Creation of the Women's Rabbinical Alliance

February 8, 1976

On February 8, 1976, 15 female rabbis and rabbinical students from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) and from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College gathered "to investigate topics of general concern."

By the end of the meeting, the Women's Rabbinical Alliance (WRA) was born. Though centered in New York and Philadelphia, the early WRA reached out to female rabbinical students on HUC-JIR's Cincinnati and Los Angeles campuses as well. In 1980, the WRA dissolved and was replaced by the Women's Rabbinic Network (WRN). Unlike the original group, the WRN was—and remains—specifically tied to the Reform movement.

Initially, the WRN remained so small that members joked that meetings "could be held in the women's restroom during conventions of the Central Conference of American Rabbis [CCAR, the North American Reform movement's organization for North American rabbis]." In fact, at the 1981 CCAR conference in Jerusalem, the WRN meeting took place at a Turkish bath. Four women were present.

Not surprisingly, many women rabbis faced hostility in filling a historically exclusively male position. The WRN offered an important forum for addressing shared issues and was a critical force in opening formerly all male Reform hierarchies to female participation. It also played a critical role in challenging a professional model for the rabbinate that made little room for the personal realities of women’s lives. WRN helped, for example, to develop standards for maternity leaves within the rabbinate.

Women's growing numbers within the rabbinate (with more than 500 Reform women rabbis since 1972) have meant a greater diversity of age, experience, opinion, and personality in the WRN. Yet the goals of the Network remained essentially the same: to address the particular challenges faced by women in the rabbinate, especially the issue of gaining acceptance in mainstream congregations, and to provide opportunities for discussion among women rabbis. Still firmly tied to the CCAR, WRN has been central in raising issues—such as the role of part-time rabbis or the question of whether Reform rabbis should officiate at same-sex weddings—that are of concern to male as well as female rabbis.

Sources: Balin, Carole B. "From Periphery to Center: A History of the Women's Rabbinic Network," CCAR Journal, Summer 1997, data.ccarnet.org/journal/997db.html; www.religioustolerance.org/hom_jref.htm.

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Claudia Dreifus speaks on art of the political interview

February 9, 1999

On February 9, 1999, the National Archives and Records Administration featured a talk at the National Archives by Claudia Dreifus on the art of the political interview. Few journalists could be more qualified to speak on this subject than Dreifus, who has built her career by conducting intriguing interviews.

Born in New York City in 1944, she earned a degree in Dramatic Arts at New York University, and almost immediately went to work as a journalist. Following a ten-year stint as an interviewer for Newsday's Sunday magazine, Dreifus moved in the late 1970s to Playboy, where her interviewees included author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, columnist William Safire, and then-Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. A move to the New York Times allowed her to continue her work interviewing and writing about cultural and political luminaries.

During her many decades of political reporting, she wrote about conversations with such figures as Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, U.S. General Colin Powell, the Dalai Lama, Burmese democracy activist and political prisoner Aung San Suu Kyi, writers Isaac Bashevis Singer and Toni Morrison, and fellow journalist Dan Rather. Rather once said that Dreifus's interviews were "like playing tennis with Steffi Graf: do your best, and you'll learn a lot; anything less, and she'll pave the court with you."

A new era for Dreifus began in the late 1990s, when she joined the staff of the Times science department as an editor. In this position, Dreifus became well-known as the author of the popular "A Conversation With…" column. Her interviewees for the "Science" section have included Jane Goodall, the biologist who revolutionized animal research by applying anthropology to the study of chimpanzees, and Marie Philbin, an Irish scientist studying the regeneration of nerve cells. Her interviews have been collected and published as Scientific Conversations: Interviews on Science from the New York Times (2001).

Dreifus continues to write regularly for the New York Times. She is also a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, and writes for a variety of other publications, including Ms. Magazine, Town and Country, Playboy, and TV Guide. In addition, she is a senior fellow of the World Policy Institute at The New School University, and an adjunct professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs.

