These days there doesn’t seem anything remarkable about a woman chairing a central Orthodox synagogue. But as the recent election of a female president at a synagogue in Leeds shows, the role of women in shul leadership can still generate controversy.
Dayan Shalom Kupperman, senior rabbi of Etz Chaim, who also heads the Leeds Beth Din, had no objection to his community having a female president. But citing the London Beth Din in support, he believed that this was permissible in Jewish law only if there were a majority of male trustees.
Apparently the prospective new slate of officers at Etz Chaim was to have comprised an equal number of men and women, leaving the female president, Sara Saunders, with a casting vote in a split decision. According to local sources, one of the prospective women officers subsequently withdrew, conveniently solving the problem.
A statement released in the name of both the officers and Dayan Kupperman informed members that he was “happy that there should be no restrictions on a female president or the composition of the honorary officers”.
Behind this incident lies a debate among halachists over questions of serarah, authority and who is eligible to hold it. It stems from a verse in Deuteronomy — which will be read in a few weeks in Parashat Shoftim (17:15) — that instructs the Israelites to choose a king.
Maimonides emphasises “a king”, and not a queen, going on to extend the bar on women to all communal leadership.
While Maimonides may have been a towering influence, not all interpreters agreed with such a blanket prohibition. According to Rabbi Jeffrey Fox, head of New York’s Yeshivat Maharat — which ordains Orthodox women rabbis — even within the medieval rabbinic fraternity those who embraced the Maimonidean position represented “minority voices”.
An ordinary Jew in the pew might well ask: what about the biblical example of Deborah, one of the Judges, who seems to fly in the face of the serarah limitations? Rabbis wrestled with this, arguing that she was not actually appointed, it was rather that the people chose to accept her guidance. (Another glaring exception to the rule was Shlomzion, queen of Judea in first century BCE, who enjoyed a good talmudic press.)
For much of history, the issue was theoretical in a patriarchal society. But it came to a head a century ago over whether women should be able to vote and allowed to stand for office in elections to the assembly to represent the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, in 1919. The ultra-conservative Eda Charedit split away from the rest of Orthodoxy over this.
Rav Avraham Kook, the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi, opposed giving women the vote, but Rav Ben-Zion Uziel — who later became Sephardi Chief Rabbi — thought otherwise, being particularly dismissive of those who argued for the exclusion of women from the electorate because their intellect was weaker. “If this is so,” he asserted, “we should also remove weak-minded men — who will never be few in number in our midst.”
Rabbi Miriam Lorie, of Borehamwood’s Kehillat Nashira and rabbinic scholar of JOFA UK (Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance), explains: “The issue of serarah is concerned specifically with ‘coercive authority’ for the majority of the Rishonim (early halachic authorities) so this is restricted to someone in the position of a monarch giving commands.
“Rabbi Shmuel Elimelech Turk, a well-known New York rabbi in the 1980s, makes the argument that communal leadership is not one of authority but rather of service, avodah, and that the democratic modes of electing communal leaders and passing decisions takes this role firmly away from being one of serarah.”
It took some years for the permissive view to filter down to the Anglo-Jewish synagogue world. When in 1975 a number of United Synagogues passed resolutions calling for women to be allowed to stand for management boards, Dayan Morris Swift of the London Beth Din rejected this as “halachically wrong”.
The rabbi of Finchley United, Dr Benjamin Gelles, said such a move would be “too radical a departure from Orthodox practice” and risk “severe damage” to the image of the US.
A couple of years later, Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits did take a step towards inclusion by creating management councils in synagogues for which women could stand (though these would remain subsidiary to the management boards).
A few years on as pressure for change grew, Jakobovits remarked: “If by opening up our communal leadership ranks to women, we would lose or weaken their primary commitment to securing stable marriages, building happy homes and raising intensely Jewish children, the sacrifice of further eroding the strength of Jewish family life would not be worth the gain in improving the management of communal affairs.”
Progress really began to come during the office of his successor, Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. Women were for the first time allowed to vote as representatives of their community on the US council in 1994. They could stand as local honorary officers in 2001, in the roles of vice-chair or financial representative. The role of chair became open to them a decade later, in 2013 (the wardenship remain an all-male preserve, apparently enshrined in the parliamentary act of 1870 that established the United Synagogue).
Halachic obstacles continued to fall. Women were allowed to become trustees of the US ten years ago and in 2021 the organisations changed the rules so that they could in future contest the presidency. Still, the constitution preserved the formality of vesting in male authority, specifying the election of five male and four female trustees, although additional trustees could be co-opted: currently the US has five of each sex (with the male president able to exercise a casting vote should the need ever arise).
Such constitutional caution reflects a preference for gradual evolution rather than sweeping change. The Office of Chief Rabbi maintains a diplomatic balance in allowing the make-up of a synagogue board to be adjudicated by the local rabbi, who is presumed to know what his community will, or will not, accept.
