The JOFA Campus Fellowship: Conversations on College Campuses and Leadership Development
In the 2010-2011 academic year, the seven JOFA Campus Fellows organized fifteen programs on their campuses. The programs reflect a wide diversity of what Orthodox feminism means to different women and different campuses. Examples include: a Muslim-Jewish women’s discussion regarding women’s roles, a lunch seminar on Jewish women’s education in nineteenth-century Russia, a text study of the sources around women reading Torah, and a women’s tefillah group for Shabbat morning davening.
In Your Community: Previewing A Daughter’s Recitation of Kaddish
This May, JOFA previewed the Ta Shma Halakhic Source Guide, A Daughter’s Recitation of Kaddish by Rahel Berkovits, in four communities: Skokie, Illinois; St. Louis, Missouri; Livingston, New Jersey; and Boca Raton, Florida. We thank these communities for their warm welcome and enthusiastic response to the program.
Two excellent teachers and scholars, Sara Wolkenfeld (curently a JLIC co-director at Princeton) and Lynn Kaye (former Assistant Congregational Leader at Congregation Shearith Israel, the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue of New York) taught these sessions. The attendees were captivated, asking a wide variety of thoughtful questions. Clearly this topic is a very emotional and powerful one in Jewish lives.
Kallah Teacher Training
This March we held our second Demystifying Sex and Teaching Halakha: A Kallah Teacher’s Workshop. Eighteen kallah teachers joined us for a four-day intensive workshop, unique in its emphasis on a broad range of halakhic positions and open and frank discussions on sex. This program was co-sponsored with Yeshivat Chovevei Torah and Yeshivat Maharat.