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A digital Jewish library aims to add women’s Torah scholarship to its shelves — by helping them write it
(JTA) — Sefaria, the app that contains a digital collection of Jewish texts, has made everything from Genesis to an essay on Jewish law and gambling accessible at the tap of a finger.
But in one way, it’s the same as nearly every other Jewish library in history: Almost all the texts, from ancient times to the present, are written by men.
Now, Sefaria is hoping to chip away at that gender disparity by organizing and supporting a group of 20 women Torah scholars who are writing new books on Jewish texts.
“It’s relatively recent in the history of the Jewish people that women have had access to as full a Jewish education as men,” Sara Wolkenfeld, chief learning officer at Sefaria, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “And so it’s even more recent that women are able to create those works.”
She added, “When I spoke to women about this, I discovered more and more that there were amazing women teaching Torah and many fewer women who were being encouraged to write books of Torah and really have the scaffolding in place to do that.”
The participants in the new program, called Word-by-Word, range from ordained clergy to academics and teachers. They have expertise in subjects ranging from early modern Jewish studies to Jewish thought and Talmud. Most of them are affiliated with Orthodox institutions or received Orthodox ordination. There are no non-Orthodox rabbis on the list.
Non-Orthodox women have been receiving rabbinic ordination for more than half a century, and recent decades have seen the proliferation of advanced Orthodox Jewish educational institutions geared toward women. In recent years, a growing number of Orthodox women have received ordination as clergy as well.
Word-by-Word aims to parlay their expertise into texts about topics such as Sephardic women’s halacha and rabbinic literature, villains of the Torah, and environmental ethics. Many but not all of the planned books will cover women’s issues: Rabbanit Leah Sarna aims to produce a pregnancy and childbirth guide for observant Jewish women and Gila Fine in Israel will explore the six women named in the Babylonian Talmud, for example, while Adina Blaustein in Ohio will produce a book rooted in the weekly Torah portion.
The program will provide the selected scholars with a support system that will help them put their knowledge down on paper — and, crucially, will pay them to do so. Cohort members will receive $6,000 per year for three years to support their work and will also get professional coaching, peer mentoring and networking opportunities with publishers and authors. The goal is for at least 15 to publish books by the program’s end, in 2026.
Erica Brown, director of the Sacks-Herenstein Center and vice provost for values and leadership at Yeshiva University, is leading the program with Wolkenfeld at Sefaria. (Sefaria’s CEO, Daniel Septimus, is on the board of 70 Faces Media, JTA’s parent organization.)
“Word-by-Word is the program I most needed when I started writing books about 15 years ago,” Brown said in a statement. “I needed help articulating my table of contents, editing myself down, structuring my ideas, writing a proposal, and then connecting to publishers,” she said. “There is a huge difference between knowing how to write and knowing how to publish a book.”
“Writing can also be lonely,” she added. “But it doesn’t have to be. With Word-by-Word, we’ll be creating a new Jewish sisterhood.”
The program builds on a sisterhood that has been growing for some time — of Orthodox women engaged in leading Jewish communities. Many of the cohort’s members are themselves graduates of, or teach at, Orthodox women’s educational institutions. At least seven of the 20 have spent time at Yeshivat Maharat, a liberal Orthodox institution that ordains women clergy. Others are affiliated with Orthodox campuses such as Yeshiva University in New York City or Bar-Ilan University outside of Tel Aviv, or Orthodox high schools or synagogues.
At least six of the cohort members are PhDs whose academic work mostly focuses on Jewish texts. Others are senior educators or hold prominent positions at Jewish educational institutions or nonprofits ranging from the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies to the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.
The funders of Word-by-Word include three foundations that have supported Orthodox women’s learning and advancement: Micah Philanthropies, which allocated nearly a quarter of its grant money from 2021-2022 to Orthodox women’s leadership; the Walder Foundation, which has given grants to projects focused on Orthodox women’s education and leadership; and the Arev Fund, which has provided funding to Yeshivat Maharat, the educational center Nishmat, and other organizations geared toward Orthodox women.
Word-by-Word was open to women of all denominations and its organizers aimed for their advertising to reach a broad Jewish audience. But Wolkenfeld estimates that somewhere between 50% and 75% of the 122 women who applied were, judging from the applicants’ resumes, “plausibly Orthodox.” She also said the cohort’s denominational breakdown may have been a result of the program call for projects that closely analyzed Jewish texts.
