Al Reguel Ajat

Mechitzah in Hebrew means separation or division. It refers to the physical separation of the men’s area from the women’s area in Orthodox synagogues during prayer. This separation is achieved through a special section for women, such as a balcony, or a physical partition that separates them. The prohibition of men and women sitting together, according to some Orthodox rabbis, derives from the Bible, so for them, it becomes obligatory.

The concept of Mechitzah is not mentioned anywhere in the Talmud. There is only one discussion that refers to a barrier that was erected in the Temple to separate women from men, exclusively during a part of the Sukkot celebration. Rav, one of the Amorite sages, also refers to a prophecy of Zechariah that said that after the war between Gog and Magog, mourning should be conducted by separating the men of each family from their wives. Another explanation offered by some scholars is the fact that there were three courtyards in the Temple of Jerusalem: the first was for women, but where both men and women could sit; the second was exclusively for men; and the third was for the priests.

Historically, there is no evidence that a mechitzah existed in ancient synagogues. Archaeological excavations have found nothing to indicate this, but this is not absolute proof that they did not exist. Philo writes in his book that in some communities in the first century, men were separated from women. There is evidence of mechitzot in synagogues as early as the Middle Ages.

It was in 1845, in the Reform synagogue in Berlin, where the mechitzah was officially eliminated for the first time, and in theory, women could sit anywhere and not just in the balcony as was the case before. Even so, for many years, women continued to sit separately from men. It was in the United States that synagogues gradually adopted the rule of men and women sitting together.

Today, gender segregation is one of the things that distinguishes Orthodoxy from other movements. Virtually all non-Orthodox synagogues lack mechitzahs. For the Orthodox, a temple without a mechitzah, which separates men and women, is not a kosher temple. The Orthodox maintain that sitting together with women distracts men from their purpose of praying to God. Ultimately, the mechitzah is more of a custom than a commandment. But its divisive function has extended beyond separating men from women: it now separates Judaism into two camps.

By Marcos Gojman

Bibliography: Jonathan D. Sarna: The debate of mixed seating in American synagogues. Chad Spigel: Reconsidering the question of separate seating in ancient synagogues.

Judah ben Solomon Chai Alkalai (1798–1878) was born in Sarajevo, then part of the Turkish Empire. He studied in Jerusalem under various rabbis and became interested in the study of Kabbalah. In 1825, he joined the Sephardic community of Semlin, today part of Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, as a teacher. A few years later, he took over as rabbi of that community. During this time, nationalist movements took shape in the region, which greatly influenced the Jews of the Balkans.

Alkalai maintained that the Jews must return to the land of Israel. Based on various religious and Kabbalistic sources, he argued that the coming of the Messiah and the redemption of Israel required the Jews to return to their land for this to happen. He had even calculated that it could happen between 1840 and 1939, provided the necessary actions were taken, since if not, redemption would be achieved in the following century, but with enormous suffering.

Simon Loeb Herzl, Theodor Herzl’s paternal grandfather, regularly attended Alkalai’s synagogue and came into possession of one of the first copies of the book Alkalai wrote in 1857, in which he spoke of «the return of the Jews to the Holy Land and the renewal of the glory of Jerusalem.»

Theodor Herzl learned of Alkalai’s ideas through his paternal grandparents, traditionalist Jews. Many scholars maintain that this was the true origin of Theodor’s Zionist ideas, rather than the famous «Dreyfus Affair,» the trial of Captain Dreyfuss, falsely accused of treason in France, which Herzl covered as a journalist. Theodor Herzl wrote two important works: in 1895, «The Jewish State» and in 1902, «Altneuland,» «Old New Land.» In the former, he wrote: «I consider the Jewish question not to be a social or religious problem, although it sometimes takes that form. It is a national question…. We have tried sincerely to unite with the national communities among which we live, seeking only to preserve the faith of our fathers. But they have not allowed us to do so. In vain have we been loyal patriots… In our native lands where we have lived for centuries, we are still considered foreigners… Wherever we begin to be politically secure, we begin to assimilate. And this is not something commendable…. Israel is our unforgettable historical homeland. We will finally live as free men in our land and die peacefully in our homes.»

