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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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The post In Orthodox communities where women don’t read Torah, Purim offers a rare opportunity appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Gunfight Outside Israeli Consulate in Istanbul Leaves One Attacker Dead
A drone view shows police officers and medics standing at the scene, after a gunfire was heard near the building housing the Israeli consulate, according to a witness, in Istanbul, Turkey, April 7, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Mehmet Emin Caliskan
One attacker was killed and two others were wounded in an extended gun battle with police outside the tower building housing the Israeli consulate in Istanbul on Tuesday.
Footage showed the backpack-wearing attackers firing with automatic rifles and handguns, and police officers returning fire and seeking cover, as they maneuvered among parked white police buses near a checkpoint. One body lay on the street.
Shots rang out for at least 10 minutes among the glass towers in Turkey’s main financial district, Reuters witnesses said. One person was seen covered in blood.
No Israeli staff were at the consulate, which occupies a floor in one of the towers, at the time of the attack, Turkish and Israeli authorities said.
Israeli diplomats had left Turkey shortly after the Hamas-Israel war in Gaza began in late 2023, a conflict that prompted large pro-Palestinian protests outside the consulate and across the country, and a deep chill in Turkish-Israeli diplomatic ties.
US ENVOY SAYS CONSULATE WAS TARGET
The three attackers had links to an organization that “exploits religion,” Interior Minister Mustafa Ciftci said, without giving any name. Two of them were brothers, and they had traveled in a rented car from the city of Izmit, he added.
While Turkish authorities did not say what motivated the attackers, Tom Barrack, the US ambassador to Turkey, said on X that it was an attack on the Israeli consulate and he condemned it.
President Tayyip Erdogan said the “heinous terrorist attack” would not dent Turkey’s trust and security. Israel’s foreign ministry said it appreciated Turkish security forces’ “swift action in thwarting this attack.”
Two police officers were also lightly wounded, Istanbul Governor Davut Gul told reporters at the scene of the midday incident, which occurred next to a major motorway as thousands of nearby workers were breaking for lunch.
DIPLOMATIC CHILL AMID GAZA WAR
Turkey, a fierce critic of Israel’s military operations in Gaza as well as in Lebanon and Iran, had recalled its ambassador from Israel in November 2023, and diplomatic relations have been effectively frozen since then.
At the same time that year, Israeli diplomats left Turkey due to security concerns, including the protests. Since then, heavily armed police and armored vehicles have been stationed in a broad area surrounding the consulate.
Militant violence has mostly subsided in Turkey in recent years after a violent spate from 2015 to 2016 when Islamic, Kurdish, and leftist militants carried out attacks amid the spillover from the Syrian civil war.
The latest incident was late last year when three Turkish police officers and six Islamic State terrorists were killed in a gunfight in the town of Yalova in northwest Turkey, amid raids on militant cells believed to be planning Christmas and New Year attacks.
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Ivy League Schools Are Cutting Jewish Admissions, While Faculty Attack Israel and Jews
Graduating students rise in support of 13 students not able to graduate because of their participation in anti-Israel protests during the 373rd Commencement Exercises at Harvard University, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, May 23, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Brian Snyder
In an escalation of its fight with Harvard, the Trump administration announced a lawsuit accusing the university of failing to protect Jewish and Israeli students, and threatening to cut off Federal grant money. The lawsuit alleges the university was deliberately indifferent to campus antisemitism, failed to discipline “campus agitators,” refused to enforce its own rules regarding demonstrations, and says the institution was in violation of Title VI.
The US Department of Education also announced two new investigations into Harvard focusing on racial discrimination and antisemitism. The lawsuit came as many universities have quietly adopted a strategy of waiting out the Trump administration.
The other notable development in March regarding campus antisemitism was the release of the report by the House Education and Workforce Committee. Among the more shocking revelations detail how Qatar Foundation officials dictated terms to Northwestern University regarding the institution’s response to the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023.
Particularly disturbing details described Qatari efforts to prevent the university from censuring faculty member Khaled Al-Hroub, who had denied that Hamas members had committed rape. The report also emphasizes that faculty affiliated with Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine “played a significant role in legitimizing and amplifying antisemitism on college campuses.
Elsewhere, legal systems continue to protect pro-Hamas protestors who vandalize university property. In one recent example, a New York State judge ruled that Columbia University cannot discipline students who occupied and vandalized buildings in May 2024 on the grounds that there was no evidence the students “acted to endanger Hamilton Hall or University property within Hamilton.” The judge, an adjunct Columbia Law School faculty member, deemed expulsions and other sanctions “arbitrary and capricious.”
In another case, pro-Hamas protestors who occupied and vandalized a building at the University of Washington in 2024 were charged with misdemeanor trespassing by county prosecutors, who claimed there was insufficient evidence for felony charges. These protestors caused more than $1 million damage to the building. Most have returned to campus.
