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In Orthodox communities where women don’t read Torah, Purim offers a rare opportunity
(JTA) — When Alyza Lewin became a bat mitzvah in 1977, the fact that she had a ritual ceremony at all was still relatively revolutionary in Orthodox circles. But she took the rite of passage a step further, and did something that, for Orthodox Jews at the time, was considered the exclusive province of men.
She chanted the Scroll of Esther, known as the megillah, in front of a mixed-gender audience in suburban Washington, D.C. on the festival of Purim. Among the crowd were her grandfathers, who were both Orthodox rabbis. Lewin was the eldest of two daughters, and her father wanted to find a ritual she would be allowed to perform while remaining within the bounds of traditional Jewish law.
“My father, when it came time for the bat mitzvah, was trying to figure out what was something meaningful that a young woman could do,” she said. “So he decided: My Hebrew birthday is four days before Purim — he would teach me how to chant Megillat Esther.”
For many modern Orthodox women more than four decades later, women’s megillah readings have moved from the cutting edge to squarely within the norm. The increasing number of women’s readings is an indication of the growth of Orthodox feminism — and its concrete expression in Jewish ritual.
According to the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, at least 105 women-led megillah readings, for both mixed-gender and women-only audiences, are taking place worldwide this year. In 2019, according to JOFA, the number hit a peak of 139, up at a relatively steady pace from 63 in 2012, when the group began collecting data. The number of readings dipped last year due to COVID-19 precautions, but JOFA expects this year’s total to come close to the pre-pandemic high once congregations get around to notifying the organization of their events.
JOFA’s executive director, Daphne Lazar Price, said she had observed but did not quantify a related phenomenon where she’s seen “tremendous growth:” girls marking their bat mitzvahs with megillah readings, as Lewin did.
“Instead of a traditional Torah reading service or women’s tefillah [prayer] service or a partnership minyan service, we’ve seen a lot more… girls read, in part or the entire, Megillat Esther,” Price said.
Alyza Lewin’s personal megillah scroll cover is embroidered with an image of Mordecai being led on a horse by Haman on one side, and her name on the other side. (Photos courtesy of Alyza Lewin. Design by Jackie Hajdenberg)
Although traditional Jewish law, or halacha, obligates women to hear the megillah on par with men, many more traditionalist Orthodox communities still do not hold women’s megillah readings. Some Orthodox rabbis may believe that women need to hear the scroll chanted but should not themselves chant the scroll. Another objection stems from the idea that synagogues should gather the largest audience possible to hear the megillah, rather than fragment the crowd into smaller readings.
Still others worry that a women’s megillah reading will act as a sort of gateway to non-Orthodox practice more broadly. Gender egalitarianism is one of the principal dividing lines between Orthodoxy and more liberal Jewish movements, and some Orthodox rabbis say women who organize a megillah reading of their own may then venture into chanting Torah or leading public prayers, which women in the vast majority of Orthodox communities are not allowed to perform.
“The fear is, if we give a little, it’s a slippery slope and once we allow women’s megillah readings people intentionally will manipulate or maybe even accidentally just get confused,” said Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb, an Israeli Orthodox rabbi formerly based in Baltimore, describing some rabbis’ concerns regarding women’s megillah readings in a lecture last month surveying a range of perspectives on the topic. “If women’s megillah readings are OK, then women’s Torah reading is OK, then women rabbis are OK and before you know it, I don’t know what.”
In recent years, a growing number of Orthodox women rabbinic leaders have weighed in on the question as well. Maharat Ruth Friedman, a spiritual leader at the Orthodox congregation Ohev Sholom: The National Synagogue in Washington, D.C., said women reading megillah may feel more acceptable to Orthodox communities that see women’s performance of other rituals as a step too far away from Orthodoxy.
“It is kind of the one semi-kosher or kosher thing that women in more [religiously] right-wing communities can do,” Friedman said. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that the rabbis allow them to meet in the synagogue space, but at least that there is a contingent of women who will go to them.”
In some communities, women’s megillah readings might take place in private homes or in other spaces outside the synagogue. Some Orthodox rabbis permit women to read the megillah for other women, but prohibit it in front of men.
