Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur 5773, the matriarch of our women’s tefillah group, rebbetzin Chava (eva) Oles, halkha le’olamah (went to her eternal reward). And our world—her family and our community of Highland Park-edison, new Jersey—lost an inestimable religious and feminist role model.
Some of you may remember her as the white-haired poster grandmother on the publicity for the 2002 JOFA Conference. Others may recall seeing her taking courses at drisha during the 2000s. For our tefillah group, she was a mainstay, often reading Haftarah and giving divrei Torah. For me, she was an “adopted mother,” and the mother of my oldest dear friend, miriam.
She set an example for the rest of us, fighting the feminist fight in our local Orthodox institutions. She called on her shul rabbi to encourage women to bring lulavim and etrogim on Sukkot and to march around in their own hakafot. She demanded of the principal of the local yeshiva that he make the curriculum of the girls more like that of the boys: Why weren’t the girls learning Gemara from a sefer, instead of Torah she-b’al peh on photocopied sheets? When the teen minyan was not attracting teenage girls, she knew the solution and told the rabbi: Give the girls a meaningful halakhic role in the service.
She could have such conversations with the rabbi because he was also her chevruta. She loved to study Torah—as she had with her husband, rabbi Arthur Oles, z’l, and as she continued to do with the younger generation of her family and community.
Most inspiring was her intergenerational way of living her Judaism. For so many years at our annual Simchat Torah women’s hakafot, there were four generations of the Schindler-Oles-Weinberger family participating: First it was her mother, herself, her daughters, and her granddaughters. Then the generations shifted, and it was herself, her daughters, her granddaughters, and her great granddaughters. no one else could come close to that many generations involved in women’s tefillah.
That is why Eva Oles will be remembered as the beloved matriarch not only of her own family, but also of our women’s tefillah group and of the wider olam (world) of Jewish feminism