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Queer yeshiva to publish first-ever collection of Jewish legal opinions written by and for trans Jews
(JTA) — In the midst of writing a 13-page analysis of a complex area of Jewish law, Rabbi Xava De Cordova found something she wasn’t expecting to see in the medieval-era sources: flexibility.
De Cordova is transgender and had long wondered whether she could feel a sense of belonging while studying reams of rabbinic writings on halacha, or Jewish law, which stretch back thousands of years and often prescribe different practices for men and women.
The laws of ritual purity, for example, prescribe specific behaviors for women on the assumption that they all menstruate. Trans women do not. De Cordova said that gap and others had her thinking, “I don’t really know if I can find a place for myself in this literature.”
But after digging into Jewish texts on the topic, De Cordova realized she’d sold the sages short: Medieval European rabbis were asking many of the same questions she was — and their answers reflected real-world complexity.
“I just found that the rabbis and the early halachic authorities’ understanding of niddah was so much more conceptual and vague and fluctuating than I ever realized before I started this particular work,” De Cordova said, using the Hebrew term for purity laws. Her conclusion: “Wow, there’s so much space for me within this literature.”
De Cordova’s realization is one of many that a dozen Jewish scholars and rabbis have had over the last year as they have scoured Jewish texts for guidance on how transgender Jews can adapt traditional rituals to their lived experience. Now, the group is preparing to release a batch of their essays, analyses of Jewish law called teshuvot, in hopes that they can inform the experiences of trans Jews who seek to live in accordance with traditional Jewish law.
The release of the essays comes at a time when lawmakers in dozens of states are targeting trans people and their rights, in some cases instigating fights that have heavily involved rabbis and their families.
In that climate, writing trans Jews into Jewish tradition “becomes an act of resistance because it’s about celebrating lives that are being demeaned and celebrating people who are being dehumanized in the public sphere,” said Rabbi Becky Silverstein, co-director of the Trans Halakha Project at Svara, the yeshiva founded in Chicago two decades ago to serve the queer community. The dozen rabbis and scholars are based at Svara and collectively form the Teshuva Writing Project.
Among the questions they have tackled: How could a trans man converting to Judaism have a bris, required for male converts? Is the removal of body tissue after gender-affirming surgery a ritual matter, given Jewish legal requirements for burying body parts? And is there a Jewish obligation, in certain cases, to undergo gender transition?
Just how widely their answers will be consumed and taken into account is a question. Most Jews who consciously adhere to halacha throughout their daily lives are Orthodox, and live in communities that either reject trans Jews or are reckoning with whether and how to accept them. Non-Orthodox Jewish denominations have made efforts to embrace trans Jews, but halacha is less often the starting point for most of their members. The Reform movement, the largest in the United States, expressly rejects halacha as binding.
Still, a growing number of Jews and Jewish communities strive to be inclusive while staying rooted in Jewish law and tradition. There are also a growing number of trans Jews who are connected to traditional communities, or who want to live in accordance with Jewish law.
“I think individual trans Jews who are not part of communities could use these teshuvot to guide their own decision-making,” said Silverstein, who was ordained at the pluralistic Hebrew College seminary. “We live in a time of religious autonomy in Jewish life, and where trans Jews actually are hungry for connection to tradition. And so they could use these teshuvot to help inform their own conversations.”
Organizations and initiatives such as the Jewish LGBTQ group Keshet; Torah Queeries, a collection of queer commentaries on the Bible; and TransTorah.org have created rituals, readings, blessings and customs for trans Jews, and Svara runs a Queer Talmud Camp as well as intensive Jewish study programs throughout the year. But until now, no collection of Jewish legal opinions has been published by and for trans people.
“Halacha has to be informed by the real lived experiences of the people about whom it is legislating,” said Laynie Soloman, who helps lead Svara and holds the title of associate rosh yeshiva, in an approach that they said the group had adopted from the disability advocacy community. “That is a fundamental truth about halacha that we are holding as a collective and taking seriously in the way we are authoring these teshuvot.”
