NEW YORK — For most of her 88 years, Eva Oles has struggled to square her Orthodoxy and her feminism.
“I want to prove and show that halachah is humane,” and stretch it to empower women, Oles said at a recent conference on Orthodox feminism, through tears that reflected a life of spiritual turmoil.
Oles finally can consider herself validated, as a new interpretation of halachah is breaking barriers for Orthodox women.
Female Torah readers are standard in non-Orthodox congregations, of course, and most Orthodox long have accepted that women can read from the Torah in women-only prayer groups.
But Jerusalem Rabbi Mendel Shapiro paved the way for an Israeli synagogue, an Israeli minyan and three New York prayer groups to adopt a new model of Orthodoxy that permits women to read and bless the Torah in mixed services.
In a controversial article published last year on the Web site of the modern Orthodox group Edah, Shapiro debunked the traditional Orthodox position that Torah reading by women would diminish the community’s dignity because it is improper for women to assume a public role.
Given women’s equality in modern secular society and their growing role in Orthodox life, female Torah readers and community dignity can be reconciled in many modern Orthodox communities, Shapiro said.
Various halachic concepts have barred women from Torah reading, such as the idea of kol isha, which holds that the supposedly seductive nature of a woman’s voice could compromise the integrity of the prayer service.
Shapiro began researching the subject before his youngest daughter’s bat mitzvah three years ago, and came away confident that the event “was on a halachically sound footing.”
At the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance’s annual conference in New York, plenaries on the topic proved popular.
“The impact has been quite extraordinary,” said Blu Greenberg, president of the alliance.
Women’s Torah reading “will be increasingly adopted not because there are pockets here and there within communities” who do it, “but because of the reports by people who have experienced it,” Greenberg said.
“Everyone who has participated in such a minyan reports on the experience of how natural it feels and how continuous with the tradition it feels rather than violating traditional sensibilities,” she said.
Apart from Shira Chadasha, the Israeli synagogue that allows women to read from the Torah, the three minyanim in New York that have followed suit are the Drisha Institute for Jewish Education, a women’s center of Jewish learning; a new group called Darkhei Noam in Manhattan; and a minyan that began last weekend in Yonkers.
A group in Teaneck, N.J., also is discussing starting a service that permits women to read from the Torah.
An Orthodox congregation in Manhattan, Kehilat Orach Eliezer, is considering a resolution to accept women as Torah readers. If it accepts, the synagogue would become the first in the United States to do so.
According to Shapiro, the decision by Shira Chadasha to let women read from the Torah has “not created any antagonism” in Israel.
In U.S. Orthodox circles, however, resistance appears stiff.
“I’m truthfully not aware of any acceptable halachic authority who has granted permission” for women to read from the Torah during a mixed service, said Rabbi Steven Dworken, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Council of America, the rabbinical arm of mainstream Orthodoxy.
Since those behind the movement “do not represent a significant proportion of the mainstream Orthodox community,” Dworken said, he doesn’t expect the issue to make much headway.
That’s precisely the problem Sarah Meyers faces at the predominantly male Orthodox services she attends at the University of Maryland Hillel.
“I could rebut these arguments but it would get me nowhere. There’s more of them, they’re bigger than me, and they’re at the bimah already,” said Meyers, 17, who began a women’s prayer service this year in her Orthodox neighborhood of Potomac, Md.
The group of 15 to 20 women ranging in age from 13 to 50-plus, meets each month. “I don’t see a problem with aliyot” for women, Meyers said. “The problem is in people’s heads.”
Others say it’s old-fashioned to seek a rabbinical imprimatur.
Lisa Schlaff, a doctoral student in Talmud at New York University and one of the founders of the Darkhei Noam minyan, backs the grassroots initiatives but calls on rabbis to incorporate such changes into their own services.
It “pains me” that the drive for women Torah readers had to develop outside established synagogues, Schlaff, 28, said in a speech at the Jewish feminist conference.
“Go out and see the exuberance of a 50-year-old woman who received her first aliyah two weeks ago,” Schlaff said. “Go out and see the pride of an 8-year old girl after she leads the Anim Zemirot,” a hymn of glory to God.