The idea of feminist megillah readings has become so mainstream that it was a storyline on “Shababnikim,” an Israeli comedy series about renegade haredi Orthodox yeshiva students. One of them is alarmed by his fiancee’s determination to read the megillah for a group of women and barges in to stop the reading. He later decides that despite his discomfort he should be more flexible in the future, within the constraints of Orthodox law, to make the woman he loves feel respected.
As women’s megillah readings have increased in popularity, they have reached the farthest parts of the globe, even reaching as far south as Antarctica. (Courtesy of Raquel Schreiber via JOFA)
At the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, a liberal Orthodox synagogue in New York City, women have been reading megillah for decades. Founding Rabbi Avi Weiss wrote a Jewish legal analysis explaining why women are permitted to read the scroll in 1998.
“I personally am someone who advocates, and in our synagogue community looks to expand, women’s roles and give more opportunities for women,” said the synagogue’s current senior rabbi, Steven Exler.
Lewin is also watching the practice expand at her synagogue, Washington, D.C.’s Kesher Israel Congregation, where women have read from the megillah for nearly three decades. This year, she’s reading the fewest chapters of the megillah she has ever read. She usually reads half of the scroll, including a difficult passage in the ninth chapter. But for this week’s women’s reading at her synagogue, a new volunteer signed up to chant the ninth chapter.
Still, despite her pioneering reading at age 12, and her decades of chanting, Lewin has encountered the Orthodox community’s ambivalence around women and megillah firsthand. For many years, she borrowed her father’s scroll when Purim came around. But about eight years ago, Lewin asked him for her own scroll as a gift, which can cost upwards of $1,800.
Lewin’s father traveled to Israel to find a scribe to commission the megillah. But he wasn’t comfortable telling the scribe the megillah would go to a woman, and instead said it was a gift for his son-in-law.
Years later, Lewin was at a wedding where she met the scribe who wrote her treasured megillah, and revealed to him that the scroll belonged to her.
“He was thrilled,” Lewin said. “I think it was his individual personality. There are some individuals who are very supportive of the increase in opportunity for women, that women are becoming much more learned in terms of Jewish law.”
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‘No Peace’: Anti-Israel Mob Storms Jewish Neighborhood in New York City
Anti-Israel protesters march through a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York City, May 11, 2026. Photo: Screenshot
New York City saw another bombardment of a Jewish house of worship on Monday, compounding an antisemitism crisis that has plunged the municipality into episodes of anti-Jewish mob violence, swastika graffiti, and discrimination.
As seen in several viral videos posted to social media, masses of anti-Zionists descended on the Flatbush section of Brooklyn to march through the streets of the heavily Jewish quarter and walk up to Young Israel of Midwood synagogue to protest its involvement in selling land they say is “stolen” for being located in West Bank.
Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn looks on as mob of anti-Israel protesters march down their block pic.twitter.com/gWwJ9Z0aRN
— Elaad Eliahu (@elaadeliahu) May 12, 2026
The group behind the demonstration, the Palestinian Assembly for Liberation in Al-Awda (PAL-Awda NY/NJ), led the protesters to the institution while shouting jihadists slogans whose orators could not be identified behind the keffiyeh scarves repurposed as masks to hide their faces.
“Zionism will fall,” the activists chanted while others wielded signs proclaiming “Abolish Israel” and “no peace on stolen land,” according to local reports. Words failed to make the point for some, however, as one female activist ambushed a Jewish girl attempting to outpace the protesters to get home. Wearing a surgical mask and red keffiyeh scarf not around her face but her shoulders, she charged the Jewish girl from behind, grabbed a fistful of her hair, and jerked backwards, video of the incident showed. When a group of teenagers near the incident decried the assault, a swarm of hooded protesters confronted them, pushing and squaring shoulders in an apparent effort to dare a response and threaten more force.
Brooklyn, New York, May 11, 2026: Days after another anti-Israel protest targeted a Manhattan synagogue, protesters attacked a young Jewish girl outside Young Israel of Midwood, waved a Hezbollah flag, displayed a Hamas-linked red triangle, and chanted “Zionism will fall.” pic.twitter.com/rEIimwGgsZ
— Combat Antisemitism Movement (@CombatASemitism) May 12, 2026
New York City Police Department (NYPD) officers attempted to hold the line between demonstrators and the synagogue’s entrance. According to reports, at least three demonstrators were arrested after attacking counterprotesters, and some of the anti-Israel activists could be seen holding flags and banners expressing support for Hamas and Hezbollah, both US-designated foreign terrorist organizations.
