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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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‘Remember the Liberty’ has become code for ‘Israel Is Evil’
The first tragedy of the U.S.S. Liberty attack is that it happened at all. The second is that Israel’s critics have weaponized it to spread hate.
When Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky stood on the House floor on June 8, the 59th anniversary of the attack, and called for a Congressional probe into the incident, he wasn’t seriously trying to bring the truth of some long-buried historical secret to light. Massie, who in 14 years never once brought up the U.S.S. Liberty on the House floor, was using the latest cudgel in the Israel-haters’ arsenal to level one last official blow at a country he loathes.
“I’ve got a call to action for everybody here,” said Massie, speaking of attack survivors who were in the audience, “Honor these individuals. Quit ignoring that they exist. Let’s have an investigation. It’s long overdue.”
Let’s put aside the fact that there have been numerous official investigations into what exactly happened on June 8, 1967, the second day of the Six Day War, when Israeli aircraft and torpedo boats attacked the Liberty off the Sinai Peninsula, killing 34 American service members.
These investigations concluded that the tragedy was a friendly-fire incident. The Israelis initially mistook the Liberty, an intelligence-gathering vessel, for an Egyptian warship. After the smoke cleared, they accepted responsibility, apologized and paid $12 million in compensation to the victims.
Of all the explanations, it’s perhaps the least satisfying but the most logical. During the Vietnam War, happening at the same time, an estimated 11% to 15% of casualties were from friendly fire.
Massie’s call for a new investigation would be more believable if he then didn’t go on to recite the alternative one-sided narrative of the incident long pushed by some survivors and now taken up with gusto by Israel haters Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson and others.
To them the attack was deliberate: The Israelis ignored the large American flag the Liberty was flying and began shooting.
“It was intentional murder by the country of Israel,” said Massie on the House floor, “either as a false flag operation or because they simply didn’t want anybody observing what they were doing that day.”
What Massie and his fellow conspiracy theorists are alleging is a crime, but none of them has sufficiently proven a motive. Why would Israel attack the ship of its most important and powerful ally?
The false flag theory — the idea that Israel wanted to sink the Liberty, blame Egypt or the Soviet Union for it and draw America into the war — makes no sense.
The war was all but won by June 8. Moreover, as the historian and former Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren relates in Six Days of War, the Israelis actually stopped firing initially when they suspected the ship was American.
The Israelis sent helicopters to investigate, but heavy smoke obscured the ship. Meanwhile, as Israeli torpedo boats closed in, a U.S. Navy crewman, perhaps not hearing his commander’s orders, opened fire.
The Israelis, now convinced it was an enemy ship, unleashed torpedoes, killing 25 Americans.
Massie left all this out of his narrative. He quoted then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who said at the time, “the attack was, quite literally incomprehensible,” implying that a murky conspiracy underlay it all.
But he didn’t include the rest of what Rusk said: That what happened was “an act of military recklessness reflecting wanton disregard for human life.”
In other words, Rusk’s full quote doesn’t suggest intention, but gross carelessness, which is a far cry from premeditated murder. It was chaos, miscommunication, uncertainty, incompetence, fear — the fog of war.
But to Massie and others, there’s no need to establish a coherent motive for why Israel attacked its harmless friends, because in their minds that’s just who Israelis are.
If Massie wants another investigation, fine. But I find it hard to believe that any investigation that doesn’t find Israel guilty of murder in the first will ever satisfy him or the people for whom “Remember the Liberty” is shorthand for “Israel is evil.”
The post ‘Remember the Liberty’ has become code for ‘Israel Is Evil’ appeared first on The Forward.
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The real anti-Zionists are at the highest levels of the Israeli government
The fact that about half of young American Jews favor replacing Israel with a binational Israeli-Palestinian state is indeed a result of anti-Zionism — but not necessarily their own.
Instead, it’s a consequence of the Israeli government’s drive to radically increase Israeli control over the West Bank and Gaza. By ensuring that some 5.5 million Arabs increasingly live under Israel authority, Israel’s leaders have created the demographic reality of a binational state.
We can’t blame young American Jews for just acknowledging reality. Instead, it’s time to acknowledge that a movement to undermine Zionism has taken hold within the Israeli government.
