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533 REFORM JUDAISM Karla Goldman LEADERS OF REFORM Judaism in the United States have often celebrated their movement’s role in emancipating Jewish women from the many restrictions that Judaism has traditionally imposed upon women’s ability to participate in and lead public worship. Historians generally see the American Reform movement as growing out of the German Reform Judaism that emerged in the early nineteenth century as an attempt to adapt traditional Jewish worship to the perceived demands for rational religious practice brought by the Enlightenment . Although it is true that the direction of the American movement was largely shaped by mid-nineteenthcentury immigrant rabbis from German-speaking lands, American Reform Judaism found a distinct expression that was both more radical and broader than German Reform in terms of actual practice. This distinctiveness emerges most clearly in the way that women’s changing roles have continually and centrally shaped the emergence and evolution of Reform Judaism in the United States. Although mid-nineteenthcentury German Reform leaders made the case for women’s equality in Judaism and the abolition of anachronistic laws and customs that stifled the public expression of women’s religiosity, it was only in the United States that practical innovations adopted by the Reform movement actively redefined the nature of women’s participation in public worship. Chief among Reform Judaism ’s liberating innovations were the abolition of a separate women’s gallery within the synagogue in the 1850s and the ordination of the first American woman rabbi in 1972. In addition to these important institutional changes, Reform congregations have also provided important sites for Jewish women to work out the tensions between evolving societal expectations for women and the roles identified with traditional Jewish practice. Efforts to adjust the American synagogue to reflect American understandings of female religious identity long predated the emergence of an American Reform movement in the mid-nineteenth century. American synagogue builders in the eighteenth century had already begun to do away with the partition barriers that kept women out of sight in traditional women’s galleries. American Jewish women quickly seemed to realize that American culture demanded women’s presence at public worship. Moreover, American Jewish leaders came to understand that the segregation and seeming subjugation of women behind opaque barriers was hardly the way to achieve respectability as an American religion. By the 1850s, open American synagogue galleries offered tiered rows of seats, carefully affording a clear view to the many women who took their place at regular worship services. A number of other innovations that helped to rede- fine women’s place in Jewish worship, and that would become characteristic of American Reform practice, found a place in synagogues that congregants still expected to be sites for traditional worship. A desire for a more formal worship service led many congregations to introduce mixed male and female choirs, challenging the usual orthodox proscriptions against hearing women’s voices during worship. In addition, the introduction by the 1850s of confirmation services in many American Jewish congregations signified, in part, an effort to celebrate the Jewish education and identity of girls together with those of boys. The departure that most clearly heralded the arrival of a Reform style of worship and definitively separated that style from traditional Jewish practice was the introduction of the family pew. The earliest instance of the mixed seating of men and women in the synagogue may have arisen as a matter of convenience. In 1851, a breakaway Albany congregation, Anshe Emeth, led by reformer Isaac Mayer Wise, adopted the mixed-gender use of family pews when the group moved into a former church building and adopted the existing design rather than build additional balconies to create a customary women’s gallery. Similarly, three years later, Temple Emanu-El in New York City utilized the existing family pews of the church building that they had bought to serve as their new synagogue. Within the new EmanuEl building, family pews were one component of a wide range of revisions of traditional synagogue practice that included an abridged liturgy, elaborately orchestrated organ and choir music, emphasis on a service leader who intoned the worship service in distinguished and modulated tones, and a regular vernacular sermon. With the exception of mixed seating, all these reforms found parallels in German Reform efforts. Family pews, however , remained an exclusively American innovation until well into the twentieth century. Women never could have been integrated into the main sanctuary at...

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