was the largest Jewish city in the Galilee, and a great seat of Jewish learning.

The 500th anniversary of Dona Gracia's birth was celebrated on Sunday at Beit Hanassi in the presence of President Shimon Peres, Israel's fifth President Yitzhak Navon, who heads the National Authority for Ladino, is a former Education Minister and is descended on both sides from long lines of Sephardi rabbis, Education Minister Gideon Saar, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch among a host of dignitaries.

Ruth

The Story of Ruth is set in the time of Judges (Reference: Ruth 1-4).

Elimelech, a native of Bethlehem, migrated to Moab at a time of famine. He was accompanied by his wife, Naomi, and his two sons, both of whom married Moabite women.

Elimelech and his two sons died in Moab. Naomi decided to return to her own people in Bethlehem. Ruth, her Moabite daughter-in-law insisted on going with her.

On their return, the two women found themselves living in poverty; and Ruth, as a foreigner, had additional pressures to cope with (See Note).

In due course, Ruth met Boaz. Not only was Boaz a rich and generous farmer living in Bethlehem, he was a distant relative of her husband's family. Moved by her loyalty to Naomi, Boaz fulfilled his family duty and married Ruth, even though Ruth was not an Israelite.

Ultimately, Ruth became the great-grandmother of King David.

Note:

At the time that the story of Ruth was written, ethnic purity was being enforced among the returning exiles. Many existing mixed marriages between Jews and non-Jews were being deliberately broken up, and there was increasing hostility against people of all other races.