If Zionism is the movement for a secure homeland for the Jews, then any forces that reject or undermine that homeland’s legitimacy or security are anti-Zionist. That includes the people whose positions and policies actively undermine the existence of a Jewish homeland.
The democratic Jewish state enshrined in the country’s Declaration of Independence has given way to something that looks a lot more like a herrenvolk democracy, in which democratic rights apply only to the dominant ethnic group. History has many examples of such arrangements, and — spoiler alert — they don’t end well for the majority. French Algeria until 1962, Rhodesia until 1980, South Africa until 1994 — all eventually faced one of three fates: negotiated transition to full democracy, violent collapse or ongoing instability and international isolation. To date, none have stabilized permanently.
Just recently Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasted that Israel will soon control 70% of Gaza, well beyond the 53% allotted to the country in the Gaza ceasefire framework to which Israel is still supposed to adhere.
When an audience member at his talk shouted out that Israel should take 100% of Gaza, Netanyahu responded, “First 70%. We’ll start with that.”
Then there’s the West Bank, where settlers tried to expel 2,000 Palestinians from a village south of Nablus earlier this month, and where settlers and an IDF soldier wounded nine Palestinians on a June 5 rampage through Hawara.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, Israel has established at least 59 new illegal outposts in the West Bank — compared to an annual average of seven in the preceding three decades. It has appropriated a record amount of land, and displaced more than 8,700 Palestinians through demolitions and settler violence.
There’s also East Jerusalem, where some Israeli Jews are actively trying to remove 20,000 Palestinians from the Silwan neighborhood.
Each act of seizure, harassment and expulsion is anti-Zionist. These Palestinians will not fade into Egypt or Amman or Los Angeles. Mass expulsion isn’t happening, and neither is mass immigration. A Jewish state is giving way to a state that is effectively equal parts Arab and Jewish — except the Jews have all the rights. As the anti-Zionists in the Israeli government seize control of more Palestinian land, they undo all of Zionism’s hard-fought gains. A nondemocratic Jewish state will be neither safe nor secure.
If this sounds like diasporic Jewish garment-rending over morality and Jewish values, it’s not. The people who live in a fantasy world are not those who point out the necessity of finding a way toward coexistence, but those who think Israel can survive and flourish if it trashes its founding principles and its democracy.
Logic and history are not on Israel’s side. No minority- or bare-majority-rule system over a large disenfranchised population has proved durable. I know from my many conversations with my fellow Jews who support a “Greater Israel” incorporating Gaza and the West Bank — or just want to ignore or get rid of Palestinians — that they think time, power or God will bend the iron laws of demography in Israel’s favor. History would beg to differ.
But what about the Palestinians, you might ask: don’t they bear responsibility? For decades of rejectionism and terror? For elevating kleptocratic and ineffective leaders? For glorifying violence and cheering on Hamas in its slaughter, kidnapping and rape of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023? For wanting, as many of them do, an end to Jewish sovereignty in the land?
Yes. Palestinian rejectionism and embrace of violence has been a disaster for Jews, as well as for generations of Palestinians. But those facts don’t change the demographic reality.
Of Americans Jews under 35, 51% support a binational state, according to a recent Jewish Voters Research Center poll. What they see is that there are 15 million people between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. About half of them are not Jews, much less Zionists, and one government is not just intent on holding and controlling all that territory, but well on its way to doing so. If a binational state already exists in practice, the best hope for the region, these young people are saying, is to accept that fact, and direct all our efforts toward making that state just.
They may be completely mistaken about the chances of that happening peacefully or even in their lifetimes, but they’re not the ones who got us to this point. The ongoing settlement of territories with a vast non-Jewish majority was the most anti-Zionist thing Israel could have done, and continues to do, and yet here we are.
The Jewish communal obsession with policing who is and isn’t a Zionist misses the larger point. The State of Israel exists. What’s in question is its character — whether it will be democratic and secure, or calcify into something modern history has repeatedly shown the world rejects.
Land comes with people, and demographics is destiny. A government intent on holding and controlling all the territory between the river and the sea is undermining Zionism from within.
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‘Odessa’ wants to use your empathy against you
The short film Odessa begins with what its director Harald Swinkels calls an “empathy trap.”
