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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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Another Graham Platner potential replacement now says Israel committed genocide in Gaza
(JTA) — Graham Platner concluded his Senate bid on a pro-Palestinian note on Friday, in the last lines of a letter to Maine’s secretary of state formally withdrawing his candidacy.
“F*ck ICE. Free Palestine. Up the Hearts,” Platner wrote before signing off with the valediction, “Solidarity forever.”
The secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, is among the candidates seeking to replace Platner on the ballot, and she soon adopted his stance on Israel. Before becoming secretary of state, Bellows was the executive director of the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine.
Asked about Platner’s letter on CNN’s “The Source” on Friday, Bellows said she agreed with Platner’s claim that Israel committed genocide in Gaza. “Yes. Israel — the Israeli government is committing genocide in Gaza right now,” Bellows said. “And we should not be sending any taxpayer funds to be conducting that harm.”
Bellows did not immediately respond to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment on Monday.
Platner, a Democrat, posted the letter nearly two days after announcing that he would leave the race, following sexual assault allegations that caused even his most devoted allies to drop their support. It was a remarkable fall for an oyster fisherman and populist who emerged out of political obscurity to command such a lead that Maine’s governor, Janet Mills, suspended her own campaign in April.
In both the speech his announcing his withdrawal and the letter, Platner has painted his exit as the result of a conspiracy against him and the progressive movement, rather than a consequence of accruing controversies that undercut his ability to win in November.
“All we were asking for was healthcare, was to end the genocide, to use our taxpayer dollars at home to uplift our communities instead of waging war overseas,” Platner said in a Facebook address announcing his exit, two days before sending the formal letter.
Platner’s successor will be selected during a nominating convention on July 25. Since his exit, candidates vying to replace him have staked out their own stances on Israel, with others besides Bellows saying publicly for the first time that they believe Israel committed genocide in Gaza. Israel and its supporters reject the claim, which a recent poll found that half of Democrats believe.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Another Graham Platner potential replacement now says Israel committed genocide in Gaza appeared first on The Forward.
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Rep. Ro Khanna says armed settlers detained him in the West Bank; IDF disputes account
(JTA) — California Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, who is eyeing a 2028 presidential bid, says he was detained last week by armed Israeli settlers in the West Bank last week — and that Israeli soldiers who arrived “took the settlers’ side.”
The IDF disputed that characterization. The military said in a statement that it received a report of Israeli civilians unlawfully blocking the vehicles of foreign nationals and members of the media near the Palestinian West Bank hamlet of Khirbet Zanuta, and that troops dispatched to the scene “quickly dispersed the Israeli civilians” and reopened the road. Its soldiers, the IDF said, did not take part in blocking the road. The military also said Khanna did not coordinate his visit with the IDF.
The incident took place Wednesday during Khanna’s to the West Bank and broke into public view over the weekend, as Khanna made a number of allegations against the Israeli military while sharing his account.
Khanna’s description of the length of his delay has varied, from about 20 minutes to 90 minutes. Khanna has also claimed the Israeli government and the U.S. Embassy were notified of his trip.
Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, disputed that on Sunday, saying Khanna’s office had asked only about visas and declined the embassy’s request to coordinate the trip. Leiter also said Khanna’s office had not responded to an offer of meetings with survivors of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack.
The incident is the latest flashpoint in mounting criticism of Israel within the Democratic Party, where Khanna is a leader of the pro-Palestinian left flank.
Khanna has repeatedly pointed out that the settlers carried American-made M4 rifles, which he described as “machine guns.” Khanna has called for a ban on all U.S. weapons sales to Israel, including defensive Iron Dome munitions.
In the wake of Oct. 7, Khanna has evolved from a staunchly pro-Israel Democrat into one of Israel’s fiercest critics in Congress. He went from taking money from the liberal J Street and voting to fund Israel’s Iron Dome in 2021 to securing the backing of Track AIPAC, a group that monitors donations from pro-Israel organizations and issues endorsements and “anti-endorsements” of candidates.
Appearing on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel is “a country of laws” that prosecutes lawbreakers, and attributed settler violence in the West Bank to roughly 150 “juvenile delinquents” he described as unrepresentative of a mostly law-abiding settler community. He said he does not want “vigilantes of any kind.”
Appearing after him on the same broadcast, Khanna rejected the Israeli account. “The IDF is lying,” he said, calling for an investigation of the four soldiers.
