Celia Gurevitch Jewish Community Library

You may not be aware of this, but today, March 8, is International Women’s Day. In former Communist countries it was a day officially dedicated to celebrate women. I still remember how to say the name of the holiday in Russian. The event was established in 1911 by Clara Zetkin, who married a Russian Jew.

Commemorating this holiday I would like to recommend a splendid title, “Four centuries of Jewish women’s spirituality” edited by Ellen Umansky and Dianne Ashton.

Gathered in this volume are writings by North American, European, and Israeli Jewish women of different ages, sexual orientations, and educational and socioeconomic backgrounds. The voices of women from all four modern Jewry’s major religious movements – Orthodoxy, Conservativism, Reform and Reconstructionism – are represented here as well as those of women who identify their spirituality as Jewish, but are not part of a particular movement.

Divided into chronological sections, each with a historical introduction, the book mirrors the experience of Jewish women in society as well as their spiritual lives. Early sections include such personal documents as a woman’s letter to her husband, written in 1619 from the Prague ghetto, and a mother’s farewell letter to her son on the occasion of his emigration to America n 1880. Among the nineteenth-century selections are writings by prominent Jewish women such as Emma Lazarus and Rebecca Gratz, as well as lectures, minutes, and addresses that reflect the proliferation of local Jewish women’s organizations in the late 1800’s Zionism, educational reform, and women’s suffrage are among the social and political issues touched on their writings.