sarah in nyc

Until the early 1970’s a woman wearing a tallit was a rare thing indeed.  One heard that Beruria in the Talmud or Rashi’s brilliant daughters wore tallitot, but generally it was not done.   The 1970’s , which of course actually began in 1968, were an interesting confluence of  ideas re thinking our world. One piece of that re thinking was the re-emergence  of feminism after it lay dormant in the post WWII years.  That sort of re thinking of the fundamentals was also going on in various corners of the Jewish world. One of those places was Havurat  Shalom in Somerville, Massachusetts.  Havurat Shalom began as an alternative,  Hippie influenced if you like, Rabbinical school. Part of the motive for starting it was to keep young men out of the Vietnam war. The institution evolved and for a whole was less a Rabbinical school and more a community ( not a commune) that also served as a kind of laboratory for experimental Judaism.  Feminism ...