In Michigan, a Federal court ruled that a lawsuit by Palestinian students who accused the University of Michigan of targeting their “activism” could advance. The suit alleges that disciplinary procedures and its suspension of the leading pro-Hamas student group constituted viewpoint discrimination.
More positively, the University of California Regents voted to settle a suit which alleges the institution failed to respond to antisemitic harassment and discrimination. The suit focused on pro-Hamas protests in 2024 where Jewish students were assaulted and harassed. The agreement stipulates antisemitism training for staff, faculty and students, an annual survey of Jewish life on campus, and the creation of a Title VI office.
Pro-Palestinian students complained the settlement is “a tool to silence the lived experiences of Palestinians and to criminalize student organizing against the ongoing dispossession and oppression of Palestinians in their homeland.” Immediately after and in contravention of the settlement, law school dean Edwin Chemerinsky announced to students that there would be no changes to the speakers policy.
The demographic composition of universities has been recognized as one of the bases for intensified hostility towards Jews and Israelis. The international component of student bodies, reaching in excess of 50% at some institutions, has imported students relentlessly hostile towards Israel and Jews. Complementing this, however, have been efforts to deliberately reduce Jewish populations.
New research has now shown how Harvard, Yale, Penn, and Columbia have systematically reduced the percentages of Jewish students in the past decades. Harvard reduced its Jewish population from approximately 25% in 2004 to the current low of 7%. Analysis of Columbia suggests the number was reduced from approximately 19% in 2004 to 9% today. Dramatic reductions in the number of white students admitted are also apparent.
Most Ivy League and elite institutions showed similar drops, with Cornell holding steady and Brown increasing the number of Jewish students. Muslim enrollment particularly at Columbia increased in the same period from approximately 4% to 7%. In response, Harvard denied reports that it had increased recruitment at Jewish day schools.
The rapid replacement of Jewish and white students at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia appears part of deliberate efforts to expand institutional “diversity,” globalize the student body and thus the subsequent donor base, and to “deAmericanize” the faculty and curriculum.
The replacement correlates with a massive upswing in anti-American, anti-Israel, and antisemitic activity at these institutions. Downstream effects on American and global society may also be inferred as institutional cachets bolstered hateful stances from graduates.
Faculty Lead the Antisemitism Effort on Campus
Faculty continue to stand at the vanguard of anti-Israel and antisemitism on campus, a reality highlighted by details in the House Education and Workforce Committee report. In the wake of the Iran conflict Faculty for Justice in Palestine groups have also become outspoken in support of the Iranian regime and have decried the US.
The University of California Ethnic Studies Council and Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism stated, “We reject imperialist and fear mongering narratives that position Iran as the intruder in the region, rather than US military bases and US interventionism.”
Union Theological Seminary announced the creation of a “Religion and Public Life” program led by two former Harvard Theological Seminary faculty who had left that institution after the program had been scrutinized for its goal to “dezionize Jewish consciousness.” The appointment of Harvard faculty member Rosie Bsheer as Columbia’s “Edward Said Professorship in Modern Arab Studies and Literature” also installs a reliably anti-Israel if mediocre figure in a high profile position. Reports regarding Clark University’s Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies also depict a Jewish founded academic unit that has been thoroughly colonized by “anti-Zionist” faculty.
Elsewhere the Harvard François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard School of Public Health also held another “human rights” event in which participants accused Israel of “genocide.” The head of that center, Kari Nadeau, has now been named dean of public health at UCLA.
In an unusual case that suggests the methods used by Qatar supporters to police academia, Kings College London academic Andreas Krieg was forced to apologize and compensate two individuals in separate defamation cases. Krieg had falsely alleged one of the academics was a UAE agent operating in Sweden which generated official investigations. Krieg was formerly a contractor for the Qatari Ministry of Defense and has a long history of promoting explicitly Qatari viewpoints.
Students Embrace Iran
The most notable development in the student sphere in March were expressions of support for the Islamic Republic of Iran in response to the American-Israel campaign. This included mourning Ayatollah Khamenei by the Ahlul-Bayt Islamic Society at Kings College London, which called his death “an unimaginable loss.”
At the University of Washington, a pro-Hamas student group endorsed a message from the PFLP affiliated Tariq el-Tahrir Youth and Student Network praising “the raining of blessed missiles over US military bases” and calls for “DEATH TO AMERICA, DEATH TO ISRAEL, GLORY TO THE MARTYRS, LONG LIVE THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN, LONG LIVE THE AXIS OF RESISTANCE!”
The infamous pro-Hamas umbrella group Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) also posted the message “Marg bar Amrika” or “death to America.” This forced the university to state the group was not “affiliated in any way with the University,” and that, “There is no evidence that anyone currently in control of their account is a current Columbia student, staff, or faculty member. They are illegally using the Columbia name.” Columbia was also forced to suspend the Young Democratic Socialists of America group for its continuing affiliation with CUAD.