Herzl envisioned a Jewish State that would combine modern Jewish culture with the best of European heritage. The Temple in Jerusalem would be rebuilt according to modern principles. He did not view its inhabitants as religious, but there was respect for religion in the public sphere. Herzl relied on his grandfather, Simon Loeb, to be the channel through whom Alkalai’s ideas influenced his thinking.

By Marcos Gojman.

Bibliography: Encyclopaedia Judaica and other sources.

Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg (1856-1927) was born in Ukraine to a Hasidic family. At the age of eight, he taught himself to read Russian. He attended cheder, the religious school for boys, until the age of 12. He then studied with private tutors, excelling as a student. He attempted to continue his studies in Vienna and Germany, but was unsuccessful. Ginsberg was highly critical of the dogmatic nature of Orthodox Judaism, but remained faithful to his cultural heritage and ethical ideals.

He returned to Odessa where he met Leon Pinsker, leader of the Hovevei Zion, a movement that sought to settle Jews in the Land of Israel. He visited the settlements in 1891 and saw them impoverished, forgotten by world Jewry, and dependent on his aid for survival. Ginsberg, whose pseudonym was Ahad Ha’am, «One of the People,» believed that the program of Theodor Herzl, the leader of political Zionism, was impractical. He argued that, rather than establishing a Jewish state, the Zionist movement should gradually bring Jews to the Land of Israel and, with that nucleus, form a Jewish cultural center that would revive the Hebrew language and create a new spiritual culture, free from the negative influences of the Diaspora. This nucleus would spread its nationalism to Jewish communities around the world, giving them the strength to come and help build the new Land of Israel.

He believed that this new Jewish culture would be the way to reconnect young people with Judaism and its national values, rather than its religious ones. His greatest contribution was his struggle to revive the Hebrew language and its culture, both in the Land of Israel and in the Diaspora. His writings would cement the relationship between the future State of Israel and Jewish culture expressed in Hebrew. Ahad Ha’am said that not only did Jews emerge from the ghetto. Judaism emerged from the ghetto as well.

For Jews as individuals, the escape from the ghetto depended on the situation in each country and depended on the acceptance of the local population. But for Judaism, its escape was something else: contact with modernity nullified its internal defenses, and it could no longer remain isolated, living a life cut off from the rest of the world. He said that the Jewish spirit always seeks to develop, so it absorbs elements of the general external culture, assimilates them, and makes them part of itself. This had happened previously in multiple periods of Jewish history. He said: «The secret of the persistence of the Jewish people is that from very early on, the prophets taught us to respect spiritual power and not to worship material power.

For that reason, Judaism did not disappear, as happened with other ancient nations. As long as we remain faithful to this principle, our existence is assured.» Ahad Ha’am’s Zionism emerged from that spiritual world and sought to resolve the problem of Judaism, while Herzl’s emerged from the material world and sought to resolve the problems of the Jews, which is not the same thing.

By Marcos Gojman:

Bibliography: Ahad Ha’am «The Jewish State and Jewish Problem» (1897), articles by Louis Jacobs, Steven J. Zipperstein, and other sources.

Solomon Schechter (1847-1915) was born in Romania to a Lubavitch Hasidic family. He was initially educated at the Lemberg yeshiva and continued his studies in Vienna and Berlin. He was a professor of rabbinic subjects in Cambridge, England, when he discovered the Cairo Genizah documents. This gave him worldwide renown, and he was soon approached by representatives of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York to join their faculty. Although it was not easy to convince him, he eventually arrived at the seminary, where he became president.

The impact Schechter had on the seminary during his thirteen years as president was enormous. He managed to assemble a group of outstanding professors, experts in diverse subjects, who soon made the seminary recognized worldwide as the most prestigious and advanced center in the field of Jewish studies. Also, in a series of letters and articles, he laid the foundations for what would become the movement he was already leading. In 1913, he founded the United Synagogue of America, with the aim of building alliances among all religious groups.

Schechter epitomized the entire philosophical position of the seminary. He spoke Yiddish, Hebrew, English, and German, and had studied in traditional yeshivot as well as in schools in Vienna, Berlin, and London, where he learned the Science of Judaism. He wrote about the mystics of Safed as well as Abraham Lincoln. In his inaugural address, he quoted Whitman, Goethe, and George Eliot along with passages from the Bible, the Talmud, and other religious texts.