“We got a lot of applications that were not actually close analysis of Jewish texts, but rather more, like, writing about themes in Jewish texts,” Wolkenfeld said. “To have a fellowship that was even more diverse, we probably would have needed to have different criteria.”
A predecessor to Word-by-Word launched in 2021, when Sefaria and Yeshivat Maharat partnered to create a writing fellowship for Jewish women scholars. Participants received training and, at the program’s conclusion, each presented a 3,000-word piece at a virtual event. The 14 scholars and rabbis who participated in that program included graduates of Orthodox, Conservative and transdenominational rabbinical schools.
Pamela Barmash, a Conservative rabbi and a professor of Hebrew Bible at Washington University in St. Louis, who is not involved in Word-by-Word, said the absence of non-Orthodox rabbis means “the full orchestra of voices that make up the Jewish community is not there.”
“We only see part of the colors in the spectrum,” she said. “We only see pieces of the Jewish world and we’re missing much of the vitality and creativity and initiative that is found in the rest of the Jewish world.”
Wolkenfeld is an alumna of several Jewish educational institutions and said she feels the increasing gender diversity she sees in institutions of Torah learning has been a boon. Soon, she hopes, some of the women she has studied with will see their names on those institutions’ bookshelves.
“As opposed to where we were, let’s say, 20 years ago,” she said, “I think we now have had the chance to start reaping the benefits of what happens when you have both men and women involved in learning Torah and teaching Torah and disseminating Torah.”
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The post A digital Jewish library aims to add women’s Torah scholarship to its shelves — by helping them write it appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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‘Scarier Than the Holocaust’: Survivor of Nazi Camps, Oct. 7 Dies at 92
Daniel Louz speaks at Auschwitz-Birkenau as part of the annual March of the Living, May 2024. Photo: Screenshot
Less than two weeks after lighting a Holocaust Remembrance Day torch and saying the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel was scarier than the Nazis’ genocide of European Jews, Daniel Louz, who escaped Nazi persecution as a child and survived the Hamas massacre at Kibbutz Be’eri eight decades later, has died at 92.
The nonagenarian lit a torch at the Israeli Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, where the annual Holocaust and Heroism Memorial Rally has been held for decades. In an interview with the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper before the ceremony, he spoke prophetically – and with humor – about his declining health.
“You see me happy and smiling in the photo, but my health is really not good,” he said. “Soon I will have to return my soul to the Creator, but I make an effort for the camera.”
Born in France, Louz was a child when Nazi Germany invaded in 1940. He and his family were held in three concentration camps in France, separated for years between different camps, with his mother and sister in one place and his father in another. The family survived, but most of his relatives, including 10 aunts and uncles and two cousins, did not.
Two years ago, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, Louz visited Auschwitz-Birkenau with the annual March of the Living, where he also took part in a torch-lighting ceremony.
Louz immigrated to Israel in 1949. He first lived on Kibbutz Nirim in the Negev and later made his home at Kibbutz Be’eri.
“I began to breathe again,” Louz said of the move to Israel.
Louz described the events of Oct. 7, 2023, in Be’eri, one of the communities hit hardest during the Hamas-led attack. On Oct. 6, like many Be’eri residents, Louz marked the kibbutz’s anniversary. The next morning, Hamas terrorists stormed the community. Of the kibbutz’s roughly 1,200 residents, 101 were murdered and 30 were kidnapped. Hundreds of homes were destroyed and more than two years later, most of the community is still living elsewhere.
Louz was inside his home as the attack unfolded.
“We were already hostages in our own home, when Hamas terrorists entered the kibbutz,” he said.
“It was a deathly fear. It was even scarier than I remember as a child during that war,” he added.
Louz said he had not recovered from the trauma of the attack and expressed his hope for an end to war, adding that while he no longer believed he would live to see peace himself, he hoped his grandchildren would.
At Birkenau, Louz tied the memory of the Holocaust directly to the massacre in southern Israel.
“We, the survivors of the Holocaust, who established a home and a state – that constitute our great victory over the Nazis and antisemitism – light this torch in memory of those who perished in the Holocaust, and in memory of those murdered on Oct. 7,” he said, his voice shaking.