The teshuvot will be published later this month, and follow a long tradition of rabbis setting halachic precedent by answering questions from their followers. Those answers are traditionally based on an analysis of rabbinic texts throughout history. They can address questions ranging from whether smoking cigarettes is permissible to the particulars of making a kitchen kosher for Passover.
Some Jewish legal questions tackled by the group at Svara had not previously been answered, such as how to mark conversion for someone who is male but does not have a penis. In other cases, accepted Jewish law pertaining to gender can be painful for those who are nonbinary or trans, either because the answer is not clear or because the law does not match up with contemporary understandings that gender and sex are distinct.
“[Those are] areas where trans people are sort of most likely to either feel lost themselves or be interrogated by their community. … And so they’re sort of these urgent halachic needs,” said De Cordova, who was privately ordained by a rabbi from the Renewal Judaism movement. “And 99.9% of the literature about them so far has been written by cis people, about us.”
De Cordova concluded that trans women are obligated in niddah, the ritual purity laws. In her teshuva, she provides several approaches to emulate the complicated counting cycle that tallies the days a woman is considered ritually impure following menstruation. She suggests using a seven- and 11-day cycle originally proposed by Maimonides, the 12th-century scholar and philosopher. De Cordova also suggests that the imposition of a cycle not based in biology means ancient and medieval rabbis had some understanding of womanhood as a social construct.
“There’s many cases in which the rabbis sort of choose to orient niddah around their understanding of women, which I would call the social construction of womanhood by rabbis, rather than observable physical phenomenon or actual women’s experience,” she said.
For De Cordova, the experience of writing about niddah provided her with new insights about some of the oldest Jewish legal texts on the subject.
“They’re flexible enough and sort of responsive enough that I can really find a lot of freedom and space in working with them,” she said of the ancient sources. “And that was just a really sort of wonderful and freeing transition to go through.”
Last year, the Conservative Movement approved new language for calling up a nonbinary person to various Torah honors. The rabbis behind the opinion consulted with groups serving LGBTQ Jews and synagogues centered on them, but acknowledged that they were imperfect authors.
“When my coauthors and I published the teshuva, we wrote in it that we are all cisgender rabbis and that we hope that, increasingly, halachic work dealing with nonbinary and trans and queer Jewish life and identity and practice will… come from queer rabbis and scholars themselves,” said Guy Austrian, the rabbi of the Fort Tryon Jewish Center, a synagogue in upper Manhattan. “And I think the publication of the first batch of teshuvot from the Trans Halakha Project shows that that process is underway, and I think that that can only be a good thing for the Jewish world.”
Scholars at Svara, the queer yeshiva based in Chicago, have served the Jewish LGBTQ community for two decades and are now creating the first written set of Jewish law by and for trans Jews. (Jess Benjamin)
Adding to the question-and-answer tradition of Jewish legal opinions means trans Jews will now have new texts to guide their religious practice, Silverstein said. Trans Jews, the writers of the opinions acknowledge, already have their own ways of performing Jewish ritual that accords with their lived experience. But they say that when it comes to Jewish law, informal custom without a sourced legal opinion is not enough.
“I want cis[gender] clergy to realize that there are resources written by and for trans people that they can turn to when they’re trying to help a member of their congregation,” De Cordova said.
The authors of the legal opinions applied to be part of the collective and come from a religiously pluralistic group, ranging in affiliation from Orthodox to Conservative to Jewish Renewal. They have varying expectations for how far-reaching the impact of the new legal opinions will be.
Mike Moskowitz, an Orthodox rabbi and the scholar-in-residence for trans and queer Jewish studies at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, which serves the LGBTQ community, said the teshuvot could provide a model for observant Jews who are also trans.
“I think it’s significant in modeling what an informed conversation can look like, which hasn’t really happened in Orthodox publications,” said Moskowitz, who was not part of the collective that composed the teshuvot on trans Jews’ practice. “I hope this models what can be done in other movements. What’s been tricky is that every movement has a different understanding of what halacha means.”
