The rabbi who helped to crack Israel’s ‘cement ceiling’

When Rabbi Dr Meesh Hammer-Kossoy was a rabbinical student in Israel, she was interviewed for radio. “They said ‘Do you look like a rabbi?’ I think it was a joke but I didn’t know if it was.”

In the first year after after graduating from Rabbi Herzl Hefter’s Har’el academy in 2015, she recalled that “about half the people who called me rabbi called me rabbi with a laugh in their voice. There is a thin line between laugh in scorn and laugh in wonder and laugh in irony.”

But she found it funny too, quoting from the Bible, “Kol Hashomeia yitzchak li” – “everyone who hears it will laugh with me” – which Sarah utters after she gives birth to Isaac at the age of 100.

She had not entertained thoughts of becoming a rabbi but when the chance came to join Har’el’s first ordination course – which is open to both men and women – she took it. “I was just happy for the doors of halachah to open to me, to be able to study it,” she said.

Israel’s official rabbinate may still not recognise Orthodox women rabbis and neither do the rabbinic establishments in the USA or UK. But the Limmud Festival welcomes them with open arms – she is paying her second visit here later this month.

The festival has provided a platform for the growing number of Orthodox women with rabbinic or equivalent qualifications over the past decade or more. She is head of the beit midrash at Pardes in Jerusalem, the co-educational institute in Jerusalem which has inspired many a British student to deepen their Torah knowledge and been a regular supplier of presenters to Limmud (her colleague Gila Fine will also be teaching at the event).

From Washington originally, Rabbi Hammer-Kossoy was “among the first cycle of women to be advanced Talmud learners in the early 90s”, attending Pardes – “my first learning home” – Midreshet Lindenbaum and Matan in Israel. “I hit – it wasn’t a glass ceiling, it was like a cement ceiling. In 1994 there was nowhere to go,” she recalled.

So she returned to the States to pursue a PhD in Talmud at New York University, which she completed in 2005. For an Orthodox woman to study for a doctorate in Talmud was “edgy” in those days.

By then, she had made aliyah and taught at Pardes from 1999. While the acquisition of a rabbinic title did not change her job, it had a practical dividend – she received a 10 per cent pay increase! Not only that but she started being consulted on pastoral questions; even strangers would ring her for some rabbinic guidance.

“Still now, I think people think of me as a walking grammatical error because I use the title Rav which doesn’t work in Hebrew, but in English it makes sense. In Hebrew people want to say rabbanit or rabba, and neither of those are really correct,” she observed.

Today, there are more options for Orthodox women to study rabbinic texts than when set out. And even institutions which still do not accept women rabbis are providing better education for women and offering leadership roles, she noted: they know, for example, that when they organise a panel, they need to include female voices.

“The fight for titles continues to rage in the Orthodox world and the establishment in some ways continues to deny the legitimacy of female rabbis,” she said, “But at the same time women’s leadership is rising at every moment.”

Limmud starts on December 20