From right: Rabbi Sally Priesand, Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso, Rabbi Amy Eilberg and Rabba Sara Hurwitz speak with moderator Rabbi Andrea Weiss, HUC’s provost.

An event on Thursday marking 50 years of women in the American rabbinate was at once a celebration of pioneering women rabbis and a testament to the barriers they still face, reports eJewishPhilanthropy’s Ben Sales.

Four firsts: The event, held at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC) in New York City, paid tribute to Rabbi Sally Priesand, who became the first woman ordained by an American seminary — HUC’s branch in Cincinnati — nearly 50 years ago, on June 3, 1972. She sat on a panel with the first Conservative, Reconstructionist and Orthodox women ordained as rabbis. 

Tough choices: Priesand said that she chose not to marry or have children in order to focus on her rabbinic career. The Reconstructionist Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso called the experience “so lonely” at the beginning of her career. Conservative Rabbi Amy Eilberg added, “It becomes familiar that people project things onto us… I got a fair amount of ‘You’re destroying Judaism.’”

Twenty-four portraits: The event also showcased “Holy Sparks,” a collection of 24 artworks representing 24 pathbreaking women rabbis. Some of the works are traditional portraits — Priesand’s, by the artist Joan Roth, is a photograph of her with a dog. Others are more conceptual. The work representing Rabbi Angela Buchdahl of New York City’s Central Synagogue, created by Laurie Gross and including photo, dyed linen and embroidery, is a column made up of seven copies of the Hebrew letter shin, which can represent God, in front of a photograph of the blue tapestry on her synagogue’s Torah ark. That image is surrounded by Hebrew and Korean words, representing Buchdahl’s dual heritage.

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Janet Zuckerman will not be spending Passover at home, but she has already thoroughly cleaned and kashered her kitchen, and done her cooking for the weeklong holiday. After freezing all the food, she will pack it into her car and drive with her husband from their home in Potomac, Md., to Orlando, Fla., where they will celebrate Passover with their children and grandchildren. Zuckerman has no relatives in Orlando or any particular connection to the city. But this year, she will join tens of thousands of Orthodox Jews making the pilgrimage to Central Florida for Passover, which begins Friday at sundown. Jewish Insider’s Gabby Deutch reports on the one week a year the nation’s theme park capital becomes the country’s Jewish hotspot.

Destination Passover: “It’s become a real destination,” said Menachem Lubinsky, who operates a website called Kosher Today that reports on kosher food around the U.S. He estimates that some 55,000 Orthodox Jews will visit Orlando during Passover this year, which is more than Orlando’s year-round Jewish population of 51,000. (Messages circulating in WhatsApp groups for people going to Orlando have estimated the numbers will be even higher, somewhere between 60,000 and 80,000 people.)

Place to be: In recent years, Orlando’s popularity as a Passover destination has exploded, even as there have been a number of highly publicized incidents of scams and double-bookings. Some families with young children or grandchildren will visit Disney World over the holiday, but the theme parks alone do not explain the massive growth of the city’s Passover scene. Orlando does not have a large Orthodox community; most of the people who go will form pop-up communities of their own, with makeshift minyans meeting in people’s rental homes.

Do it yourself: Unlike more established “Passover programs,” which are generally all-inclusive affairs at resorts, Orlando is more of a do-it-yourself experience. Central Florida is less built up and thus less expensive than cities further south like Boca Raton and Miami, so visitors can rent large homes (“villas,” as renters call them) for their entire extended family — villas with up to a dozen bedrooms, game rooms, swimming pools and other warm-weather amenities like backyard grills and hot tubs. But that doesn’t mean Passover in Orlando is cheap.

Nothing like it: “We’ve done a couple of programs before, but I had never seen anything like this in my life. It is such a racket,” said Zuckerman. She’s in a WhatsApp group with several hundred other people who are heading to Orlando for Passover, and the group is bombarded with ads for different culinary options, such as personal chefs for hire.