Even within Orthodoxy, conflicting opinions already exist, in a reflection of how halacha has always operated. For example, Talia Avrahami, a transgender Orthodox woman, follows the opinion of the late Rabbi Eliezer Waldenberg, known as the Tzitz Eliezer, who ruled that a trans woman who undergoes gender affirmation surgery is a woman according to Jewish law. But Avrahami was told she could not sit in the women’s section of her synagogue, because the rabbi who the synagogue follows does not accept Waldenberg’s opinion. Months earlier, Avrahami had also been asked to leave her teaching job at an Orthodox day school after students and parents learned that she was transgender.
Avrahami declined to comment on the new teshuvot, citing restrictions set by her current employer.
Silverstein says some Conservative rabbis have expressed interest in using the opinions to guide practice in their own congregations. But he is less sure if they will be adopted in the Orthodox community, which is the target audience for most traditional literature on Jewish law.
“When it comes to the Orthodox community, I’m not sure I am bold enough to dream that these teshuvot specifically are going to be adopted,” Silverstein said. “I’m not even sure I know what that means. But it is my hope that they will permeate throughout the Jewish community, at least through the Modern Orthodox community.”
The scope of the opinions written by the collective extends beyond the trans community. The first batch of answers, for example, includes an opinion about how to increase physical accessibility to a mikvah, ritual baths used to fulfill some requirements of Jewish law.
“Judaism thrives and Torah thrives when people are bringing their life experiences to the text and asking their questions of the text,” Silverstein said. “That’s how new Torah is uncovered in the world. And that’s how Judaism and Torah has stayed alive through so much of Jewish history.”
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In the depths of Tel Aviv’s bus station, a fragile refuge for those with nowhere else to go during war
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — Two floors underground, past dumpsters and oil-laden puddles, through a reinforced Cold War-era door, a bomb shelter is buried underneath Tel Aviv’s Central Bus Station.
Built in 1993 to accommodate more than 16,000 Israelis, the shelter found a new life during the Israel-Iran war as a public refuge for residents of Neve Shaanan, among Tel Aviv’s most diverse neighborhoods and one of its poorest, home mainly to asylum seekers and foreign workers.
With few other options for public shelters in south Tel Aviv, residents pitched tents in the squalor of a space that had fallen into disrepair — with pipes dripping and rats scurrying — for more than 38 days as Israel and Iran exchanged missile fire until a ceasefire that began on April 8 halted the fighting.
“It’s very difficult. Not just because of the war, but because of the conditions we’re living in,” Gloria Arca, who took refuge inside the shelter with her son, Noam, said in Spanish during an interview in April. “We’re protected from the missiles, but inside we’re not safe.”
For many Israelis, the bus station occupies a space that balances between nostalgia and revulsion. Until 2018, the station was a main node for travel into and out of Tel Aviv. Since then, ridership has dropped, and now the hulking structure is seen as little more than an eyesore. During Israel’s 12-day war with Iran last year, a short video by Israeli comedians went viral for sharing the station’s GPS coordinates in a video that jokingly urged Iran, “Please don’t bomb this bus station.”
Yet the station also offers a concrete window into Israel’s widening reliance on foreign workers, which has surged in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks.
When there is no war on, the shelter functions as a community center, complete with a Filipino church, a refugee health clinic, and retailers catering to customers in more than a dozen languages.
During wartime, the station takes on a new and vitally important role as a shelter for those who have none in their homes or neighborhoods, no family in the country whose homes they can flee to and little ability to pay for temporary accommodations somewhere safer.
Arca, who came to Israel more than two decades ago from Colombia and is in the country legally, knew that it would take her and Noam more than 10 minutes to get to a shelter from their home — longer than Israel’s advanced missile warning system allows. So they decided to move into the bus station, pitching a tent alongside some of their neighbors.
Depending on the day, more than 200 residents spent their nights in the shelter during the war, according to Sigal Rozen, public policy coordinator at the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants.
“It’s not easy, especially with young children and families with special needs,” she said. “You can’t get up in the middle of the night and just run.”
The Hotline, with funding from the Tel Aviv Municipality, worked to improve conditions in the shelter, but the starting point was dire. During a visit in April, rats could be seen scurrying across newly installed artificial turf meant to brighten the space, and mosquitoes landed on visitors’ ankles before being chased off.
