Bonna Haberman, Women of Wall Founder, Dies

Bonna Devora Haberman, the founder of Women of the Wall, a group pressing for egalitarian prayer at the Western Wall, has died.
Haberman, a Canadian-born scholar, author and activist who lived in Israel and the United States, died Tuesday of cancer, The Jerusalem Post reported.
Haberman taught at Harvard, Brandeis and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and was the author of “Israeli Feminism Liberating Judaism: Blood and Ink” and “Rereading Israel: The Spirit of the Matter.”
In addition to founding Women of the Wall in 1988, Haberman founded and directed Brandeis University’s Mistabra Institute for Jewish Textual Activism and co-directed, with the Palestinian actor-director Kader Herini, an Israeli-Palestinian community theater project in Jerusalem called YTheater.
According to a post placed on Haberman’s Facebook page on Tuesday, she died at her Jerusalem home surrounded by family and friends.
She is survived by her husband, Shmuel Browns, and five children.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a Passover gift today!
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Make a Passover Gift Today!
Most Popular
- 1
News Student protesters being deported are not ‘martyrs and heroes,’ says former antisemitism envoy
- 2
News Who is Alan Garber, the Jewish Harvard president who stood up to Trump over antisemitism?
- 3
Opinion What Jewish university presidents say: Trump is exploiting campus antisemitism, not fighting it
- 4
Opinion Yes, the attack on Gov. Shapiro was antisemitic. Here’s what the left should learn from it
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward Harvard president: As a Jew, ‘I know very well’ that concerns about antisemitism are valid
-
Fast Forward Ben Shapiro, Emily Damari among torch lighters for Israel’s Independence Day ceremony
-
Fast Forward Larry David’s ‘My Dinner with Adolf’ essay skewers Bill Maher’s meeting with Trump
-
Sports Israeli mom ‘made it easy’ for new NHL player to make history
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.