page_title: Jewish feminism
section_title: Women in Jewish religious law, clergy, schools, groups, and rituals
hierarchical_section_title: Jewish feminism / Women in Jewish religious law, clergy, schools, groups, and rituals
caption_attribution_description: English: Gloria Steinem, photographed in her home, 1977 ©Lynn Gilbert
context_page_description: Jewish feminism is a movement that seeks to make the religious, legal, and social status of Jewish women equal to that of Jewish men in Judaism. Feminist movements, with varying approaches and successes, have opened up within all major branches of the Jewish religion.
  In its modern form, the Jewish feminist movement can be traced to the early 1970s in the United States. According to Judith Plaskow, the main grievances of early Jewish feminists were women's exclusion from the all-male prayer group or minyan, women's exemption from positive time-bound mitzvot, and women's inability to function as witnesses and to initiate divorce in Jewish religious courts.
  According to historian Paula Hyman, two articles published in the 1970s were trailblazers in analyzing the status of Jewish women using feminism: "The Unfreedom of Jewish Women", published in 1970 in the Jewish Spectator by its editor, Trude Weiss-Rosmarin, and an article by Rachel Adler, then an Orthodox Jew and currently a professor at the Reform seminary Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, called "The Jew Who Wasn't There: Halacha and the Jewish Woman", published in 1971 in Davka.
context_section_description: In 1845, rabbis attending the Frankfort Synod of the emerging Reform Judaism declared women count in a minyan, a formalization of a customary Reform practice dating back to 1811.
  In 1854, Fanny Neuda wrote the first Jewish prayer book known to have been written by a woman for women, called Hours of Devotion; it was translated into English and published in the United States 12 years later. In 2015 a plaque honoring her was unveiled in Loštice, where she lived while her husband was a rabbi there.
  In 1884, Julie Rosewald became America's first female cantor (though she was born in Germany); she served San Francisco's Temple Emanu-El, although she was not ordained. She served as a cantor there until 1893.
  On 14 September 1890, Ray Frank gave the Rosh Hashanah sermon for a community in Spokane, Washington, thus becoming the first woman to preach from a synagogue pulpit, although she was not a rabbi.
  On 18 March 1922, the American rabbi Mordecai M. Kaplan held the first public celebration of a bat mitzvah in the United States, for his daughter Judith, at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, his synagogue in New York City. Judith Kaplan recited the preliminary blessing, read a portion of that week's Torah portion in Hebrew and English, and then intoned the closing blessing. Kaplan, who at that time claimed to be an Orthodox rabbi, joined Conservative Judaism and then became the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, and influenced Jews from all branches of non-Orthodox Judaism through his position at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.
  Also in 1922, Martha Neumark and her father attended the Central Conference of American Rabbis Conference, where she succeeded in convincing the CCAR to ordain women rabbis. The CCAR declared in a responsa in 1922, "...woman cannot justly be denied the privilege of ordination," having voted 56 to 11 in favor of that statement. Yet the board of the college still refused to consider women for ordination, voting (as Neumark recalled) six laymen to two rabbis against it. Neumark thus earned a qualification as a religious school principal instead of ordination, though she had spent 7 and a half years in rabbinical school.
  Also in 1922 Irma Lindheim entered the Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City, though she eventually left for the "greater cause of Zionism." While there, in 1923, she petitioned the faculty to change her status from that of special student to a regular student in the rabbinic program; in response, in May of that year they unanimously recommended the admission of women to the Institute on the same basis as men.
  In 1935, Regina Jonas became the first formally ordained female rabbi; she was ordained by the liberal Rabbi Max Dienemann, who was the head of the Liberal Rabbis' Association, in Offenbach am Main, Germany.
  In 1939, Helen Levinthal became the first American woman to complete the entire course of study in a rabbinical school, which she did at the Jewish Institute of Religion in New York. Her thesis was on women's suffrage from the point of view of Jewish law. However, she only received a Master of Hebrew Letters (and a certificate recognizing her accomplishment) upon graduation, rather than a Master of Hebrew Letters and ordination as the men received, since the faculty felt it was not yet time for women's ordination as rabbis.
  In 1955, the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of Conservative Judaism declared that women were eligible to chant the blessings before and after the reading of the Torah, a privilege called "Aliyah". However, in 1962, a study found that only eight conservative congregations had fully embraced the ruling while fifty implemented it with conditions and 196 congregations still had not adopted this newfound right of Jewish women. In the late 1960s, the first Orthodox Jewish women's tefillah (prayer) group was created, on the holiday of Simhat Torah at Lincoln Square Synagogue in Manhattan. This development came by the judgement of the synagogue's rabbi, Shlomo Riskin. Further, the late 1960s saw Bat Mitzvahs, a public coming of age r
caption: Gloria Steinem, a prominent Jewish feminist attended Esther M. Broner's 1976 women-only seder
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