More than anything, Arca worries about safety in the shelter — but not from the war. “We’re protected from the missiles, but inside, we’re not safe,” she said. “Security is there, but they don’t do their job. Drug users come in and use the bathrooms. There are many children here, and we’re afraid.”
The challenging conditions were nothing new to many of the people who moved in, who represent an often unseen but growing sector of workers in Israel.
The category of “foreign worker,” a term used in Israel to describe non-citizen laborers, most of them from countries such as the Philippines, India, and Thailand, who enter the country on temporary work visas tied to a specific employer, has long been a fraught designation.
Dominant in some industries, such as home health care, where there are so many foreign workers that the role is known as “filipina” in Hebrew, foreign workers have taken on greater shares of other sectors in recent years, particularly after Israel banned Palestinian workers from Gaza and the West Bank after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack. With Israelis increasingly reluctant to take low-paying manual labor jobs, the Israeli government has moved to fill the gap by permitting employers to hire more foreign workers.
Israel’s foreign worker population rose by 41% in 2024 alone to more than 156,000. By 2025, the total had reached 227,044. It is expected to grow even more in the coming years, as the government has set a ceiling of 300,000 workers.
For many Israelis, footage that circulated after the ceasefire showing long lines of foreign workers arriving at newly reopened government offices to renew their visas offered a stark illustration of the growing sector.
It is not uncommon around the world for people from impoverished countries to migrate to countries with more work and higher pay. For the workers, occupying a tenuous legal status can be worth it to be able to support their families, send their children to stronger schools and earn wages on a different scale than in their home countries.
Evelyn, a Filipina caregiver sheltering with her three children beneath the Central Bus Station, declined to give her last name out of fear of deportation. “In Israel, I can earn 10 times what I do in the Philippines. So I have money to send back to my family — not just taking care of my kids here, but my parents in Manila.”
But advocates for the workers say foreign worker status, and Israel’s increasing reliance on foreign workers, creates conditions that are ripe for abuse. Ohad Amar, executive director of Kav LaOved, a nonprofit that works to uphold equal labor rights for all workers in Israel, said the workers are “enduring conditions akin to modern slavery.”
Many foreign worker visas in Israel are tied to a specific employer and are non-transferable. Kav LaOved has documented numerous cases of delayed or unpaid wages, as well as workers who feel pressured to remain silent about abuse from their employers lest they lose their immigration status.
“Israel had not relied on migrant workers in the same way before. This is the first time at this scale,” Amar said. “Every day we are getting reports of workers’ rights violations, and we are completely overwhelmed.”
During wartime, foreign workers are frequently exposed to Israel’s unique dangers in extreme ways. On Oct. 7, as sirens blared, foreign workers were slaughtered in the fields of kibbutzes near Gaza. During the most recent war, videos circulated online of construction workers from China who filmed themselves stranded high in the air during missile barrages, afraid and without protection.
The first death in the latest round of fighting with Iran was Mary Anne Velasquez de Vera, a foreign worker in Israel from the Philippines. At the end of March, two other foreign workers were killed by a Hezbollah rocket while working in a field in northern Israel after they were unable to reach shelter.
Feeling physically vulnerable is an experience many foreign workers in Israel know well. Evelyn, a migrant from the Philippines who slept in the bus station with her children during the war, described how, in an industry as intimate as caregiving, working with elderly people who struggle to make it to a shelter, workers can feel pressured to stay in the building during an attack.
“They can’t exactly tell their employer they left grandma in the building during a missile attack, because they’ll get fired and lose their visa,” Amar said.
Some of the risks are much less visible. Evelyn was out of work as a housekeeper for the duration of the war, when her employer, an elderly woman, left the country. She lived on donations from community members and civil society organizations.
“Here is still better than back home,” she said. “But we are all struggling, and not just because of the shelter. If I can’t start working soon, I really don’t know what I will do.”
Workers like Evelyn who lack work visas must rely on informal employment, making them ineligible for compensation from Bituach Leumi, Israel’s national workers’ insurance, when they go unpaid. But having a visa did not solve the challenges of war, Rozen said.