He declared his commitment to modernity by criticizing those who refused to acknowledge the great movements and revolutions that occurred in all fields of human thought in the 18th and 19th centuries, reducing them to nothing, as if they had never happened. But he also defended the traditional foundations of Judaism, with all that distinguished it from other religions. He maintained that the Torah was the foundation of Jewish thought, as it had been for thousands of years, always responding to the conditions of each era.

Schechter, like Frankel in Breslau, was able to reconcile seemingly opposing elements of modernity with traditional classical Judaism. His approach was based on the historical and critical study of Judaism, thereby distancing himself from both Orthodox currents, which refused to accept the fact that Judaism had evolved over time, and from the Reform movement, which had eliminated many historically classical Jewish practices.

Schechter did not write a declaration of principles for the new movement, unlike the Reformists, who, with their Pittsburgh Platform, provoked a break with traditional sectors of the American Jewish community. Their ideological openness made them the most flourishing Jewish religious movement in the first half of the 20th century. Without a doubt, Solomon Schechter was the great architect of Conservative Judaism.

By: Marcos Gojman.

Bibliography: Conservative Judaism by Neil Gillman and other sources.

On the evening of July 11, 1883, some 200 people gathered for dinner in a Cincinnati restaurant to celebrate the 8th council meeting of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and the graduation of the first class of rabbis from Hebrew Union College. The dinner was sponsored by a group of prominent Jews and featured seafood, meat, and dairy desserts, violating the dietary precepts that distinguish between permitted (kosher) and non-permissible (treif or taref) foods. In the history of American Judaism, it is known as the «Treif Banquet» and was one of a series of events that ultimately led to the split between the Reform and the more traditionalist factions.

This separation was cemented when the Reform movement adopted the principles of the Pittsburgh Platform, which in 1885 discarded the observance of mitzvoth and deemed the concept of the “Jewish people” anachronistic.

Following the banquet, a group of moderate rabbis and scholars, including Sabato Morais, Henry Pereira Mendes, Alexander Kohut, and Cyrus Adler, sought to establish a more traditional rabbinical seminary that would reflect the historical conception of Judaism as an evolving religion, much as Zechariah Frankel had done at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau in 1854.

In January 1887, the Jewish Theological Seminary Association was founded in New York City, with the goal of preserving “the knowledge and practice of historic Judaism.” The seminary would teach Bible, history, and philosophy, in addition to providing traditional Ashkenazi rabbinical training. In its first fifteen years, it graduated 14 rabbis and 3 chazanim, including Joseph H. Hertz, who would become the chief rabbi of the British Empire, and Mordechai Kaplan, a theologian who taught at the seminary for many years and founded the Jewish Reconstructionist movement.

From its inception, the seminary suffered from serious financial problems and was on the verge of closing in 1902. As early as 1890, some of its leaders began to discuss the idea of ​​bringing in Solomon Schechter, professor of Talmud at Cambridge University and discoverer of the Cairo Genizah, to preside over the seminary. Schechter initially declined, citing the institution’s poor financial situation, but thanks to the work of Cyrus Adler and a group of volunteers, the financial problems were resolved, and Solomon Schechter accepted the position.

 In March 1902, he took office as president of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS). Schechter never imagined that the seminary would become the source from which a new movement within Judaism, the Conservative movement, would emerge. He sought to offer an alternative to Reform Judaism, with a traditional, enlightened, and Americanized Judaism. In addition to being a professor of Jewish theology at the seminary, he dedicated himself to laying out in various documents the ideological foundations of what he believed the practice of Judaism in America should be.

But some rabbis disagreed with his position and left the seminary to form Agudat Harabanim, an Orthodox organization. Another group of rabbis formed the Orthodox Union, which, while maintaining some ties to the JTS, took a different direction.

No one is entirely sure who was responsible for serving treif food at that banquet. But indirectly, that incident marked the course of Judaism in the United States and around the world. Neither Isaac Mayer Wize, father of the Reform movement, nor Solomon Schechter, ideologue of the Conservative movement, nor the founders of Agudat Harabanim and the Orthodox Union, sought to divide Judaism. All sought, from their perspective, the best path for the Jewish people. Perhaps a kosher banquet to clarify differences might have been the solution.

