The Israeli woman rabbi who is ‘redreaming Jerusalem’
When Rabbi Tamar Elad Appelbaum was seven, she was taking a class in sewing at her religious school in Israel when something dawned. “I realised that in the same slot, the boys were learning Mishnah. I couldn’t understand why. It was a shock.” From that moment, her desire for Jewish knowledge proved unstoppable. Now 44, she is one of a rare but growing band of female rabbis in Israel, the head of an innovative community in Jerusalem called Zion that seeks to transcend barriers between religious and secular.
She grew up in a religious Zionist family that at times verged on Charedi — or Chardali, as that trend is sometimes called. But from her grandparents she inherited a broader view of the world.
Her paternal grandfather Yaish Bouskila from Casablanca used some of the proceeds of his tyrefitter’s shop in Jaffa to found a Moroccan synagogue in Bat Yam. “He showed me how to welcome every Jew into the synagogue. I learned the synagogue is supposed to be a safe haven for Jews, whoever they are. He didn’t see the difference between secular and Orthodox — he didn’t know what it meant, it’s not the vocabulary of the Sephardim.”
Her other grandfather, Alphonse Cerf, was a yeker, the last chazan of the Jews of Delme in North-Eastern France, who always impressed on her that his life had been saved in the Holocaust by a Jesuit priest. It taught her that people of faith have a serious role to play.
Recognising her appetite for learning, her parents when she was 14 sent her to Pelech, the pioneering high school run by the redoubtable Alice Shalvi, where girls could learn Talmud. “One of my uncles called me and said, ‘You can’t do that, women do not learn Talmud’.”
She recalls the first time in Bnei Akiva a woman was scheduled to lead a Talmud class. Some members were so opposed that “they chained the doors. I am part of a generation that really had to fight.”
While she studied the classical Jewish sources, it was only when she went to the army that she realised she knew nothing of modern Hebrew literature. And when the army sent her for a short while to New Jersey, she encountered Reform and Conservative Jews for the first time. When she returned to Israel, she grasped that it was the diversity of Judaism that she valued — “the panoply of voices”.
After her BA in Jewish philosophy from the Hebrew University, “I was sitting with a good friend. I asked him what he was going to do and he said he wanted to be an Orthodox rabbi. I said that was wonderful. When he asked me what I was going to do, I said I thought I was going to learn to be a teacher.
“He stopped in the middle of his couscous and said, ‘I heard there are women rabbis in the world and I think you must be a woman rabbi’. He said, ‘I will not study to be a rabbi unless to you study to be a rabbi’.”
When she put the idea to Yossi, her husband of one month, who was from an Orthodox family, too, “he hugged me”.
Studying at the (Conservative) Shechter Institute in Jerusalem, she was mentored by Rabbi Michael Graetz and eventually took over from him as head of a small community in Omer in the Negev. After spells in Tel Aviv and White Plains, New York, she founded Zion in Jerusalem seven years ago in her grandparents’ honour.
From ten people, it has grown to 150 families. Religious, secular, Orthodox, non-Orthodox, Ashkenazi, Sephardi. It is egalitarian, traditional and experimental. “We created an Eretz Israeli nusach (liturgy). We start like the Moroccans with Shir Hashirim, the Song of Songs. Then we go to a Hebrew song from the kibbutz. So everyone feels at least that one point is familiar. It is a traditional, not a New Age, synagogue. But like our ancestors did, it brings together all the voices.”
Two weeks ago, an Orthodox woman led tefillah for her first time, the week before a secular woman made her prayer debut.
What attracts secular Jews to synagogue, she believes, is “the sense of belonging and more than that, a sense of purpose. Many Israelis want to know why we are in Israel, why we are paying such a heavy price. Zion reminds us. The purpose is peace, inclusivity, a humanity that could live together and not in a contest in a jungle.”
Its tikkun olam co-ordinator is from an Ethiopian background and its work has included campaigning for young, unaccompanied asylum-seekers to remain in Israel. On Yom Yerushalayim, Jerusalem Day, “we do a prayer for the sake of heavenly Jerusalem and we do it with Christians and Muslims in Hebrew and Arabic,” she says.
Not only has she founded a synagogue but also a nondenominational rabbinic seminary which has trained 32 rabbis and has 19 in its current cohort. A woman from a northern kibbutz who started Kabbalat Shabbat celebrations there 20 years ago is one of its graduates and, in a kibbutz which once might have regarded Judaism as old-fashioned, she is now called “rabbi”.
Talking in terms of religious and secular does not do justice to the complex reality of modern Israel — a shifting reality which Rabbi Elad Appelbaum is helping to transform. As Zion describes itself on Facebook, “we are re-dreaming Jerusalem”.
My grandfather didn’t see the difference between religious and