Published: 2 September 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
DEBORAH STONE: Australia’s Orthodox congregations continue to ignore half their congregants for ritual purposes, which makes it impossible for women to have equality within our community
MY FIRST ROSH Hashanah edition as editor of the Australian Jewish News was in 1999. We prepared two test covers for the festival supplement: one with a bee and honey design, the other a shofar-blowing image.
I knew music teacher Anna Mylenek-Kalman had a beautiful shofar and was skilled at blowing it, so I asked her to pose for a photo shoot. The photographer did an excellent job – the long curving shofar snaking up diagonally through most of the frame with Anna’s face and her flowing black hair in the bottom left and a lovely clear skyline for the title text.
The shofar blower was clearly the superior cover, but staff and management asked me not to use it. Picturing a woman blowing the shofar was going to – if you will excuse the expression – blow the entire edition. Advertisers, rabbis, and readers would inundate me with complaints. Nothing else in the supplement would matter. We would be throwing a match into a tinderbox of communal tension.
I gave in and I regret it still. Playing it safe that first year allowed me to remain in the editor’s chair and do what I could to push the discourse. But I wish I could write that I had stood on the barricade and won some small change then.
Reflecting on this experience for another Rosh Hashanah, 22 years down the track, it is disheartening how little has changed. Our mainstream Orthodox congregations continue to ignore half their congregants for ritual purposes and sideline them in most lay leadership, too.
Our Progressive congregations subscribe to full egalitarianism in ritual but are still dominated by male leaders. (Rabbi Nicole Roberts finally cracked a glass synagogue ceiling when she became Sydney’s first female senior rabbi in 2018; Melbourne has yet to have such an appointment.)
The Australian Jewish community remains dominated by a fundamental inconsistency in which the majority of Jews subject themselves to Orthodoxy’s medieval attitudes to women in communal activity, although they accept neither Orthodox religious law in their personal Jewish practice nor the marginalisation of women in other aspect of their lives.