The threat of losing their visa if they lose their employment hangs over the heads of the workers, forcing them into difficult decisions, like whether to leave their children with volunteers at the shelter or alone at home.
“Even those who still have work face a problem. If a single mother has children and there’s no school, where does she leave them? She can’t bring them along when there’s an alarm,” Rozen said. “So even when work exists, many can’t do it.”
She said the war had offered a glimpse into the as-yet-unaddressed challenges that come along with Israel’s increasing reliance on importing labor from abroad. The country’s labor market didn’t come to a standstill, as was the case in other countries in the region such as the United Arab Emirates where the vast majority of workers are migrants who tried to leave, but for Rozen, something new and troubling was laid bare.
“If you don’t want foreigners here, then don’t recruit them,” Rozen said. “But you can’t recruit them, triple their numbers, and then expect them to disappear when there’s a war.”
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Nearly half of young Americans view US relationship with Israel as a burden, survey finds
(JTA) — Nearly half of young Americans, 46%, believe that the United States’ relationship with Israel is mostly a burden to the United States, according to a new survey from the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School.
The Harvard Youth Poll, which polled 2,018 Americans aged 18 to 29, found that just 16% of those surveyed described the U.S. relationship with Israel as mostly a benefit.
Respondents were asked about their view of other U.S. alliances, including Canada, which 53% saw as beneficial, and Ukraine, which 21% saw as beneficial. Israel received the lowest perceived benefit of any country tested.
The survey also found that 55% of young Americans believe the U.S. military action in Iran is not in the best interest of the American people.
It comes as attitudes about Israel among young Americans in recent years have grown sharply negative. Earlier this month, a Pew Research Center survey found that 70% of Americans aged 18 to 49 held a somewhat or very negative opinion of Israel. That view was split among partisan lines, with 84% of Democrats in that demographic holding a negative view of Israel, compared to 57% of Republicans.
The Harvard survey was conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs between March 26 and April 3 and had a margin of error of 2.74 percentage points.
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Long Island father and teen son arrested after investigation into swastika drawn in school bathroom
(JTA) — A father and his teenage son were arrested Wednesday after an investigation into swastika graffiti at the teen’s school led police to search their home, where authorities said they found chemicals used to make explosives.
The arrests stemmed from an investigation into swastika graffiti found in a boys’ bathroom at Syosset High School on Long Island. After police determined that a 15-year-old student had drawn the swastika, the Nassau County Police Department sent officers to his home.
There, the teen told the officers about the explosive materials, according to prosecutors. He said his father had purchased the chemicals for him to build rockets.
During the subsequent search of the home, police found “highly unstable” materials that had been combined to make explosives, including nitroglycerin, multiple acids, oxidizers and fuels. They began to evacuate people in adjacent homes, fearing an explosion.
The teen was not identified by police due to his age. Francisco Sanles, 48, who was arrested at the scene, has pleaded not guilty to seven criminal counts, including criminal possession of a weapon and endangering the welfare of a child. His son was charged with five counts, including criminal possession of a weapon, criminal mischief, aggravated harassment and making graffiti.
Swastika graffiti is relatively commonplace in schools, with the Anti-Defamation League reporting over 400 incidents in 2024: Syosset High School itself was hit by a spate of antisemitic graffiti, including swastikas, in 2017. But it is relatively rare that incidents result in arrests.
In an email to the school district Wednesday night, the Syosset School District — which enrolls a large number of Jewish students — said its investigation had identified the student for the police, and he would face “serious consequences pursuant to the District’s Code of Conduct.”
“Antisemitism and hate speech have no place in our communities or in our schools,” the district said. “Syosset has long been proud of being a welcoming, empathetic, and inclusive community and those values remain firm. We protect those values and this community by confronting and holding accountable those who traffic in any form of hate.”
In January, New York City Police arrested and charged two 15-year-old boys suspected of spraying dozens of swastikas on a playground in a heavily Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood with aggravated harassment and criminal mischief as a hate crime.
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