Ramaz, a Modern Orthodox school in Manhattan, has joined SAR in agreeing to allow girls to pray with tefillin, although the school’s principal reportedly says no students are currently doing so. “If a young woman wanted to put on tefillin and tallit, she could daven with us in our school minyan,” Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, the…
A young woman prays wearing tefillin on April 11, 2013 in Jerusalem, Israel. / Getty Images On December 8, 2013, SAR High School principal Rabbi Naphtali Harcsztark permitted students Ronit Morris and Yael Marans to lay tefillin in the school’s daily women’s prayer group, allowing them to do so within the school building. While this…
SAR High School, a Modern Orthodox institution in Riverdale, New York, is now allowing girls to wear tefillin. Rabbi Tully Harcsztark, head of the school, sent out an email explaining that two girls were granted permission to wrap tefillin at the school’s daily all-girls meeting, reports the Boiling Pot, the online student newspaper of Shalhevet…
Several recent rabbinic rulings that have invalidated certain kinds of tefillin straps as unfit for use are causing an uproar in the Orthodox community. A number of rabbis in Jerusalem, Chicago, Brooklyn and Lakewood, N.J., have issued rulings prohibiting the use of tefillin straps (retzuot in Hebrew) that peel, and so-called leatherboard straps, according to…
Shortly before Boychik’s bar mitzvah, which was a few years back, his zeyde bought him tefillin. I have sweet photos of my (Haredi) father-in-law showing him how to put them on for the first time. At the time, we were well aware that the scene would not be repeated with Girlchik as she prepared for…
When Molly Moses graduated from Harvard University in 2011, she wanted to pray each day wearing tefillin. But she couldn’t afford the several hundred dollar investment required to buy a pair of the leather-covered boxes, which contain tiny parchments with handwritten Torah verses. Moses had borrowed tefillin from friends in the past; now she wanted…
Earlier this week, Lavie Tidhar wrote about Jewish vampires and Hebrew punks and searching for Osama. His new novel, “An Occupation of Angels,” is now available. His blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog series. For more information on…
“You know Barbie’s getting a new job,” says my friend Mimi to me. “People can vote for her new career.” I put tefillin on a Mattel Barbie doll in 2006, unwittingly creating the Jewish icon now known as Tefillin Barbie Tefillin Barbie has a religious-girl denim skirt, a T-shirt, the tallit and tefillin more generally…
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