When it came time for Berman's 60th birthday, she wanted to have a bat mitzvah service at a traditional women's minyan in the auditorium of the religious-school building. She went to the rabbi. The last thing Mogen David needed, with its venerable but aging, traditional membership increasingly calling itself a Cemetery Club, was a feminist rebel. Once again, she was rebuffed. Still, she could not bear to leave the synagogue where her family had belonged since 1949 and where she still serves as a board member.
Hard victories come on strange feet.
For three years, Annette Berman struggled, without results, to achieve that goal. As a matter of equity, Rabbi Yisroel Kelemer and Markman urged the board to finally establish the Shivyon Minyan. Since January, an egalitarian prayer service, attracting about 60 men and women, has been meeting monthly in the cramped classrooms of the Rabbi Abram I. Maron day school. When I was there, the gifted Tracee Rosen, a former banker and a student at the new Ziegler rabbinic school, led the full Torah service. The struggle is by no means over, and each month the battle to maintain the minyan must be waged again.