Sue Fishkoff
Chicken soup for the Jewish masses
Rabbi Ephraim Buchwald started Shabbat Across America 10 years ago. This year, 65,000 participants have signed up. photo courtesy of NJOP-
Shabbat program celebrate 10 years
Tonight, some 650 American congregations from across the denominational spectrum will all do something together. They'll each offer an introductory, abridged Shabbat service and hold a communal meal, and they'll do it under a common name, "Shabbat Across America."
Judaic texts, precedent may leave room for mohelets
WALNUT CREEK, Calif. – Jewish law does not prohibit a woman from serving as mohel, although it seems to be discouraged.
Rabbi Daniel Korobkin of Kehillat Yavneh in Los Angeles points to Yoreh De'ah '64:1 in the Shulchan Aruch.
"Two opinions are brought," he says, one that says a brit milah done by a woman is kosher, and one that says it's not.
"But both agree that whenever a Jewish male is available, a woman should not be used," he concludes.
That preference for a male has, over time, become custom that assumed the force of law. It's the way things are done: In Orthodox circles, a brit milah takes place in the presence of a minyan, or group of 10 Jewish men. Women often stay in a separate room during the ceremony, or in a part of the main room separated by a mechitza, and join the men afterwards.
Female mohels snip preconceptions
Dr. Lillian Schapiro, left, performs the brit milah ceremony of Brody Weiss, in January '004 in Atlanta, as Brody's father Mike holds him. photos by Sue Fishkoff/JTA
WALNUT CREEK, Calif. – When Dr. Debra Weiss-Ishai watched her son's brit milah two years ago, she thought to herself, "I could do this better."
Not just technically, although as a pediatrician she had done numerous medical circumcisions. She felt she could bring a warmth and spiritual beauty to the ritual in ways her old-school mohel, who she says "rushed through" the ceremony, did not.
Last April Weiss-Ishai completed the Reform movement's Berit Mila Program, an intensive 35-hour certification course for physicians and nurse-midwives at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles. She now has performed seven or eight Jewish ritual circumcisions in the San Francisco Bay area.
