NEWS FEATURE: Alternative Jewish Minyans Promote Equality but Keep Tradition

c. 2004 Religion News Service (UNDATED) When Jill Levy, 28, stepped off the plane three years ago after studying in Israel, the first place she went was Central Park for a Friday evening service at Kehilat Hadar, a vibrant alternative prayer community in New York City. Hadar, as it is known, is one of a […]

c. 2004 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) When Jill Levy, 28, stepped off the plane three years ago after studying in Israel, the first place she went was Central Park for a Friday evening service at Kehilat Hadar, a vibrant alternative prayer community in New York City.

Hadar, as it is known, is one of a growing number of traditional but alternative Jewish “minyans” across the country. Unlike Orthodox minyans, which require a quorum of 10 men for certain Jewish prayers to be recited, these minyans include women.


Another difference is that in alternative minyans, women don’t have to sit separately. They can even lead services.

But some things remain the same. The content of the Jewish Sabbath service remains highly traditional and mostly in Hebrew. In that sense, alternative minyans are a hybrid of the old and the new, combining Orthodox liturgy and Conservative gender sensibilities, which is what attracted Levy.

“I knew that the type of minyan where I would feel most comfortable was one that encourages leadership regardless of gender, provides inspirational davening (prayer) and maintains a traditional liturgy,” said Levy, who is moving to Atlanta and hopes to start a new minyan in that city.

When Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement and holiest day on the Jewish calendar, begins at sundown Friday (Sept. 24), Levy will be praying in a far more observant setting than her Conservative childhood congregation. But this change did not require her to make the leap to the Orthodox world.

Some alternative minyanim (the plural of minyan) are subsets of larger congregations. Others, like Hadar, are groups of like-minded young people who meet in living rooms and community centers. Some count 10 worshippers as a minyan; others require 10 men and 10 women. Some worship with mixed-gender seating; others sit separately.

But all of the growing number of alternative minyanim nationwide have in common a belief that gender egalitarianism and traditional Judaism are not mutually exclusive.

Alternative minyanim flourish in New York, Boston, Washington and Los Angeles, where high concentrations of young Jews live. Other minyanim have cropped up in Chicago, Pittsburgh and Kansas City.


Though alternative minyanim are led entirely by volunteer lay people, many exist as segments of established congregations, mostly from the Conservative movement of Judaism.

“It’s a good thing for a congregation for people to have some choices about where to daven,” or pray, said Rabbi Steven Rubenstein, of Congregation Beth Shalom in Kansas City, Mo.

The major difference between the service at the Library Minyan, in which a core group of 20 worshippers gather in the Conservative congregation’s library, and the main sanctuary service at Beth Shalom is that the Library Minyan reads the full Torah every year.

The main sanctuary, as in many Conservative synagogues, reads the Torah in its entirety every three years.

Beth Shalom’s alternative minyan does not meet on the High Holy Days because the main sanctuary offers a full-length Torah reading on those days. But other minyanim meet every Shabbat as well as for all major holidays.

That requires a pool of knowledge to maintain lay leadership of the entire service.

The alternative minyan at Congregation Adas Israel in Washington, called simply “The Minyan,” finds that the biggest struggle in maintaining its 250-person service each week is locating people to “leyn,” or have the Hebrew skills required to read from the Torah.


To streamline the process and ensure that there are adequate leaders, The Minyan even maintains an e-mail address. Leyners are asked to e-mail organizers in advance to say they’re available to read from the Torah on a given Saturday.

Despite the hard work required to maintain the lineup of readers and service leaders, observers say that the pool of Jews who hold the necessary skills has grown exponentially over the past generation, thanks to the proliferation of Jewish day-school education and Jewish summer camps.

The Conservative movement in particular, which makes up a quarter of all American Jews, has fostered young people who have “new abilities and new needs,” said Jonathan D. Sarna, a professor of Jewish history at Brandeis University.

It is a challenge for Conservative Judaism to offer sufficient alternatives to keep Jews from disaffiliating.

The National Jewish Population Survey 2000-2001 reported that 54 percent of Jews who were raised Conservative no longer consider themselves part of the movement. While many who leave become more secular, a growing number of those disaffiliating are hungry for more tradition and need an alternative to keep them in the fold, said Sarna.

The alternative minyanim also invest energy into training new leaders and increasing Jewish literacy among members.


At Hadar, weekly courses include sessions on the Torah portion of the week and lessons on the liturgy and theology of the High Holy Days, in hopes of drawing people who might come from less observant backgrounds.

“There are a lot of access points into Hadar,” said Rabbi Shai Held, who is the resident scholar there.

Though many rabbis and other Jewish professionals belong to alternative minyanim, none is led by a rabbi in the traditional sense.

Held, who is formerly the rabbi of an egalitarian minyan at Harvard Hillel, said that both Orthodox and Conservative young people experienced “an undercurrent of crisis” in their denominations because of either gender issues or lack of traditionalism. He said the options were either to despair or to start something new.

Like many young Jews in large American cities, they chose the latter.

MO/JL END ROSSI

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