By Marcos Gojman.

Bibliography: Conservative Judaism by Neil Gillman and other sources.

The genizah, which means «hiding place» in Hebrew, is a place where books and documents that are no longer useful are kept. Because they contain the name of God, they cannot be destroyed. Since it is also customary to write God’s name at the beginning of a letter or other document, these are also eventually kept in the genizah.

The most famous genizah is the Cairo genizah, due to the size and content of the documents found there. For nearly a thousand years, the Jewish community of Fustat, in the old part of Cairo, deposited used books and other documents in the genizah of the Ben Ezra Synagogue, built in 882. In 1896, Solomon Schechter, professor of Talmud and rabbinic literature at Cambridge University, arrived in Cairo with financial assistance from Charles Taylor and, after several months of arduous work and with the permission of the Egyptian Jewish community, brought nearly 190,000 documents to England. The Taylor-Schechter collection of the Cairo Genizah in Cambridge is the most extensive, although not all of the genizah documents are housed there.

The Cairo Genizah is one of the greatest treasures of Judaism ever found. Its contents provided the world with invaluable information about the Middle East in medieval times. In addition to documents on the Bible and the Talmud, there were also documents on daily life. Schechter even found a letter signed by Maimonides himself. In 1970, Professor Stefan Reif, an expert in medieval Judaism and Semitic languages, was appointed head of the department responsible for the genizah collection. Reif tells us: “Before the genizah, if we wanted to know something about that period, the only way was with documents from the 16th and 17th centuries. Thanks to the genizah, we have documents dating from the 9th to the 13th centuries.”

Professor Reif explains that letters, certificates, wives’ complaints about their husbands, lists of jewelry, and so on were found in the genizah. This material reflects daily Jewish life at the time. There are also documents that have revolutionized fields of study, such as some with Hebrew punctuation forms different from those previously known. Reif tells us that the genizah documents reveal the great dispute that existed between the academies of Babylon and those of Israel, where halacha was more flexible. The Babylonian sages accused those of Israel of not being strict enough in their practice. Reif also found material that now allows us to better understand the Jerusalem Talmud, relegated to the background by the Babylonian Talmud.

Reif says: “We don’t know much about prayer books from before the 9th century. Until then, prayer was prayed orally, and each leader prayed according to his own preferences, without a unified text. The Babylonian sages favored a single text, while those in Israel allowed each leader to pray according to his own preferences. The Genizah documents showed that Babylonian custom prevailed over that of Israel.” There is still much to be discovered among the Cairo Genizah documents. What we do know is that the Cairo Genizah hid different ideas stored in old documents.

By Marcos Gojman

Bibliography: Interview with Dr. Stefan Reif by Tali Farkash and other sources.

Isaac Mayer Weiss was born in 1819 in Bohemia, now part of the Czech Republic. From a young age, he proved to be a brilliant student. He studied the Bible and Talmud, especially with his father, Leo Weiss, and his grandfather. He graduated from the Universities of Prague and Vienna, and at age 23, a rabbinical court awarded him the title of rabbi. In 1846, Weiss emigrated to the United States, finding it difficult to be a rabbi in Bohemia due to a series of government restrictions against Jews. Once in America, Weiss changed his surname to Wise.

He initially served as a rabbi in Albany, New York, but due to differences with the congregation’s president, he resigned and moved to Cincinnati. There, he was offered a lifelong position as rabbi of the Bnei Jeshurun ​​congregation. In 1847, he presented to the Bet Din (rabbinical court) a project for a prayer book to be used throughout the country, which he called «Minhag America.» The proposal remained pending until 1855, when a conference of rabbis in Cleveland asked him and two other rabbis to edit and publish it. «Minhag America» ​​became the prayer book of most Jewish synagogues in the South and West of the United States.

Wise used his newspaper, «The American Israelite,» to spread his ideas of unifying the country’s Jewish congregations and their rabbis. In 1848, he called on «all Israelite ministers» in the United States to unite and thereby end the prevailing religious anarchy. To this end, he summoned them to a meeting in Philadelphia the following year, but it did not take place. His idea was more widely accepted among the congregations, who organized themselves in 1873 into the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, headquartered in Cincinnati.

