On the Cutting Edge: Women Rabbis in Israel

by Jane Calem Rosen

Rabbi Tamar Elad Appelbaum may not look like a rebel but she is on the cutting edge of Israeli society, unafraid to challenge the status quo.

Take the time she dared to carry a sefer Torah in broad daylight through the center of Jerusalem to the home of a family whose daughter was to celebrate her bat mitzvah on the coming Shabbat. Perhaps not a big deal elsewhere, but in Israel, especially in Jerusalem, a major statement.

“As I was about to leave the office, a colleague asked me if it was the smart thing to do,” Rabbi Elad-Appelbaum said. With many ultra-Orthodox who might object to the sight of a woman carrying the Torah, her colleague was concerned about her safety.

Rabbi Elad-Appelbaum, who works in Masorti movement headquarters directing two new national programs, the Wedding Initiative and Makhilim, the Kehilla Builders Program, was not to be deterred from what she perceived as a teaching moment. Amid the stares, she suddenly saw an elderly haredi man who was sitting outside a tiny coffee shop on Ben Yehuda Street get up from his seat in a sign of respect for the Torah. Soon after, a woman approached, touched the scroll, and asked her to give her a blessing for her daughter. “It was beautiful,” Rabbi Elad-Appelbaum said. “We should see every moment as an opportunity to create changes in people’s attitudes.”

Rabbi Elad-Appelbaum and three of her female rabbinic colleagues are emblematic of the face of today’s Masorti movement: young and dynamic role models of religious, spiritual and traditional Jewish family life. Together with the others – Deby Grinberg, the rabbi for Noam, Masorti’s national youth movement, who is an olah from Argentina; Chaya Rowen-Baker, spiritual leader of Kehillat Ramot Zion in Jerusalem; and Hagit Sabag, educational director of Kehillat Eshel- Avraham in Beersheva – she is altering the way Israelis practice and think about Judaism. Three of the four also balance raising young children with the long hours they put in as rabbis, a feat they readily credit their husbands with making possible.

Tamar Elad-Appelbaum is a reflection of the change Masorti is working to bring about. She grew up within the Orthodox establishment, but exposure as a teenager to the religious-feminist thinking of Alice Shalvi, principal of her modern Orthodox girls high school, eventually led her to identify with and pursue ordination through the Masorti movement.

The former spiritual leader of Kehillat Magen Avraham in Omer, Rabbi Elad- Appelbaum is determined to help at least some of the estimated 20 percent of couples who choose to forgo a religious wedding rather than submit to the authority of the Orthodox rabbinate, which controls Jewish lifecycle events in Israel. Though many of these couples travel to Cyprus or elsewhere for a civil ceremony that the government will consider legal, Rabbi Elad-Appelbaum is working to convince them to supplement that with a fully traditional halakhic ceremony under a huppah, performed by a Masorti rabbi, surrounded by family and friends.

Through ads on the Internet, radio and in newspapers, she said, the public soon will learn about Masorti’s non-coercive, egalitarian, pluralistic option for a religious wedding. “We believe that once they know about this way to be married Jewishly, we will increase the number of weddings performed by Masorti rabbis,” Rabbi Elad-Appelbaum said.

Her other portfolio, Makhilim, trains nonrabbinic professional leaders to work alongside rabbis and volunteers to enhance programs and services to make kehillot more relevant to their local communities. In a yearlong course set to begin this fall, participants will study kehillot programming and administration. (The name Makhilim comes from a story in the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Brakhot, about Rabbi Akiva, who refused to obey the Roman ban on Torah study. He was said to have continued to gather the community, makhil kehillot, to teach.)

Like Tamar Elad-Appelbaum, Hagit Sabag was raised Orthodox. She found her way to Masorti through a desire to combine her love of traditional Judaism with social justice. Profoundly affected by the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Rabbi Sabag became a student activist at Bar Ilan University, where she raised political awareness and coordinated a group that paired college students with underprivileged children.

With her bachelor’s degree completed, she began teaching b’nai mitzvah preparation and family education workshops in Tali public schools, which integrate a Masorti-style Jewish studies curriculum with general studies. In 2002, Rabbi Sabag joined a special group of young religious leaders, the Rikma Fellows, who combine social action with educational enrichment to build unique spiritual communities in Israel.

As the new educational coordinator of Kehillat Eshel Avraham, Rabbi Sabag has big plans. With professional resources from Rikma, she hopes to team up with Masorti leadership to create an independent educational center for residents of Beersheva. As the one non-sabra in the group, Deby Grinberg perhaps best represents the newest face of Israel – immigrants from Spanishspeaking nations who have made aliyah within the last two decades.

Educated in Masorti movement schools in Argentina, and a member of the Noam youth movement since childhood, Rabbi Grinberg studied at the movement-affiliated Seminario Rabinico Latinoamericano in Buenos Aires and at Machon Schechter in Jerusalem. She then moved to Chile to become director of youth and young adults for the Comunidad Israelita de Santiago and the country’s coordinator for Noam and Marom, Masorti’s organizations for college students and young adults. Since making aliyah in 2005, she’s worked with Noam in Israel but makes it a point to maintain contact with Noam in South America, serving as a liaison for young people who come to Israel for any length of time. “Now that I am Israeli,” Rabbi Grinberg said, “I feel that I have fulfilled my dreams as a Jew and as a Zionist.”

The only one of the four to have grown up in the movement in Israel, Chaya Rowen- Baker might never have become a Masorti rabbi had her parents agreed on which shul to attend when she was a child. “My father was Orthodox and my mother Reform,” she said. “So they compromised by sending me and my siblings to Tali schools. From there the four of us found our way to Noam, and after my army service I worked for Noam, Tali, and Marom.”

Rabbi Rowen-Baker also is the only woman now serving as a Masorti pulpit rabbi in Israel, and she is the first rabbi hired by Kehillat Ramot Zion in Jerusalem’s French Hill neighborhood. Her selection reflects, among other things, an understanding that the time has come for movement leadership to transition to younger Israelis. Paying tribute to her predecessors, Rabbi Rowen-Baker said, “They established magnificent institutions that have done a lot for Israel, but my generation is now looking more outward than inward, seeking to bring the Masorti movement to the general population. We are building on the foundations laid down for us, and we see its influence in many, many places.”

Her impact is already apparent; many young families go to Shabbat services at Ramot Zion regularly. Asked to identify her goals and the primary focus of her rabbinate, Rabbi Rowen-Baker answered by telling a story:

“I had been visiting one of the local secular kindergartens each month to teach basic Jewish mitzvot, such as honoring your parents. The director there recently called to say that she had complaints from parents about ‘religious activity in the school,’ and therefore I would not be allowed back. “I realized that these parents have grown up to hate and fear Judaism so much that they don’t know any better. I want the Jewish people in Israel to love Judaism again, not fear it, and learn that in Masorti, we offer a modern, accepting option of how to be Jewish.”

Perhaps paradoxically, being a woman rabbi may be to her advantage, she noted. “I’m more accessible, less intimidating to people afraid of religion. I’m not a man in black.”