“He said Israel is a country of law and order,” Khanna said about Netanyahu. “Well, let me be very specific. The prime minister needs to open an investigation on these violent settlers who are connected to Yinon Levi, who has destroyed Zanuta’s village and is a known person who has killed Palestinians.”
Levi was indicted last year following the fatal shooting of a prominent Palestinian activist, Awadh Hathaleen, in a village neighboring Kirbeit Zanuta.
Khanna is not the first American to have been detained in the West Bank. In March, CNN’s Jeremy Diamond and his crew were detained for about two hours by Israeli reservists while reporting in the northern West Bank. In that case, in which the crew recorded a soldier assaulting a detainee and making inflammatory comments about Jewish control of the disputed region, the Israeli military suspended the battalion involved and apologized to CNN, with its chief of staff calling the episode a “grave ethical incident.”
In Khanna’s case, no arrests have been made — though the IDF said in its statement that the identity of at least one armed individual is under review.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Rep. Ro Khanna says armed settlers detained him in the West Bank; IDF disputes account appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel’s elections are set for Oct. 27, triggering mad dash for scarce plane tickets for Israelis abroad
(JTA) — After several months in which it seemed possible that elections would be called earlier, Israel now has a date for its voters to head to the polls to pick a new government.
The Knesset House Committee on Sunday affirmed an election date of Oct. 27, the latest allowed under law, following months of political maneuvering to force an early collapse of the government by both the opposition and the governing coalition.
The determination puts Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government on track to be the first to complete a full term in more than half a century, with the Knesset set to disperse on July 17.
The timeline means that the intense final weeks of campaigning will overlap with the three-year anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that is looming large over the race, particularly for Netanyahu, who was in charge at the time.
It also means that Israelis living abroad — who number more than ever before — now know when they must be in Israel if they wish to vote. Unusually, Israeli law does not allow for absentee voting except in a narrow number of situations, meaning that almost anyone with an Israeli passport who lives outside of Israel must travel back to cast a ballot.
In past elections, Israelis abroad have faced tough decisions about whether to fly home to vote — most recently in 2022, when Israel had a fifth round of elections in four years.
This time around, there are even greater pressures. A record number of Israelis have moved abroad in recent years, with 70,000 leaving in 2025 alone and causing Israel to experience an unusual net migration loss. Flights, meanwhile, are historically expensive, owing to cancellations by foreign carriers amid war-induced uncertainty. At the same time, the stakes of the election are high, with analysts and politicians of all ideologies warning that Israel’s democracy is at an inflection point.
Netanyahu and his supporters say reelecting him is the only way to keep Israelis and Jews around the world safe, while a wide range of opposition parties say only they can safeguard the country’s future, For now polls suggest that the opposition has a majority of voters’ support — though it’s not clear which bloc will have the necessary votes to form a government and, within the opposition bloc, which parties will command
Recent polls have shown a new party formed by Gadi Eisenkot, a former army chief whose son was killed during the Gaza war, leading among the opposition and rivaling Netanyahu’s own Likud party in its share of voters. A joint party led by the former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid also has support from significant numbers of voters, as does a left-wing party led by the retired army general Yair Golan. Parties will hold primary elections in the coming weeks.
Some initiatives are already underway to help Israelis abroad get home for the election. The AID Coalition is collecting information from interested Israelis with the goal of potentially chartering flights to boost the number of people who can make the trip — though each voter will bear his or her full costs.
“Don’t let distance silence your voice,” the group tweeted on Sunday, after the election date was announced.
Meanwhile, Israeli academics have set a slew of conferences for the days before the election, across dozens of fields. Israeli Science and Academia Week says it “seeks to leverage the arrival of thousands of Israeli researchers from abroad to Israel during the Knesset election period to create professional meetings, encourage research collaborations, reveal new academic opportunities, and strengthen the international status of Israeli academia.” It may also have the effect of enabling Israeli academics working abroad to get their institutions to subsidize their travel and permit them leave during the school year.
Israelis posting to social media are already noting a spike in ticket prices just ahead of Oct. 27. But many are also sharing screenshots of their ticket receipts that show the number of days until their trips — and the election.
“My entire feed is full of screenshots of flight tickets to Israel for election day. People spending money, taking time off, and coming specifically just to vote,” tweeted Avi Edelson, an anti-government activist. (His LinkedIn account identifies him as working at El Al, Israel’s main airline.) “It reminds me how much people care about the future of this country.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Israel’s elections are set for Oct. 27, triggering mad dash for scarce plane tickets for Israelis abroad appeared first on The Forward.