Wise did not relent in his efforts to unite the rabbis. To this end, he called a conference in Cleveland in 1855, but this not only failed to unite them, but instead divided them into two camps: Wise and his followers on the one hand, and a group of prominent rabbis from the East Coast on the other. At the conferences in Philadelphia in 1869, New York in 1870, and Cincinnati in 1871, differences were gradually smoothed over, until the Central Conference of American Rabbis was formed in 1889. Wise served as its first president and served for eleven years, until his death.

He was equally tireless in his insistence on creating a seminary to train rabbis. He criticized many who posed as spiritual guides, saying they were not properly prepared. He attempted to establish a seminary in Cincinnati, but failed after a year. He remained undeterred and continued to propagate his seminary idea through his newspaper. On October 3, 1875, Hebrew Union College opened its doors. The first four rabbis graduated eight years later.

Despite his great leadership abilities, Wise was considered an unprepared colleague. This was echoed by some German rabbis who had earned doctorates from Central European universities and arrived in America in the 1850s. Nevertheless, Wise represented the pragmatic approach to American Judaism. The tripartite structure he devised—the union of congregations, the association of rabbis, and the rabbinical seminary—was the basis for organizing Jewish religious movements in the United States. Wise was primarily an institution-builder rather than an ideologue. His greatest merit was having laid the foundation for Jewish-American religious movements.

By Marcos Gojman

Bibliography: Encyclopaedia Judaica and other sources.

Bundism was another response to the problems facing Jews in the late 19th century, especially in the Pale of Settlement in Russia. It was a secular, socialist Jewish movement. The General Union of Jewish Workers, known in Yiddish as the «Alguemeiner Yidisher Arbeter Bund,» was founded in 1897 as the Jewish component of the socialist movement in Russian society.

The structure and ideology of the Bund (Union) was a response to the difficult situation prevailing in the Pale of Settlement, the area where Jews were permitted to live in the land of the Tsars. At that time, antisemitism was widespread among the Russian population, and the difficult economic and social situation in small Jewish towns encouraged emigration to other countries, especially the United States. Also, as part of the Russian socialist movement, the Bund shared its goals, tendencies, divisions, and methods.

The Bund received support primarily from three sectors of Jewish society. The first was the group of Jewish wage workers who began to realize their working-class status and organize into union-style groups, especially in the garment industry. The second was the circles of radical Jewish intellectuals who combined revolutionary Marxist ideas with their Jewish identity and concern for the Jewish proletariat. The third group was those Jews who were deeply rooted in Jewish culture.

In the 1870s, the Bund made its first attempts to disseminate socialist ideas among the Jewish population, using Yiddish, their native language, instead of Russian. This indirectly contributed to revitalizing the language and its literature. With its «Kultur Lige» (Cultural League), the Bund promoted Yiddish literature, theater, art, and secular Jewish culture in general.

The Bund was part of the Russian Social Democratic Party, the organization that united various revolutionary groups operating in the Russian Empire into a single structure. At its second congress, held in London in 1903, the Bund, with five delegates out of a total of 51, sought recognition as the representative of the Russian Jewish proletariat and recognition of Yiddish as its language, but its motion was rejected, leading the Bund to leave the party.

The Bund did not consider Judaism a global national entity and fought only for the rights and autonomy of Jews in their places of residence, especially in Russia. It strongly opposed Zionism and religious orthodoxy, believing that in a socialist society, the Jewish question would be resolved. It promoted secular Jewish culture as the identity of the Jewish people, expressed in Yiddish. It spread to many countries, although its influence waned after the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel. After the war, a world coordinating council of the Bund was founded in New York. Little of the Bund’s socialist ideas remained, but its love for Yiddish endures to this day.

By Marcos Gojman

Bibliography: Encyclopaedia Judaica and other sources.

In the 19th century, despite the changes brought about by modernity, Jews had not been able to fully integrate into European societies, and European societies, in turn, had failed in their attempts to incorporate them. This problem, known as «the Jewish question,» was widely debated at the time within Judaism and in European Gentile society in general.

