Arnav

By Chaye KohlOn the last day of Passover, the Yizkor prayer helps us memorialize our dead. On Pesaḥ 2020 I recited the prayer in the solitude of my living room, slowly mouthing the words.Ostensibly I was reciting the Yizkor prayers for my father, a Holocaust survivor who died twenty years ago, and for all his […]

By Nomi KaltmannAustralia, for most people, conjures images of cuddly koalas, beautiful beaches, and picturesque landscapes with laid-back people. I was born in Melbourne, Australia, and can confirm that for those in coastal cities, this image is pretty accurate. Most people live relaxed lives and take their time to get things done.But on Sunday, May

Devorah ScholarsIn the spring of 2020, the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance awarded Devorah Scholar grants to seven Orthodox synagogues. This innovative program, designed to seed the American landscape with women spiritual leaders, was made possible thanks to the generosity of Micah Philanthropies. Women who retain the position of a Devorah Scholar deliver congregational sermons, play

By Susan Hornstein The Women’s Tefillah Group of Raritan Valley, based in Highland Park and Edison, New Jersey, has been meeting regularly for more than thirty years. Most of our current membership has been a part of the group for at least a decade, and we are a close-knit and supportive bunch. We love to

By Thalia Gur-Klein From one step on a ladder to heaven, I dreamed I was seen and seeing her, far beyond my locked down horizon. Yet underway back I tarried on a thoughtful mountain to wrestle a muscled angel, all night long, or was it my angry twin, until dawn, belatedly to realize how one-sided her end meanwhile came.   Unresolved syllables of dreams and regrets, dripple into the Jordan, receding sign and

By Talya Gordon After moving to a new city during a pandemic as a single twenty-four-year-old woman, I have grown to see the incredible gifts that Judaism has given me. With all the chaos around the world, I have needed the Jewish community more than ever to provide light at the end of a very

By Laurie Dinerstein-Kurs I am perplexed. I am amazed. I am also pleasantly moved by the degree to which I read and hear so many people lamenting the difficulties they have faced this past year and a half. Why pleasantly? To sum it up in one sentence: Welcome to my world.Although many people believe they

Educator of Jewish EducatorsJOFA mourns the passing of Dr. Chaya Gorsetman, a master teacher, champion of women’s inclusion in the day school curriculum, and mentor of Jewish educators. In her role as co-chair of the Education Department at Stern College of Yeshiva University, she inspired and mentored a generation of novice teachers in Jewish day

Edited by Erin Leib SmoklerBen Yehuda Press. 2021, $24.95 Review by Atara Cohen How do we make sense of the suffering of the COVID-19 pandemic within a Jewish framework? Rabbi Dr. Erin Leib Smokler has gifted the broadly defined Jewish community with a compilation of essays by a diverse range of authors offering a variety

By Michal S. RaucherIndiana University Press, 2020, $24.Reviewed by Roselyn BellIf you are tired of Ḥaredi women being portrayed as oppressed, uneducated, and subservient to their husbands, Michal Raucher’s Conceiving Agency provides a much-needed corrective, reframing our notions of reproductive agency and religious meaning in the ultra-Orthodox community. Using the tools of ethnography and anthropology