Sign up for Weekday J and get the latest on what's happening in the Jewish Bay Area.

NEW YORK — Being an Orthodox Jewish feminist has long meant straddling two worlds based on diametrically opposed values.

The first International Conference on Orthodoxy and Feminism, held over Presidents' Day weekend, made it clear that Orthodox women and the rabbis who back them feel they are slowly but surely bridging the chasm between those worlds.

"Ten years ago, we felt on the fringe," said Freda Rosenfeld, a consultant on breastfeeding and childbirth educator who lives in Brooklyn.

"Now we are definitely mainstream," she said, looking around at some of the estimated 700-plus women and sprinkling of men at the conference.

The unexpectedly large turnout included women with uncovered heads wearing pants, and those with long skirts and wigs. All of them described themselves as modern or centrist Orthodox.

The gathering also drew a few Chassidic women, a few Conservative women and a female Reconstructionist rabbi.

The latter was one of at least five Bay Area Jews who attended.

Reconstructionist Rabbi Joanne Yocheved Heiligman, who is a member of Berkeley's Orthodox Congregation Beth Israel and spiritual leader for San Jose's Reform Temple Beth Sholom, called the event refreshing.

She grew up attending an Orthodox synagogue and day school but eventually drifted away from Orthodoxy because she felt excluded as a female.

"It's really exciting to see that Orthodoxy is dealing with these issues, after feeling that they never would," she said.

Blu Greenberg, who chaired the event, said that author Cynthia Ozick "once called Orthodox feminism an oxymoron, and it long was. But it isn't anymore."

Not everyone who attended calls herself a feminist.

Linda Zack of Oakland said she is uncomfortable with the term. Yet Zack said she found it invigorating to gather with so many women who wanted to "walk up to the line of Jewish law…but didn't want to walk over the line."

Zack, the wife of Rabbi Howard Zack who heads Oakland's Orthodox Beth Jacob Congregation, said she was disappointed to find that some of the women who attended were angry.

"They were using their anger in a way I think will be counterproductive," she said. Orthodox women who want to move ahead must instead work as partners with those rabbis who are willing "to look at Jewish law and find ways that change can be made."

The most important outcome of the conference, said many participants, was that nine Orthodox rabbis who spoke at various sessions throughout the program said publicly there is room for change in women's roles within the parameters of Jewish law.

"It's earthshaking that rabbis are saying for the first time that their hands are not tied by distance from Sinai," said Shelley Frier List of Baltimore.

Orthodox women have been expanding their religious roles over the last two decades or so, at first reclaiming traditional women's observances such as Rosh Chodesh, the start of a new month, by starting gatherings that have developed into women's prayer groups.

Innovations have evolved from there. A generation ago, a girl's 12th birthday passed without ceremony and meant only that she was required to fast on Yom Kippur.

Today, a bat mitzvah is often celebrated in one of the approximately 40 women's prayer groups that exist around the world with the girl learning the appropriate blessings, reciting her Torah portion and delivering a sermon on its meaning, much as a boy would.

Baby-namings also are becoming increasingly accepted as a way to publicly welcome, in synagogue, the birth of a baby girl.

And in some Orthodox synagogues, a Torah scroll is passed behind the mechitzah dividing the sexes so that women can touch the Torah after it is read as men have always done.

On the issue of agunot, women whose husbands refuse them the divorce that only men can issue, female activists and a handful of Orthodox rabbis have acted to counter the passivity of the rabbinate on the issue.

A handful of rabbis led by Emmanuel Rackman, a leading modern Orthodox authority, recently created a new religious court, or beit din, which thus far has freed six women by finding ways within Jewish law to annul their marriages.

Some centrist Orthodox rabbinical authorities are firmly opposed to changes.

Rabbi J. David Bleich, a well-known interpreter of Jewish law and dean of Yeshiva University, called the changes Orthodox women are making as "frivolous."

"Changing the norms is up to the rabbinate alone," said Bleich, who did not attend the conference.

"You can't change the norms and still claim to be operating within a traditional community. If they are, then they are beyond the pale of Orthodoxy. It's called Conservatism."

One of the handful of pulpit rabbis who attended the conference disagreed with Bleich.

"There are sources within traditional Judaism" that permit women an expanded role, though "they're not mainstream," said Rabbi Abraham Mandelbaum, spiritual leader of Congregation Ahavat Yisrael in Hewlett, N.Y.

"We have to find solitary ideas and develop them more fully to make them mainstream," he said.