I held up the etrog, inspecting it not only for the black spots that my father taught me would render it unkosher, but also for an overall esthetic appearance that would appeal to me personally. (Bumpy, hourglass shaped, green, and pitomless are my preferences.) And so it went with the branches of the lulav, the […]
Doing Hoshanot from the Women’s Side of the Mehitzah Read More »
Author’s note: This article has been updated and expanded from a piece I wrote nearly a decade ago. I will never forget the first time I saw a woman wearing a tallit. I was twenty-seven years old, living in Israel, and attending the first International Conference on Women and Judaism. I came early, stumbled into
The Road to Wearing a Tallit: Why This Orthodox Woman Wears a Tallit Read More »
Dear Editor, I read the article by Barbara Trainin Blank on “Women as Circumcisers” in the JOFA Journal Vol. XII, no. 2. I should like to point out that I discussed this issue in my Minhagei Yisrael, Vol. 4, Jerusalem, 1995, pp. 3–9, with additional evidence in ibid., Vol. 7, Jerusalem, 2003, p. 401, and,
Letter to the Editor Read More »
On the last day of Passover, the Yizkor prayer helps us memorialize our dead. On Pesaḥ 2020 I recited the prayer in the solitude of my living room, slowly mouthing the words. Ostensibly I was reciting the Yizkor prayers for my father, a Holocaust survivor who died twenty years ago, and for all his family
I didn’t expect to say Kaddish with any regularity. When my father, Morris Robinson, died in late January 2020, I intended to recite only the three Kaddishes at the end of the Shabbat davening each week and, instead, focus on helping raise my three young children. At the shivah minyanim at my parents’ house, however,
Kaddish, in Retrospect Read More »
On Performance and Mikveh During COVID-19 My first encounter with the mikveh was at 27, when I met with my converting beit din for the last time. I had never seen the mikveh before I immersed that day, having only heard bubbe meises from my unmarried female friends. Unsure of what to expect, I found
When COVID-19 broke out, most mikva’ot closed, but many women’s mikva’ot remained open. I remember hearing some who were angry that women’s mikva’ot weren’t closing as well, saying that it was too much of a risk for women to go out and that rabbis should find kulot (leniencies). I didn’t agree then, and I still
An Appreciation for Mikva’ot Read More »
The Women’s Tefillah Group of Raritan Valley, based in Highland Park and Edison, New Jersey, has been meeting regularly for more than thirty years. Most of our current membership has been a part of the group for at least a decade, and we are a close-knit and supportive bunch. We love to celebrate together, and
A Women’s Tefillah Group Faces the COVID Year Read More »
In this retrospective, I will draw on my decadeslong experience working with agunot, first as a New York City trial attorney and then as the founding director of Get Jewish Divorce Justice (GJDJ) in Los Angeles (since 2012) to analyze the emerging solutions both from secular law and from within the Orthodox or Israeli rabbinic
Solutions to the Agunah Problem: Looking Back Twenty-Five Years Read More »
My mother, z”l, died almost forty years ago; my father, z”l, four years ago. Although, figuratively, there has been a tenfold improvement between then and now in the status of women saying Kaddish, we still have a long way to go Forty years ago, even in the Modern Orthodox community in which I lived at
Women Saying Kaddish: Are We There Yet? Read More »