The film opens with a German couple and their young son hiking across the Dolomites; the woman seems anxious, the man much more energetic. They approach a church, where they are greeted suspiciously by the twins who take care of it, until they say the passcode: “Odessa.” They later try the codeword again with an innkeeper — but this time they are sent running as she calls on the village to attack them. It’s a heart-pounding scene as the family the viewer has been so closely tied to runs for their lives from a loud, angry mob.
Interspersed through the scenes of the family’s flight are blurry white and black clips of a hazy figure approaching a camera. Even with the obscured shot, the viewer can make out train tracks and recognize the setting as a concentration camp, a flashback to the world they’re leaving. It feels like your typical Holocaust film, showing the risks Jewish refugees faced at every turn and the way the trauma of the camps haunted them.
At the end of the film’s 20-minute run, however, the shadowy figure finally comes into focus. It’s the husband, but not in the striped clothes of a camp prisoner: He’s wearing an SS uniform and ordering twins to be placed in a separate line. He’s Josef Mengele.
“People take first impressions as character,” Swinkels told me in an interview. “That’s not character. You should look behind that.”
Contemporary politics inspired Swinkels, the founder of the Dutch production company Exosphere, to make the film.
“One of my most conservative friends started arguing that ‘these people’ should be kept in their own region, as he called it, and certainly not taken in by us,” Swinkels said, of debates over Syrian immigrants in the Netherlands. “And then we had this discussion about if you would feel the same about these refugees, if they look like him and me.”
Wanting to make a film about Northwestern Europeans fleeing led Swinkels to think about World War II. After an election in Denmark resulted in a right-wing shift in politics, he also became interested in exposing how charisma can hide someone’s darker nature.
Swinkels had long been interested in Josef Mengele, but when he discovered the Nazi’s duplicitous relationship with the kids in Auschwitz — survivors have testified that Mengele would bring them candy in order to gain their trust — that solidified him as the main character. The film features a quote from a Jewish prisoner forced to work for Mengele, Miklós Nyiszli, stating that the doctor “was capable of being so kind to the children” as he prepared to torture them and send them to their deaths.
“Arendt once called it the banality of evil,” Swinkels said. “But with Mengele, it’s even more dangerous because it’s the charm of evil.”
The bread crumbs leading to the family’s true identity are there for history buffs. Over the course of the film, we slowly learn their names — Josef, Irene, and Reif. “Odessa” was the American name for Nazi’s underground escape networks, although there is no historical consensus that this term was used by the Nazis or was an actual organization.
But the clues are easy enough to miss — by the time the audience learns these details, we have already formed assumptions that the protagonists of the story are likely Jews or members of another group persecuted by the Nazis.
The fact that Mengele had darker features and his wife had fairer ones adds another misleading layer. At one point, the wife abandons the journey and insists that it’ll be safer for the son to stay with her while the husband flees. It seems as though this is because she is Aryan and the husband isn’t. But, as it turns out, it’s because he is a wanted war criminal.
The short film also nods to a few other historical figures. One of the brothers at the church is named Alois, in reference to Alois Hudal, an Austrian Catholic Bishop who was a Nazi sympathizer and aided in the escape of several Nazi leaders, including Adolf Eichmann. He did not have a twin brother in real life, but this detail alludes to Mengele’s fascination with twins.
The inn-keeper who sets the village after the family, Frau Scholl, is named after Sophie Scholl, a member of the White Rose Nazi-resistance group, hinted at by white roses outside of her house in the film. They even shot the film in the Dolomites, the same mountain range Mengele crossed during his escape.
Swinkels noted that details like this can be easy to miss. “But I think you can still feel it, that we put so much detail in the film to make all these kinds of historical references,” he said.
He hopes that the film makes viewers think more carefully about charismatic figures.
“History has taught us that monsters don’t come dressed as monsters,” Swinkels said. “They come as protectors, visionaries, or loving fathers. And by the time we find that truth, it’s most often too late.”
“If a viewer walks out of Odessa and looks a little bit harder at the next person who charms them, and even better at the next person they’re about to vote for, then the film will have fulfilled its purpose.”
The short film Odessa is showing at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 13.
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