Approximately 2,500 Holocaust survivors were in areas directly affected by Oct 7, according to Israel’s Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs. Roughly 2,000 of these survivors were forced to evacuate their homes from the Gaza envelope and northern Israel due to the subsequent war.
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An Indiana town had no Jewish cemetery. When its mayor died, it built one
When Marcus Levy died in Aurora, Indiana, in September 1871, the city gathered.
Levy was 63 years old, a native of Prague, and the mayor of Aurora. After the upheavals of 1848, he left Europe and arrived in New York a stranger and without means before making his way west. He came to Aurora around 1855 and, over the years, served as city treasurer, county treasurer, school trustee, and then mayor at the time of his death.
He was unmarried and died a poor man after a failed business investment. At his funeral, one fraternal resolution noted the “entire absence of any one related to him by blood.” But he did not die unknown. He had, as The Israelite newspaper of Cincinnati put it, gained the respect of those around him through “his integrity, his talents, and his goodness of heart, both in his private and public life.”
His funeral was held in the Methodist Episcopal Church, the largest building in town. Rabbi Goldammer of Cincinnati had traveled roughly 40 miles to Aurora to officiate. When Levy’s death was announced, one local report noted, “the grief of his friends and the public at large was no less poignant.”
Aurora marked the death formally. The town council recorded its “unfeigned sorrow,” described Levy as “a competent, faithful, and honest public official,” ordered Council Hall draped in mourning for 30 days, and directed city officers to attend the funeral as a group.
At 1 p.m., according to an account of the day, the services began. The church was filled to capacity, and probably more than half of those who came could not get in. One account estimated the attendance at more than 4,000 people.
Then the procession formed.
A German band led. The Aurora lodge of Masons followed in full regalia. Then came the Odd Fellows lodges, also in regalia. Another band. The hearse. Ladies and gentlemen “of the Jewish faith” in carriages. Citizens on foot.
The procession moved under direction through the city to River View Cemetery. One account said it extended nearly three miles. Another called it the largest funeral procession Aurora had ever seen.
At the graveside, rites were performed. The Masons and Odd Fellows conducted their fraternal ceremonies. Afterward, Rabbi Goldammer read the Jewish funeral service.
‘The wind is favorable’
The burial itself had nearly taken place elsewhere.
Because Aurora’s Jewish population numbered just four families, local Jews had first agreed to send Levy’s remains to Cincinnati, where there was an established Jewish cemetery.
But Aurora resisted that plan. According to one report, the “impressive desire of the community” was to keep within the city “as a dear memory” the remains of the man they had respected for so many years. Another account stated Levy’s friends in the city, “irrespective of religious belief,” insisted that he should be buried where he had spent so much of his life.
And so he was.
Levy was interred in River View Cemetery, and Rabbi Goldammer consecrated the ground. Yet the work did not end with the funeral. Rabbi Isaac M. Wise later explained that the Jews of Aurora and neighboring Lawrenceburgh, “few in numbers,” attempted to purchase three adjoining lots so that Levy’s grave might become part of a Jewish burial ground.
A second effort followed: to place “an appropriate monument” above Levy’s grave.
To raise the money, local Jews turned outward. Wise wrote that Abram Epstein and Joseph Meyer of Aurora took the matter in hand and invited him to lecture in the city for the benefit of the monument fund. Wise had refused other outside engagements that winter, but he went to Aurora on Jan. 20, 1873.
The lecture was held in the Presbyterian church. Its pastor, the Rev. A.W. Freeman, with the unanimous consent of his congregation, offered the building for the occasion. Wise described it as “a very pleasant and spacious building.” Before the lecture, Freeman’s daughter played the organ, and four local vocalists, including “one of the most respected bankers of the place and his lady,” sang a quartet.
Though revival meetings were underway in two other churches that same evening, Wise said the church was well filled with “a highly intelligent class of people,” who listened patiently for an hour and a quarter as he lectured on episodes from Jewish history and the world’s progress since then.
Afterward, Freeman, who had introduced Wise, rose and proposed a vote of thanks, which was unanimously approved.
Wise did not know how much money had been raised. He hoped only that the work would continue until the fund was sufficient to erect “a respectable monument” to Levy. He added that he would willingly serve again for that purpose.