A Hezbollah flag waves at the forefront of the anti Israel protest across the street from a Flatbush synagogue.
The red inverted Hamas triangle can also be seen on a banner. pic.twitter.com/1B98Yof3I6
— Michael Starr (@StarrJpost) May 12, 2026
This is not the first time PAL-Awda has targeted a Jewish neighborhood or institution over the issue of Israeli real estate.
Last week, protesters gathered outside Park East Synagogue in Manhattan during a showcase called “The Great Israeli Real Estate Event 2026,” which included the marketing of properties in Israel proper as well as West Bank settlements. At the demonstration, activists held signs and chanted slogans that went beyond criticism of Israel, seemingly calling for the death and expulsion of Jews and, in some cases, support for US-designated terrorist groups.
“Death, death to the IDF [Israel Defense Forces],” “Rapists,” and “Settlers, settlers go back home, Palestine is ours alone” were among the insults screamed by the protesters, some of whom also waved flags belonging to Hezbollah.
The demonstration prompted a significant police response and raised concerns about rising antisemitic rhetoric in the city home to the world’s largest Jewish population outside of Israel.
The scene marked a return to the same synagogue that was the site of a contentious protest in November, where demonstrators chanted “We don’t want no Zionists here” and “Resistance, you make us proud, take another settler out,” among others. One speaker claimed, “It is our duty to make them think twice before holding these events! We need to make them scared.”
Both protests were organized by Pal-Awda.
In each case, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who took office on Jan. 1 but was mayor-elect at the time of the November incident, condemned the Israeli real estate event.
“There is no tolerance for hatred of Jewish New Yorkers,” he said last week. “I’ve also been clear to New Yorkers, my honest opinions about the fact that when we have a real estate expo that is promoting the sale of land, which includes the sale of land in occupied West Bank in settlements that are a violation of international law, that that is something that I firmly disagree with.”
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, antisemitic hate crimes in New York City have been surging since Mamdani’s election. According to police data, Jews this year have been targeted in the majority of all hate crimes committed in the city, continuing a troubling trend of rising antisemitism following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
Jews were targeted in 60 percent of all confirmed hate crimes in April despite composing just 10 percent of the city’s population, the NYPD revealed in its latest figures.
The change in New York City’s climate since Mamdani’s election is palpable, Jewish advocacy groups have said. On his first day in office in January, Mamdani voided the city government’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, lifted the ban on contracts with companies boycotting Israel, and modified key provisions of an executive order directing law enforcement to monitor anti-Israel protests held near synagogues.
“Mayor Mamdani is deeply opposed to the real estate expo this evening that includes the promotion of the sale of land in settlements in the Occupied West Bank,” Mamdani said in a statement issued before last week’s synagogue protest, failing to deliver the conciliating message his critics said was needed to hold together a fraying community. “These settlements are illegal under international law and deeply tied to the ongoing displacement of Palestinians.”
Rabbi Mark Wildes, director and founder of the Manhattan Jewish Experience organization, told The Algemeiner that the Mamdani administration is fueling antisemitism.
“From swastikas appearing on homes and in parks, to increased anti-Israeli demonstrations, Mayor Mamdani has created a climate in which bigotry is allowed to flourish,” Wiles charged. “His irresponsible rhetoric calling Israel an ‘apartheid’ state committing ‘genocide only emboldens antisemites to target Jews across the city.”
On Tuesday, as Jewish community advocates called for the arrest of the protester filmed assaulting a Jewish girl, the Trump administration confirmed that the US Justice Department is investigating the incident.
“We are aware of this situation last night and are working with our colleagues in NYC to collect evidence and analyze potential charges,” said Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for civil rights.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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‘Brazen Attacks’: Antisemitism Turns Increasingly Violent in the West
CCTV footage of a Jewish man getting stabbed by an attacker in Golders Green area, which is home to a large Jewish population, in London, Britain, April 29, 2026, in this screengrab taken from a social media video. Photo: Social Media/via REUTERS
Across North America and Europe, antisemitism appears to be entering a new, more dangerous phase, with Jewish communities facing a growing wave of shootings, assaults, arson attacks, and violent intimidation even as overall incident totals in some countries begin to dip after the surge that followed Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, atrocities in Israel.
