Women Insulted For Reading Torah At French Synagogue

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By JTA June 29, 2017

(JTA) — Women who read aloud from the Torah at a synagogue in Marseille were subjected to threats and insults by congregants after local rabbis condemned the event.

The dozens of threats and insults, made on social networks and in emails, started coming in Saturday night after the group of half a dozen women read the Torah at the Fleg Jewish Center that morning, the French community center’s president, Raymond Arouch, and director, Martine Yana, wrote in a statement Monday.

The threats were of “all kinds of assaults” and were “intolerable,” Arouch and Yana said in the statement, which neither identified the women nor contained examples of the abuse. They said the synagogue at the community center was nondenominational and open to all Jewish streams, including Reform Jews, who worship in an egalitarian manner. However, men and women were seated separately inside the synagogue during the reading, organizers said.

The incident prompted passionate statements from supporters and critics of the women’s actions, which some Orthodox Jews believe contradicts what they perceive as a prohibition on the vocalization of Torah portions by women at synagogue. The news site JForum called the fallout of the incident “a scandal” in an article Thursday.

“The reading of the weekly portion by a woman in the framework of a religious ceremony is not permitted in the Halakha,” the chief rabbi of Marseille, Reuven Ohana, wrote in a statement Thursday upon hearing of the women’s plan to stage a public reading on Saturday.

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