A local writer had remarked that the event would be a curious spectacle, a Jewish rabbi speaking in a Christian church before a Christian audience. Wise rejected the novelty. There was nothing peculiar in it, he wrote, for one “to whom all men are equals whatever their creeds, languages, or places of nativity may be.” He added, “We worship one God and love one human family,” and told readers afterward, “We are steering in that direction, and the wind is favorable.”
In Aurora, a Jewish mayor died, and the town did not send him away.
They buried him and then worked to mark the ground.
The post An Indiana town had no Jewish cemetery. When its mayor died, it built one appeared first on The Forward.
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Mediators Still Seek to Bridge US, Iran Gaps Despite No Face-to-Face Talks
People walk past a billboard with a graphic design about the Strait of Hormuz on a building, amid a ceasefire between US and Iran, in Tehran, Iran, April 27, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Work has not halted to bridge gaps between the United States and Iran, sources from mediator Pakistan said, despite the absence of face-to-face diplomacy after President Donald Trump called off a trip by his envoys over the weekend.
Iranian sources disclosed Tehran’s latest proposal on Monday, which would set aside discussion of Iran‘s nuclear program until the war is ended and disputes over shipping from the Gulf are resolved. That is unlikely to satisfy Washington, which says nuclear issues must be dealt with from the outset.
Hopes of reviving peace efforts have receded since the US president scrapped a visit on Saturday by his envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner to Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, where Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi shuttled in and out twice over the weekend.
Araqchi also visited Oman over the weekend and went to Russia on Monday, where he met President Vladimir Putin and received words of support from a longstanding ally.
OIL PRICES RISE AGAIN
With the warring sides still seemingly far apart on issues including Iran‘s nuclear ambitions and access through the crucial Strait of Hormuz, oil prices resumed their upward march when trade reopened on Monday. Brent crude was up around 3.5% at around $108.8 a barrel by 1500 GMT.
“If they want to talk, they can come to us, or they can call us. You know, there is a telephone. We have nice, secure lines,” Trump told “The Sunday Briefing” on Fox News.
“They know what has to be in the agreement. It’s very simple: They cannot have a nuclear weapon; otherwise, there’s no reason to meet,” Trump said.
Araqchi expressed a different perspective, telling reporters in Russia that Trump requested negotiations because the US has not achieved any of its objectives.
ISLAMABAD REOPENS AFTER LOCKDOWN TO HOST TALKS
Senior Iranian sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters the proposal carried by Araqchi to Islamabad over the weekend envisioned talks in stages, with the nuclear issue to be set aside at the start.
A first step would require ending the US-Israeli war on Iran and providing guarantees that Washington cannot start it up again. Then negotiators would resolve the US blockade and the fate of the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran aims to reopen under its control.
Only then would talks look at other issues, including the longstanding dispute over Iran‘s nuclear program, with Iran still seeking some kind of US acknowledgment of its right to enrich uranium for what it says are peaceful purposes.
In a sign that no face-to-face meetings are planned any time soon, streets reopened in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad, which had been locked down for a week in anticipation of talks that never took place. The luxury hotel that had been cleared out to serve as a venue was again taking reservations from the public.
Pakistani officials said negotiations were still taking place remotely, but there were no plans to convene a meeting in person until the sides were close enough to sign a memorandum.
SHIPPING SNARLED BY BOTH SIDES
Although a ceasefire has paused the US-Israeli strikes on Iran that began on Feb. 28, no agreement has been reached on terms to end a war that has killed thousands and driven up oil prices. Both sides could be settling in for a test of wills.
Iran has largely blocked all shipping apart from its own from the Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz since the war began. This month, the United States began blockading Iranian ships.
Six tankers loaded with Iranian oil have been forced back to Iran by the US blockade in recent days, ship-tracking data shows, underscoring the impact the war is having on traffic.
Between 125 and 140 ships usually crossed in and out of the strait daily before the war, but only seven have done so in the past day, according to Kpler ship-tracking data and satellite analysis from SynMax, and none of them were carrying oil bound for the global market.
With his approval ratings falling, Trump faces domestic pressure to end the unpopular war. Iran‘s leaders, though weakened militarily, have found leverage with their ability to stop shipping in the strait, which normally carries a fifth of global oil shipments.
However, experts have warned that the Iranian economy is on the verge of collapse, especially if the US blockade continues to slash Iran’s oil exports.