Antisemitism in British education continues to intensify. The depth of hostility towards Jews on British campuses is depicted in a new report from the Union of Jewish Students, which details among other things that 20% of students would be reluctant or unwilling to have a Jewish housemate. Some 47% of students indicated they had been exposed to slogans or protests celebrating the Hamas massacres of October 7. The massacres were widely hailed by pro-Hamas student groups who celebrated the killing of Israeli civilians and soldiers. Jewish students are also routinely subjected to harassment and even violence on and off campuses
K-12 Teachers Support Iran and Oppose Israel
Teachers unions remain the focal point for anti-Israel and anti-American activism (and in the case of Philadelphia for training “revolutionary abolitionists”). They have now also taken the lead as supporters of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In response to the attack on Iran the Chicago Teachers Union co-sponsored a “hands off Iran and Lebanon” rally along with Palestinian, communist and other groups.
The union also adopted a resolution calling for a May Day civic action that would shut down schools. The protest calls for “No Work, No School, and No Shopping” to “defend our Democracy, demand ICE out of our cities, and tax the rich to support our schools and vital services.”
Anti-Israel activity by teachers unions and state officials in Canada continues to follow the path of Britain toward antisemitism and boycotts of Israel. In one development the British Columbia Teachers Federation passed a motion endorsing the BDS movement. In another, Montreal school officials announced they would be investigating reports of Israeli soldiers speaking in Jewish schools as violations of public funding laws.
In a third case a Holocaust survivor’s talk at a Canadian private school’s symposium was canceled. The school pointed to safety and the “current volatile geopolitical climate and … the high-profile nature of the dignitaries scheduled to attend,” and said it was “reviewing the format of its annual Holocaust commemoration ceremony.” The move came as “anti-Palestinian racism” continues to be elevated as the single most important and untouchable form of discrimination and pedagogical pivot in Canadian schools.
Dr. Alex Joffe is an archaeologist and historian specializing in the Middle East and contemporary international affairs. A completely different version of this article was originally published by SPME.
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Ambulances Burned in London: How Many More Warnings Do We Need?
Charred remains of ambulances belonging to Hatzola, a Jewish community organization, which were set on fire in an incident that the police say is being treated as an antisemitic hate crime, in northwest London, Britain, March 23, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Hannah McKay
The world woke up last week to the news of yet another antisemitic attack in the UK, this time in the form of an arson attack, where three masked individuals set alight four Hatzola ambulances outside a synagogue in Golders Green, London.
The police were surprisingly quick to label this as an antisemitic attack. Tweets started flooding in from political leaders such as the UK’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer, declaring “This is a deeply shocking antisemitic arson attack,” and “Antisemitism has no place in our society.”
We need to ask ourselves a simple question: Is condemnation really enough to stop this?
On September 27, 2025 — a late Saturday night — I sat down at a pub in Manchester. Not even 60 seconds passed before my kippah caught a middle-aged woman’s attention. She leaned right over me, demanding answers: “Do you believe in genocide?” “Do you believe in free Palestine?”
Trying to de-escalate and enjoy my pint in peace, I respond, “Let’s keep politics away from the pub.”
She repeated herself in a more aggressive tone, and then picked up my pint, threw it in my face, and ran out straight into a taxi.
With just 12 hours until my flight, the police agreed to meet me the next morning to take a statement. I gave them a very clear message: If you don’t deal with the minor antisemitic attacks, there will be something way bigger, and it will be too late.
Five days later, just 0.5 miles from that pub, the Yom Kippur attack occurred — when an Islamist terrorist committed a heinous act of violence, leaving two Jews murdered in cold blood.
Following the shocking terror attack, I hoped the police would finally enforce a zero-tolerance policy on minor antisemitic attacks, especially the antisemitic assault that happened to me at the pub five days prior, as they had promised during the interview.
I stayed hopeful for four months, until the case was closed with no action taken. What does that tell us?
The Jewish community in the UK has reached a stage where they often don’t bother calling the police after antisemitic assaults or attacks, because receiving a crime reference number and a “we won’t tolerate antisemitism in our society” condemnation isn’t enough.
When British political leaders and police turn a blind eye to hundreds of antisemitic assaults in the UK, while thousands march and scream “globalize the intifada,” and Israelis are banned from attending a soccer game on British soil, does that reduce antisemitism — or risk encouraging it?
If the UK is serious about making Jews feel safe, they must end these marches calling to “globalize the intifada,” and crack down on every single minor antisemitic attack.
What starts small doesn’t stay small.
A group calling themselves the “Islamic Movement of the People of the Right Hand” has claimed responsibility for the arson attack on the Hatzola ambulances, and several other arson attacks targeting synagogues in Europe over the past month. This terrorist organization has ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), yet the UK still fails to formally proscribe the IRGC as a terrorist organization. We must ask ourselves: What signal does that send to those willing to attack Jews?
The warning signs are there. They’ve been there.
At what point are they actually going to be taken seriously?
Chaim Frankenhuis is a UK-born commentator based in Israel, focusing on the rise of antisemitism, distorted media narratives, and developments surrounding Jewish heritage.