Sources:www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/1999/nr99-35.html; http://www.worldpolicy.org/wpi/claudia_dreifus.html; cuny.tv/series/jewish350/educational.lasso.

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Eve Ensler's "The Vagina Monologues" performed at Madison Square Garden

February 10, 2001

The February 10, 2001, performance of Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues was cheered by 18,000 men and women at New York City's Madison Square Garden. The event raised $1 million for Ensler's V-Day movement, which works to end violence against women and girls.

The Vagina Monologues, first performed in 1996, won an Obie Award in 1997, and has been translated into over 35 languages and run in theaters all over the world. The play consists of a series of monologues drawn from interviews in which Ensler asked hundreds of women to share their thoughts and feelings about their vaginas. Funny, painful, angry: the monologues run the gamut of emotion, and are told in diverse voices, ranging from a sex worker to a victim of mass rape, a 65-year-old to a young lesbian.

In performing Monologues around the world, Ensler says, she was inspired to create V-Day as a way of working to stop violence against women and girls. In order to draw attention to rape, battery, incest, female genital mutilation, and sexual slavery, annual V-Day events — including performances of Monologues — raise money for the organization, which then distributes it to anti-violence groups around the world. Since its inception in 1998, V-Day has raised more than $50 million. In 2008, V-Day's tenth anniversary was celebrated at the New Orleans Superdome on April 11 and 12. It included an international and star-studded cast performance of The Vagina Monologues and was preceded by two weeks of local activities meant to bring attention and assistance to efforts to help women and girls of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in rebuilding their lives after Katrina.

To learn more about Eve Ensler, visit Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution.

Sources: www.vday.org; Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution, jwa.org/feminism/index.html?id=JWA022.

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Adlene Harrison becomes first Jewish female big-city mayor

February 11, 1976

On February 11, 1976, Adlene Harrison became the acting mayor of Dallas after the presiding mayor's resignation. She was the first Jewish woman to become mayor of a major American city, as well as the first woman mayor of Dallas. Harrison, who had been a Democratic city councilwoman since 1973 and mayor pro tem, succeeded Wes Wise, who resigned to run for Congress. Harrison served only until the election of a new mayor at the end of the year.

Always an activist for environmental causes, Harrison, while on the city council, had co-sponsored an ordinance to establish a city environmental committee and supported a strict air pollution ordinance. In addition, she was a member of the National League of Cities' Steering Committee for Environmental Quality. As mayor, she continued her work for the environment, as well as encouraging legislation for historic preservation in the city.

Following her tenure as mayor, Harrison was appointed an Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator in 1977, responsible for directing the EPA's anti-pollution efforts in five states. She held this position until 1981, when she became chair of the Dallas Area Rapid Transit Authority Board.

Harrison's other civic involvements have included work on the boards of the Women's Museum, the Women's Center of Dallas, the Dallas Jewish Coalition, the Metropolitan YWCA and the Dallas Arboretum. Harrison has been awarded the Women's Council of Dallas Distinguished Service Award, and Southern Methodist University's Profiles in Leadership Award. In addition, she was awarded a Special Honor Award for furthering the EPA's affirmative action program.

See also: This Week in History for April 18, 1987.

Sources:www.dallashistory.org/history/dallas/1970s.htm; www.epa.gov/history/admin/reg06/harrison.htm; www.epa.gov/history/topics/perspect/women.htm; www.smu.edu/newsinfo/releases/00229.html; www.texaslegacy.org/bb/transcripts/harrisonadlenetxt.html.

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Los Angeles Council of Jewish Women opens day nursery

February 13, 1913

On February 13, 1913, the Los Angeles chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) opened a day nursery for the children of working mothers. The nursery was expected to "lighten the burden of mothers who are compelled to labor in the factories, laundries and shops." The children were to be provided with milk, paid for by the ten-cent nursery fee, and any children deemed "unkept" would be bathed and given clean clothes.

