Liberal shul told me to sit apart from the men
“WHAT DO you want, Shani?” the rabbi asked me in Hebrew in lieu of a Shabbat greeting, as I made my way to a seat near the centre aisle of Pestalozzistrasse Synagogue in West Berlin, unfolding my tallit as I went.
In this self-described Liberal synagogue, women may not sit in the main seating area, nor wear tallitot, nor take active roles in the service. These instructions are enforced principally by word of mouth, and I was aware of them as I walked to my chosen seat.
In fact, the gender segregation was the precise reason that I had set out from my apartment into a light rain for the one-and-a-half hour walk early that morning, having snapped my Shabbat key belt over a charcoal grey skirt, under my tallit and coat.
My destination was a space where I knew I would not be welcome and where I would not be comfortable. The synagogue uses an organ for their Shabbat services and follows a triennial cycle of Torah reading that involves reading only one third of the weekly parashah every Shabbat.
I have faced numerous challenges as a halachically committed and feminist woman since I arrived in Berlin in 2015 to take up my position as Professor of Hebrew Bible at the Abraham Geiger College and the University of Potsdam. I posed these challenges to the status quo and faced the consequences.
But only now, on the eve of my departure from Germany, did I realise how simple and right it would be to challenge the gender discrimination practiced in some non-Orthodox Ber- lin synagogues. For my first Shabbat at Pestalozzistrasse Synagogue, I had only planned to wear my tallit, not to defy the seating rule. But on my long walk, I thought of Rosa Parks and it occurred to me that there would be nothing preventing me from sitting in the main section that I knew was designated for men.
When a male congregant approached and asked me to move to the peripheral seating area, I said that I was familiar with the synagogue’s rules and found them indefensible.
When I arrived at the synagogue a second time on February 16, a number of men were prepared to prevent me from sitting in the centre again. Oddly, they seemed to think they could persuade me to change my view about a Liberal synagogue’s gen- der segregation and exclusion in the year 2019.
They legitimised it as a re-instatement of practice in 1930s Germany with three broad arguments.
First, they invoked the importance of obeying rules and orders, attributing to them a higher priority than morality and the spirit of Law.
They derisively labelled my appeal to the latter as “nonsense”.
Second, they deployed the word minhag — “tradition” or “custom” — in an attempt to justify contemporary sexism.
I maintain that using that word for social norms in 1930s Germany is a disingenuous appropriation of a halachic term. I also think it’s absurd to regard pre-war Germany as a sociocultural grounding for modern German Jewry, especially considering the Pestalozzistrasse Synagogue was Orthodox before the Second World War and not Liberal, as it claims to be today.
Third, they claimed “Germany is not the United States”, when I referenced Rosa Parks as a model for protest against discrimination in the pursuit of human rights and equality. Surely members do not believe their synagogue should be as irrational and inflexible as the Segregated South in 1955? I am bewildered that they insist on inequality.
In recent years, global statistics on violence have convinced me that gender equality is a matter of pikuach nefesh, life and death.
I know that my view is a minority opinion, so, even though I am critical of gender segregation and exclusion in many Orthodox Jewish contexts, I can muster sympathy for the dilemma of those negotiating halachic clashes.
I am stunned, however, by discriminatory policies and practices in Berlin’s non-Orthodox synagogues. There is no such commitment to halachah here; only an aggressive insistence on gender inequality.
Shani Tzoref is the outgoing Professor of Hebrew Bible at Abraham Geiger College and the University of Potsdam