Yiddishe Mamas (30 page)

She steered Beth Israel for the next three years, leading services, officiating at events, and participating in meetings of Mississippi rabbis. In 1962, however, when the rabbi of Ackerman’s childhood synagogue, in Pensacola, Florida, suddenly quit she agreed to return temporarily to hold that congregation together as well.

Twelve-year-old Judith Kaplan Eisenstein (1909-1996) became the first American female to celebrate a bat mitzvah. Known as “Daughter of the Bat Mitzvah,” she was the eldest daughter of German-born Lena (Rubin) and Lithuanian-born Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism. The rabbi believed that girls should have the same religious opportunities as their brothers, and arranged for his daughter to read Torah on a Shabbat morning, March 18, 1922, at his synagogue, the Society for the Advancement of Judaism. Although she was not allowed to read from the Torah scroll as modern bat mitzvah celebrants do, she read a passage in Hebrew and English from a printed
Chumash
(first five books of the Bible) after the regular Torah service.

Judith, a musical prodigy, married Ira Eisenstein (Kaplan’s successor in the Reconstructionist movement) and then went on to a successful career in Jewish music. After studying at the Institute of Musical Art (now the Julliard School), she attended the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) Teachers Institute and Columbia University’s Teachers College, where she earned an MA in music education in 1932. In 1996, she earned a PhD from the School of Sacred Music at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of
Religion (HUC-JIR). She wrote many Jewish songs (on her own and with her husband), published the first Jewish songbook for children, and taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary Teachers Institute and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. She and her husband had four children. In 1992, eighty-two-year-old Kaplan Eisenstein celebrated a second bat mitzvah, surrounded by leaders of the modern Jewish feminist movement. This time, she read from a Torah scroll. She died on February 14, 1996.

By 1948, about a third of Conservative congregations held bat mitzvah ceremonies. By the 1960s, the bat mitzvah was a regular feature of Conservative congregational life. Today, it is a mainstay in synagogues from Reform to Modern Orthodox.

In 1972, Sally Priesand became the first ordained female rabbi in the United States. (Currently, there are over two hundred female Reform rabbis and fifty-five female Reconstructionist rabbis.)

Although the Reform movement began ordaining women in 1972, the Conservative movement took another decade to do so. Amy Eilberg was enrolled at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) when the school’s faculty voted, on October 24, 1983, to admit women to the rabbinical program. Eilberg enrolled as a rabbinical student in 1984. When the JTS decided to ordain women the following year, Amy—after a long struggle within the Conservative movement—was the first to be ordained.

In the twenty years since her ordination, she has been passionately involved in health care and is a national leader in the Jewish healing movement. She was a cofounder of the Bay Area Jewish Healing Center and directed the Center’s Jewish Hospice Care program.

In 1988, she contributed new rituals for women and couples grieving after a miscarriage or an abortion to an updated edition of the Conservative movement’s rabbinic manual, Moreh Derekh, as well as creating a ritual for women healing from sexual violence.

Rabbi Eilberg is married to Dr. Louis Newman and is the mother of a daughter, Penina Tova, and two stepsons, Etan and Jonah Newman.

Just as women bring their own special contributions and experience to the world, female rabbis, and those with children, also bring a unique point of view to the rabbinate. They often offer a closer, more intimate relationship with their congregants than many of their male counterparts.

Along with their strength, women are good and caring listeners and able to relate spiritually to feminine issues, such as child-rearing, domestic violence, and menopause. Furthermore, female congregants are also more comfortable discussing these issues with another female: The woman-to-woman connection can be a powerful support.

Many female Reform rabbis, instead of wanting to shed ritual, want to make more ritual—but new ones. And so they have.

Women in the rabbinate have made it possible for women to mark the milestones in their lives in Jewish ways. They’ve created rituals for menarche, menopause, weaning, miscarriage, and abortion and they are responsible for making the ceremony for bringing a new daughter into the covenant as prominent in rabbis’ manuals as
brit milah.
This contribution goes beyond women’s ceremonies. There are now new rituals for men as well as women: rituals for retirement, new rituals for divorce, gay and lesbian commitment ceremonies, and rituals for becoming a grandparent.

In a 2003 article in
the Jewish Journal,
Ellen Jaffe-Gill reports on the special challenges and reach of the female rabbi. Gill noted that many rabbis are finding that the pulpit rabbinate is incompatible
with being a mom—especially when their children are young-and therefore don’t opt for congregational leadership.

Many choose administrative, communal, teaching, officiating at special life events, or part-time work as alternatives. Of course, “part-time” for a rabbi is often forty hours a week, and the “usual” days off for most are days “on”—Friday nights and Saturday. While other moms are doing “family stuff,” these moms are working.

Invariably, female rabbis often face the “Whose mother are you?” queries from their children. These can be even more torturous for rabbis, whose role is to provide learning and spiritual guidance. Reconciling the time spent with congregants vs. their own families becomes not merely a scheduling dilemma, but a moral and spiritual one.

And, like other working moms, they must evaluate and self-actualization with traditional roles.

Mothers who are rabbis raise the congregations’ consciousness that all rabbis must set limits on the time they give their synagogues. Men as well are evaluating their competing demands. In looking for solutions, some lay people are taking on greater support roles, and in so doing, are developing greater knowledge of ritual as well as the necessary organizational skills.

Yocheved Mintz, wife, mother, grandmother, teacher, is now the only female rabbi in Las Vegas, Nevada, and is following her family tradition. She comes from generations of rabbis, but she is the only female.

“My grandfather was head of the Orthodox community in Cleveland, so there was concern he would disapprove. I asked a family member how grandfather, who we called ‘Abba ’(patriarch), might have felt about my ordination. I was told that when my uncle, who was head of a synagogue in Buffalo, asked Abba how he would feel if he were to become head of a Reform Temple, Abba’s reply was, ‘Who better? ’The day I was ordained, May 31, 2004, I viscerally felt the presence of Abba, my parents, in-laws, and all of the past generations approving. There were lots of tears. My husband felt it too.

“My mother and mother-in-law were born in Europe,” she says. “My mother was a wonderful storyteller, writer, and linguist. She suffered a massive stroke six years before she died—she
lost her language sense. She was a very brave woman, who let me go away to school. She provided a home where my brothers and I were Jewish down to our corpuscles.” Their home was filled with Jewish books, and Friday night Shabbat was filled with
guests.
“We were very close to our grandparents … and were active in the synagogue. I developed a strong sense of Zionism.”

“Keeping kosher was just a part of who you were,” says Rabbi Mintz, who added supporting Jewish philanthropies was also important.

“The Jewish mother has a strong sense of heritage and she also has a very strong responsibility to Judaism.”

Rabbi Mintz, a pulpit rabbi, also spends a good deal of her time working toward helping the burgeoning Jewish community in Las Vegas. She also uses her role as a director of the Las Vegas Jewish Center for Education, Media, and the Arts (LVJ-CEMA) to assist the community in various creative endeavors.

The wife of the rabbi has always had a critical role to play in the community, and many were revered as leaders themselves.

She shared communal leadership as well as led prayers. The Talmud discussions mention Beruria, the wife of Rabbi Meir, who was an expert in Jewish law and lore in the rabbinic era.

Rabbi Eleazar of Worms (1165-1230) praised his wife for her active religious and cultural life in the community.

In the biographies of Rabbi Judah Loew (1525-1609), the Maharal of Prague, we learn that when he and his wife, Pearl Loew, were promised at age six, she studied secretly, and was, in her own right, a Torah scholar and Talmudist.