In Canada, early 2026 data already indicate the country is on track to see its most violent year against the Jewish community in recent memory, with more violent antisemitic attacks recorded so far this year than during all of 2025, according to the Jewish advocacy group B’nai Brith Canada.
In total, 11 violent antisemitic attacks have already been recorded across the country since the start of 2026, surpassing the 10 violent incidents documented during all of last year, when more than 6,800 antisemitic cases were reported nationwide.
“These brazen attacks on Jewish Canadians are a sign of a crisis of antisemitism that has spiraled out of control,” Simon Wolle, chief executive officer of B’nai Brith Canada, said in a statement.
“Violence such as this, which has escalated from targeting synagogues to targeting Jewish people directly, does not occur in a vacuum. It is what happens when governments fail to act despite mounting evidence that antisemitism is becoming more normalized and dangerous,” Wolle continued.
Last week, a group of Jewish worshippers standing outside the Congregation Chasidei Bobov synagogue in Montreal was targeted in a drive-by shooting, leaving one person with minor injuries.
A week earlier, three visibly Jewish residents were targeted in a separate antisemitic attack when suspects opened fire with a gel-pellet gun, causing minor injuries.
In the United States, overall antisemitic incidents declined in 2025, but violent attacks against American Jews remained at alarmingly elevated levels, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
In total, 6,274 antisemitic incidents — including assaults, harassment, and vandalism — were recorded across the country last year, averaging roughly 17 incidents every day.
While antisemitic assaults rose modestly by 4 percent to 203 incidents in 2025, attackers increasingly wielded deadly weapons, with such cases surging nearly 40 percent compared to the previous year.
According to the ADL’s recent report, this broader escalation was marked by the return of fatal antisemitic violence in the US, with Jewish victims killed in such attacks for the first time since 2019.
Last May, two Israeli embassy staffers were shot dead in Washington, DC, followed weeks later by a firebombing in Colorado that killed one person and left 13 others injured.
In Spain, an anonymous group has launched an interactive online map called “BarcelonaZ,” which its creators describe as a mapping of “Zionism” across Barcelona, prompting growing concern within the local Jewish community over an increase in targeted attacks and violence.
The interactive tool functions as a geolocated blacklist of Jewish, Israeli, or allegedly Israel-linked businesses and organizations, which its creators accuse of complicity in what they describe as a “genocide” in Gaza.
On the platform, each entry includes a business name, address, category, links, contact details, and political accusations, which Jewish leaders have denounced as resembling a modern-day “Nazi list.”
The map has intensified an already hostile climate in Spain, where reports of antisemitic harassment and violence have surged in recent months. In one of the latest incidents, an unknown individual attempted to set fire to a Jewish-owned pizzeria in Madrid while customers were still dining inside.
In the United Kingdom, Jewish communities have also faced a mounting wave of antisemitic violence, intimidation, and street-level harassment amid growing fears over public safety.
Recently, an increasingly popular antisemitic TikTok trend in London has led to arrests and convictions after young men filmed themselves using cash to mock and harass members of Orthodox Jewish communities.
Videos circulating on social media show young men walking through heavily Jewish areas of London carrying fishing rods with money attached to the line in an apparent attempt to “fish for Jews.”
In a separate incident over the weekend in Stamford Hill, north London, a man allegedly whipped several Haredi Jewish women with a belt before spitting at volunteer responders who arrived at the scene. Witnesses said he also shouted racist insults, antisemitic slurs, and threats at both the victims and the volunteers.
Hours later, in nearby Amhurst Park in north London, a Jewish child was allegedly assaulted outside a school after a woman screamed antisemitic insults and punched the minor.
These latest incidents come amid a wider surge in antisemitic violence in London, including the stabbing of two Jewish men in Golders Green — an attack that prompted the British government to raise the national terrorism threat level from “substantial” to “severe” for the first time in over four years.
Across the English Channel, three teenage boys assaulted a 14-year-old Jewish girl and threatened to kill her in the Parisian suburb of Sarcelles in March. The attack occurred weeks after a 13-year-old boy on his way to synagogue in Paris was brutally beaten by a knife-wielding assailant. France has seen several high-profile antisemitic attacks over the past year.
