A Hanukkah near-miracle reminds us of feminist divisions The quarter-century-old feminist prayer group Women of the Wall was on the receiving end of its very own Hanukkah near-miracle this week, when Israel’s attorney general’s office ordered the Kotel rabbi to include women in the state’s official Hanukkah ceremony. Women of the Wall launched a campaign…
On Hanukkah we sing, “Banu Hosheh Legaresh” (We came to drive out the darkness), as we remember the unlikely victory of the Maccabees against the Assyrians in Jerusalem. So too, Judith led the defeat of Holofernes, against all odds when the Israelites were in a very dark place of despair, having almost given up hope….
The Women of the Wall said they would not attempt to smuggle a Torah scroll to the Kotel during this month’s Rosh Hodesh prayer service due to the current security situation. In a letter sent Sunday to Shmuel Rabinowitz, the rabbi of the Western Wall, Women of the Wall Chairwoman Anat Hoffman said the women…
Women of the Wall was able to pray with a Torah scroll after bringing one into the Western Wall plaza the previous evening and keeping it there all night. Western Wall regulations bar the group, which conducts monthly morning prayer services at the site, from bringing a Torah scroll to its service. To circumvent the…
Israel Police officers detained a women’s rights activist at the Western Wall and confiscated her Torah scroll. Rachel Cohen Yeshurun, a Women of the Wall board member, was taken into police custody prior to a service Friday and released shortly afterwards, The Jerusalem Post reported. Women of the Wall runs gender egalitarian services at the…
I’m looking at the lines in my notebook “Bonna Devora Haberman [email protected]” written carefully in neat precise handwriting. I had never imagined that only a few weeks after she gave me her email, Rabbi Haberman would no longer be in this world. Although she apparently had cancer for a while, in my blindness she didn’t…
I first met Bonna in London in late 1985. She and Shmuel and Tiferet were living on the attic floor of an old house in Hampstead while she finished her Phd. I had never met a couple like Bonna and Shmuel before. They moved to their own beat. They were quirky, charming, funny, eclectic. I…
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…
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