My experience at the JOFA Conference 3/12 - 3/13/2010

Last Thursday Sonia Sarah Lipsyc and I flew to New York City to attend the JOFA conference: Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance: for those of you who are not au courant, she and I have embarked on a series of video interviews of important Jewish feminists.

Wow!!! Were we blown away!!!

Thursday we interviewed two female powerhouses, both working physicians in Manhattan and also important female Jewish leaders in Judaism, who both consider themselves part of the Orthodox kehillah.

Dr. Michelle Friedman, Psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst made time to meet us between 3 and 3:30 in her private office on the Upper West Side.

At 3pm we were waiting in her spacious lobby. She rode up on her bicycle and ushered us into her office.

She is the pastoral counselor for all the Rabbis, mostly male, ordained by Yeshivat Chovevei Torah. She explained that it is her task to prepare male rabbis to meet
the demands that are inevitably thrust upon them by all kinds of human dilemmas,
as they fulfill the role of Rabbi. She explained that they are all eager to "help" and it is her job to train them how best to do this.

She meets with them once a week for a year and starts of each class with a dvar torah, based on the traditional sources of Talmud, Torah and Midrash.

Earlier from 1: 30 to 2:30 we met Dr. Shera Tuchman in her own home on the East Side.

She too is a Physician in private practice, and also a Jewish Scholar who has been leading a women's study group 7:30 - 8:30 am at Kehilat Bnai Jeshurun for 18 years. She has published two books of Biblical commentary and is working on a third.

She is also about to publish the translation (from Hebrew,Yiddish and Polish) of the 35 notebooks of her dear departed grandmother which span the last century from the time her grandmother arrived in New York (1905) to her death about ten years ago.

She showed us her library and her bagful of Jewish texts which she uses each week to prepare for her morning class, which happens regularly on Thursdays and is free and open to the public.

During the conference, we met and I have a full video of Rebbe Mimi Feigelson teaching in her own special way. She was ordained by Shlomo Carlebach in secret many years ago.
I videotaped her teaching, which was like an amazing Hassidic teaching session. You had to be there and through the magic of video - you can be.

For those of you interested in the halachic underpinnings of all this. I videotaped Daniel Sperber, the Posek: a 45 minute lecture on all of the gory details.

Also, I met and interviewed Susan Weiss, attorney and executive Director of Center for Female Justice, an organization working to ameliorate the Agunah problem in Israel through the Rabbinic and the secular courts.

And I had the pleasure of listening and videotaping Judy Klitzner, author of "subversiveSequels in the Bible". She gave a class based on her book. She is a creative interpreter of the torah for our time. She is a student of Nehama Leibovits and a teacher at Pardes, an institution of higher Jewish learning for women.
She brings new and original insights into the traditional texts of Adam and Eve,
Cain and Abel, Deborah, the prophetess, judge and warrior, Sarah, Rachel, Rivka and Leah.

The last session was with Tova Mirvis, a contemporary Jewish female author of fictional books who grew up in an orthodox community in Memphis and whose first books are set in that setting. And she considers herself Orthodox, a working writer, and mother.

Oh and did I mention, Yutta Silverman, the young filmmaker from Boropark, who created the film "Arranged" about the friendship between two school teachers, one Moslem and one Orthodox Jewish, both encountering the follies of dating within their respective traditions.