Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

London Orthodox Synagogue Stops Allowing Women To Carry Torah Scroll

Under pressure from the local rabbinical court, a London Orthodox rabbi ended the practice of women carrying a Torah scroll during prayers at his synagogue.

Rabbi Harvey Belovski told congregants last week that the rabbinical court had ordered him to stop a practice that he had initiated last year, in which women carried the Torah scroll around their section of Golders Green Synagogue on Shabbat mornings after it had been taken out of the ark, The Jewish Chronicle reported.

Belovski said he had decided that “the needs of the community are best served by discontinuing” the practice, according to the report. The judges of the rabbinical court “over the past few months have expressed the view that they did not like the practice. I asked around the community to get some sense of how people felt about it. There was a mixture of views — some supported it but others were opposed,” he added.

Several dozen people signed a letter objecting to the insistence of the rabbinical court, or beth din, that the custom end.

“The pressure to stop the women taking the Sefer Torah is merely the touchstone reflecting a deeper chasm between the Beth Din and the communities it serves,” one of the co-signatories and a member of the synagogue congregation, Sally Berkovic, told the Chronicle. “The alienation and disaffection of young women in particular is clear to anyone who understands these communities.”

A spokesman for the Beth Din defended its intervention, saying that one rabbinical judge had “private, informal discussions with Rabbi Belovski in which he expressed concerns that deviations in the practices of the synagogue are problematic.

“This was not a question of curtailing the rights of women, but was an issue of protecting the synagogue customs and practices,” the unnamed spokesman told the Chronicle.

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.

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.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

2X match on all Passover gifts!

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.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.