Jewish integration not only involved knowing the country’s language and living with their neighbors, but also led to their own secularization, as they sought to be part of a society based on three principles: equality of all before the law, separation of church and state, and loyalty to the country of residence. By the end of the 19th century, many viewed the Jewish people more as an ethnic and cultural group than a religious one. What secularists sought at that time was to integrate Jewish culture into European humanist education, detaching it from religion. From this secular stance emerged movements in Judaism that proposed various solutions to the Jewish question.

 One of these was the nationalist movement expressed in Zionism, which proposed the reconstruction of Jewish national life in the Land of Israel as a solution to the problems that modernity had brought to the Jewish people. Migration to a homeland was the answer to the problems of Jews in Europe. Antisemitism in Russia sparked the growth of the Zionist movement, but the underlying cause was the end of the Jewish way of life in the ghetto and the limited possibilities of integrating into European society.

Jews always dreamed that one day the Messiah would solve their problem. Three times a day, the Amidah is prayed for the reconstruction of Jerusalem, but for 18 centuries, the Jewish people did nothing practical to make it a reality, despite being constantly subjected to discrimination by Christians and Muslims, and despite the fact that modernity did not mitigate antisemitism in Europe.

The Jewish national movement began in the 1870s, first in Russia and later in Poland. Groups promoted migration to the land of Israel, such as the «Hovevey Zion.» Moses Hess, in his book «Rome and Jerusalem» (1862), argued that Jews were not a religious group but rather a national group with their own religion. Zionists criticized reformers for trying to reshape Judaism by copying Gentile religious forms.

The Zionist movement gained political strength with Theodore Herzl when he convened his first congress in 1897. Herzl had witnessed how «the Jewish question» had acquired a national dimension, not just a social and religious one. His proposal had a political focus, although there were other Zionist approaches with a cultural, religious, social, or practical action focus.

The religious response to modernity had not been sufficient to resolve the «Jewish question.» Therefore, Zionism proposed a national solution. For them, the best thing was to return home.

By: Marcos Gojman

Bibliography: The History of Zionism, by Moshe Maor and other sources.

One of the first Jews to arrive in what is now the United States was a group of 23 men, women, and children fleeing Recife, Brazil, who landed in 1654 in New Amsterdam, present-day New York. Later, Ashkenazi and Sephardi traders arrived in the American colonies. By 1730, the majority were Ashkenazi, although synagogues were governed by Sephardi ritual and customs, which combined modern aesthetics with ancient traditions. Order, decorum, rationality, and refinement prevailed.

The next major wave of immigrants were German Jews, who began arriving in the 1840s. They left Germany because of its restrictive laws, poor economic situation, and the failure of political movements seeking change in German society. They settled in the Midwest, West, and South of the American Union. Especially in Cincinnati, home to Isaac Mayer Wise, the first leader of the American Jewish Reform movement. In addition to promoting Reform Judaism, German Jews created institutions such as B’nai B’rith (1843) and the American Jewish Committee (1906).

By 1880, Eastern European Jews began immigrating to the United States in large numbers. They were fleeing overcrowding, oppressive laws, antisemitism, and poverty. Between 1880 and 1924, more than two million Jews from Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Austria, Hungary, and Romania arrived in the United States. They settled in the working-class neighborhoods of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, and Chicago. They worked as laborers, especially in the garment industry. Therefore, they supported union movements to improve their working conditions. Yiddish culture, expressed in plays, journalism, and literature, flourished in the immigrant neighborhoods. They brought with them ideological principles that influenced American Judaism, such as socialist ideas, liberal politics, and Jewish nationalism.

Generally speaking, Jews from Eastern Europe were uncomfortable with Reform Judaism. They insisted on maintaining their traditions but in a modern context, which contributed to the establishment of Conservative Judaism and the continuity of Orthodox Judaism. However, many of them relaxed the strict religious discipline they had experienced in Europe to adapt to the conditions of a new culture. Judaism in America became pluralistic, and its observance now depended on the individual. There was no chief rabbi or central religious organization. Instead, a wide range of religious movements emerged, competing for adherents, each insisting that its ideas were the best for the survival of Judaism. In any case, America was not Europe; America was America.

By Marcos Gojman

Bibliography: The American Jewish Experience through the XIX Century, by Jonathan D, Sarna and Jonathan Golden. History of the American