Festive food: For those who do not want to transport crates of food on long car rides, many Jewish caterers and kosher markets transport their food to Orlando. The food comes south from the New York tri-state area and north from Boca Raton and Miami. The Rebbe’s Choice, a direct-to-consumer kosher herring company based in Queens, is arranging a pick-up spot in Orlando this year for the first time. “We shipped many orders down there last year, and because of that volume, we decided it would be worthwhile for our customers to put together a pallet of goods that would be going down to Orlando, and have a central pickup point,” said Naftali Engel, who founded the company eight years ago while studying at a yeshiva in Israel.

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“My first meeting as executive director of the Philadelphia Board of Rabbis quickly took a contentious turn. It was 1988, and nearly 50 clergy were gathered to hear from Rabbi Julie Ringold Spitzer, one of the first rabbis to specialize in educating about domestic abuse within the Jewish community. Her message — that abuse was present in the Jewish community, and that we had not been properly trained to recognize or to respond to it — was challenging for many of the rabbis to accept…While many rabbis came away from this meeting with much-needed information about a rarely acknowledged issue, I suspect some others agreed with the colleague who asked, ‘Why did we devote a whole program to an issue that does not even exist?’” writes Rabbi Richard Hirsh, a longtime member of Jewish Women International’s Clergy Task Force on Domestic Abuse, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

Clergy as resources: “This year, I participated in a very different meeting of the Philadelphia Board of Rabbis. In our workshop, ‘Skills and Resources for Responding to Intimate-Partner Abuse,’ Deborah Rosenbloom, chief program officer of Jewish Women International, noted that clergy are now seen as resources, advocates and partners in addressing domestic violence.” 

How best to respond: “Rather than debating whether abuse occurs in the Jewish community, we focused on how to best respond to it. Instead of isolating abuse in some imagined corner of our community, we now recognize that intimate-partner violence can occur in any and all parts of the Jewish community, and transcends distinctions of religious and secular, observant and non-observant.” 

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“For American Jews, Hebrew can offer a set of resources that strengthen aspects of Jewish identity, engagement and practice. While the same may be true for Israeli expats, Hebrew is a home language beyond or in addition to its more religious significance. Though the language is usually a central feature of their identities, many Israeli-American families aren’t banging down the doors of local day schools, supplementary schools and camps for backup. They typically prefer public schooling for reasons including affordability and opportunities for integration,” writes Hannah Z. Kober, a doctoral candidate in educational linguistics (with a concentration in Jewish studies) at Stanford Graduate School of Education, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy. 

Unease with religious institutions: “Secular Israeli expats also often have an aversion to religious institutions, based in their distaste for the coercive and exclusionary control the Israeli rabbinate has on public and personal life. But they typically find liberal Judaism to be quite foreign too. Additionally, the concept of paying for religious education may seem strange given the public funding of religious institutions in Israel. Studies show that Israelis generally feel some unease towards American Jewish institutions upon arrival. However, with longer stays in the U.S., they tend to either affiliate more strongly with organized religion or integrate into broader society.” 

Israeli-American perspectives: “When we, as a community and as thought leaders, discuss the ‘Israel-Diaspora relationship,’ we frequently erase the border group in our midst: those for whom Israel is literally their homeland, but for whom America has become their home. Their perspectives on American Judaism, organized religion, cultural maintenance, security and more are likely to be channeled through their experiences within and in relation to Israeli society. We highlight their ties to Israel, but show a remarkable lack of curiosity when it comes to their triumphs and struggles here in the U.S. We’re grateful for the pipeline of educators and shlichim, who demonstrate a vibrant Jewish, Hebrew-speaking culture for our constituents. Yet the sizable representation of Israelis in Hebrew teaching roles leads us to believe that Israeli-Americans are and will be continuous producers of Hebrew-medium content. We forget that the children of Israeli expats are often consumers of Hebrew education as well. The expectation that Israeli-Americans will endlessly produce and perform ‘authentic’ Israeli Hebrew isn’t sustainable. This is just not how America works. We know this from our own complex migration histories and from those of our neighbors.”

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