Meanwhile, the commissioner to combat antisemitism in the German state of Hesse sounded the alarm in January after an arson attack on a local synagogue in the town of Giessen, warning that it reflected a “growing pogrom-like atmosphere” threatening Jewish life across Germany. The environment has become so hostile that the Jewish community in Potsdam, a city just outside Berlin, fears it may not be safe to open a new Jewish daycare center amid growing security concerns.
In Ireland, the Jewish community has also reported a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents since the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, with community leaders warning that violent threats and intimidation are becoming increasingly commonplace.
One Irish Jew said he and his wife no longer attend community events together out of fear that a mass-casualty antisemitic attack could leave their young son orphaned — a stark reflection of the deepening sense of insecurity gripping parts of Ireland’s Jewish community.
“If there were another community that felt that sense of siege and that they had to take steps to protect themselves in moments where they’re visible, I think there would be a sense of moral outrage about it,” Sunday Times journalist Jon Ihle told “The Claire Byrne Show.”
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Debating Zionism is fair. Protesting Israel’s president at commencement crosses the line
I am grateful for Noam Pianko’s recent essay, “Debating Zionism is good for Jews, actually.” Pianko argued that criticism of a small group of graduating seniors at the Jewish Theological Seminary who objected to JTS’s invitation to Israeli President Isaac Herzog to serve as this year’s commencement speaker was misguided, citing JTS’s long history of internal debates over Zionism.
I was among those critics. In a May 3 blog post for The Times of Israel I argued that even six students publicly opposing Herzog’s presence was six too many — not because Jewish institutions should avoid debate, but because there is a difference between debate premised on a shared commitment to Jewish peoplehood, and debate that rejects of one of Jewish peoplehood’s central expressions.
Pianko rightly reminds readers that JTS has never been ideologically monolithic. Its history includes tensions between tradition and change, particularism and universalism, theology and modernity. Those tensions are part of what has made JTS so influential in American Jewish life for nearly 140 years.
The history of debate over Zionism within the seminary’s intellectual culture does not weaken my concern. It sharpens it.
The crucial issue is conceptual precision. Expressions of skepticism about Zionism in earlier periods of JTS history were often very different from today’s anti-Zionism.
In some cases, they reflected a classical religious view that Jewish return and sovereignty would come through a messianic process rather than through human political action. That position was a theological claim about timing and agency, not a negation of Jewish national aspiration. In others, like Ahad Ha’am’s cultural Zionism, for example, an emphasis was put on Jewish renewal through language, spirit and civilization, while questioning whether political statehood should be the immediate or primary goal. That was an internal argument about how Jewish national life should unfold — not over whether such a life was valid.
Contemporary anti-Zionism, in contrast, frequently challenges the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty itself. That is not simply another version of an older seminary debate. It is a different claim with different consequences.
To be clear, the students’ letter is not a simple declaration of anti Zionism, and it should not be caricatured as such. Their stated concerns include the devastation of the war in Gaza, the moral responsibilities of Jewish leadership, and the fear that honoring Herzog without sufficient public reckoning sends the wrong message about Palestinian suffering.
Those concerns deserve serious engagement. But seriousness also requires asking what this protest communicates in institutional context. At a moment when the Jewish people and Israel’s legitimacy are under intense assault, opposing the presence of Israel’s president at a flagship Jewish seminary risks turning anguish over Israeli policy into a symbolic rejection of Israel’s legitimacy as a central part of Jewish life. That is the line I believe JTS must be careful not to blur.
So while Pianko is right to highlight ideological range in JTS’s past, we should not flatten the past into the present.
Zionism did not become central to Jewish life by accident. It emerged as the primary vehicle through which the Jewish people reclaimed agency, safety and a collective future after centuries of vulnerability. The establishment of the state of Israel transformed Jewish existence. That fact does not erase earlier debates, but it does change the center of gravity.
Institutions like JTS have a responsibility to teach that complexity honestly — which Herzog’s presence at commencement, and thoughtful, well-informed debates around it, will help to do. Seminaries should expose students to the range of Jewish thought, including theological reservations, cultural critiques and internal disagreements about Zionism.
At issue is not whether the varieties and history of Zionism should be debated at JTS. Of course they should. Instead, this incident is a reminder that a flagship institution of Jewish learning can and should remain clear that Jewish peoplehood, Jewish sovereignty and the state of Israel are not peripheral to contemporary Jewish identity. They are central.
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