Like many such projects, the Los Angeles nursery served two purposes: it aided working women by providing low-cost child care, but it also sought to teach them how to care for their children. To that end, the provision of baths and clothes was seen as an "object lesson" to mothers. These mothers, many probably immigrants, were to be taught American norms of cleanliness and dress.

The nursery project thus reflected broader trends in women's reform work of this period. The National Council of Jewish Women, which had initially focused on preserving Judaism among Americanized women, shifted its focus to social work after debates over proper religious observance split the group at its 1913 convention. In focusing on immigrant aid—including Americanization classes, practical job training, and settlement houses—the women of the NCJW and its Los Angeles chapter joined thousands of others in transferring women's traditional caretaking roles from the home into the broader world.

To learn more about the National Council of Jewish Women, visit Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.

See also: This Week in History for February 28, 1935, May 9, 1894, September 4, 1893, and November 15, 1896.

Sources:Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 968-979; Los Angeles Times, February 14, 1913; Faith Rogow, Gone to Another Meeting: The National Council of Jewish Women, 1893-1993 (Tuscaloosa, Ala, 1993).

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Death of Henrietta Szold

February 13, 1945

Failing health had brought Henrietta Szold, in July 1943, to the Henrietta Szold Nursing School on the grounds of the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. Even as she received care, she sustained her interest and involvement in her public activities, and American Hadassah members were kept informed of her condition. She died there on February 13, 1945. Thousands attended her funeral, and a boy from one of the last groups of children rescued from the Nazis by Youth Aliyah, an effort that she had directed, read kaddish, the Jewish mourners' prayer.

Szold is best known as the creator of Hadassah: The Women's Zionist Organization of America (founded February 24, 1912); she also worked strenuously for decades as secretary (meaning translator, indexer, fact checker, proofreader, statistician, administrator, and editor) of the Philadelphia-based Jewish Publication Society. But Szold spent most of the last 25 years of her life in Palestine where she made crucial contributions to the Jewish settlement that would become the state of Israel.

Szold moved to Palestine in 1920, at the age of 59, to take charge of the Hadassah-funded American Zionist Medical Unit, which was attempting to bring modern medical care to the region. She oversaw the transformation of this World War I-era emergency effort into the Hadassah Medical Organization. Emphasizing the health needs of women and children and serving people of all origins and religions, the organization expanded into the creation of milk clinics, food programs, a nursing school, and Hadassah Hospital.

Although always supported by Hadassah, Szold found new roles beyond the organization's continued focus on medical care. Chosen in 1927, as a member of the three-person international Zionist executive committee overseeing Jewish life in Palestine, Szold worked to create systematic frameworks for the provision of medical and educational services. In 1931, elected to the Jewish settlement's National Council, she created, from scratch, the basis for a national system of social welfare.

The last major effort of Szold's career, beginning in 1933, was her leadership of Youth Aliyah. In this role, she oversaw a massive effort to secure the departure of 11,000 Jewish youth from Germany and other nations threatened by the Nazis, and to arrange for their education and care within Jewish agricultural settlements in Palestine. Szold tried to meet every arriving transport and took a personal interest in the placement and situation of each child. This work absorbed her into her 84th year.

Szold remains revered for her impact, as the founder of Hadassah, in reshaping American Zionism and in radically expanding public identities for American Jewish women. It is remarkable that in addition, we can point to Henrietta Szold as largely responsible for the healthcare, educational, and social welfare infrastructure that defined Israel at its founding in 1948.

To learn more about Henrietta Szold, visit Women of Valor and Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.

See also: This Week in History for February 24, 1912, July 28, 1893, December 21, 1935; Women of Valor poster series; Jewish Women in Travel; Go & Learn: Primary Documents and Lesson Plans, "Henrietta Szold on Saying Kaddish".

Sources: jwa.org/exhibits/wov/szold/; Joan Dash, Summoned to Jerusalem: The Life of Henrietta Szold (NY, 1979); Marian Greenberg, There is Hope for Your Children: Youth Aliyah, Henrietta Szold, and Hadassah (Hadassah, www.hadassah.org; Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 1368-1373.

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