Yiddishe Mamas (29 page)
Authors: Marnie Winston-Macauley
Though Radzikowski did not disclose her religion to Iraqis, maintaining her identity as “a Jew, a woman, and an American” is critical, she said, adding, “I’d be lost without my faith, especially in the circumstances I find myself in.”
“J
ewish women have contributed to the U.S. military since the Civil War, when Phoebe Yates Levy offered her nursing skills and became one of the first women to break into the previously all-male field of nursing. [Women] have since [served] in every branch of the armed services. Of the 24.3 million veterans in 2000, 1.2 million were women, according to the Department of Veteran Affairs.”
— Rahel Musleah, award-winning journalist
L
t. Col. Susan Rena Yanoff, an army veterinarian, says one of her most moving experiences was escorting a group of veterans from the 120th Evacuation Hospital on their visit to Buchenwald: They had been the first medical personnel there when the camp was liberated.
Chaplain Bonnie Koppell grew up in Brooklyn, New York, near the army chaplain school. This piqued her curiosity and interest in military service and she joined the Army Reserves in 1978 while a rabbinical student at the Reconstructionist Rabbincal College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was ordained in 1981 and
became the first female rabbi ever to serve in the United States military.
In 1991, during Operation Desert Storm Rabbi Koppell was ordered to report to the Academy of Health Sciences, a unit of the 5th Army Headquarters at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. There, preparations were underway to medevac an anticipated “massive” amount of American casualties, which would result from a planned major ground offensive against Iraq. As the only rabbi on staff, Bonnie was to provide for the spiritual needs of the sick and wounded.
Following her release from active duty, she was assigned to the 164th Corps Support Group in Mesa, Arizona.
After 9/11, she was again called to active duty in Fort Huachuca, Arizona, leaving her husband, David Rubenstein, a professional astrologer, and two daughters, Jessie, now twenty, and Sarah, seventeen.
Currently, she works with three congregations in and around Phoenix and is a chaplain for Tucson’s Jewish Family and Children’s Services.
In 2005, she was in Bagdad for Passover and in Afghanistan and Kuwait for Hanukkah, and then in April of 2006, she was in the northwestern region in Iraq for Passover.
Rabbi Koppell, now a full colonel, possesses not only a dedication to Judaism and America, but is also a marvelously caring and hysterically funny woman—who easily shares her extraordinary skills with all she encounters.
According to the Jewish Chaplains Association, there are only twenty-eight active-duty Jewish chaplains and fifty-seven reservists.
“
I
AM PROUD TO CONSIDER AMONG MY MANY IDENTITIES AS WIFE, AS MOTHER, AS RABBI, AS TEACHER, AS FRIEND, YET ANOTHER—AS AN AMERICAN SOLDIER.
G
OD FORBID THE NEED SHOULD ARISE, OUR JEWISH SOLDIERS DESERVE TO HAVE RABBIS WHO ARE TRAINED AND READY TO DEPLOY ALONGSIDE THEM, TO BE THERE TO OFFER ALL THE SUPPORT THEY WILL NEED.
I
AM PROUD TO BE AMONG THOSE WHO STAND READY TO GO WITH THEM.”
— Rabbi Bonnie Koppell
Rabbi Chana Timoner, who became the first Jewish
full-time
army chaplain, came from a military tradition. The
New York Times
reported that her mother joined the Canadian Army in 1940, in order to fight the Nazis.
Timoner was born in the early 1950s. She married at eighteen and then graduated from Southern Connecticut State University, while raising two children, who were teenagers when she enrolled in rabbinical school.
She commuted to New York City to attend the Academy for Jewish Religion, where she was ordained in 1989, and then spent another two years at the New York Theological Seminary, studying for her doctorate.
She was thirty-nine when she began her army career at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Timoner officiated at all life-cycle events, organized donations to agencies and those in need on the base, ran the army’s largest Jewish religious school, and was also active in counseling gay soldiers. She served in Korea, where she was stationed with an aviation attack regiment near the demilitarized zone, and was there when she was diagnosed with the Epstein-Barr virus.
She died in 1998 at forty-six shortly after her honorable discharge for medical reasons, leaving her husband, Dr. Julian Timoner, and two children, Samson and Aviva.
T
here was an empty seat at MIT in the 2003 commencement ceremonies when Samson J. Timoner received his PhD in electrical engineering and computer science. His mother, Rabbi Chana Timoner, had died in 1998, but the family still felt her loving presence: “We know she’s here in spirit.”
The year was 1964 when young Andrew Goodman said, “Mom … I have to go.” She recalled, “It wasn’t easy for us. But we couldn’t talk out of both sides of our mouths. So I had to let him go.”
On June 21, 1964, one day after Goodman arrived in Mississippi, Andrew, along with James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, who were all participating in an intensive voter-registration drive, were beaten and shot by a gang of Klansmen. Their bodies were found in a clay dam forty-four days later in Neshoba.
In 1967, Killen was tried on federal charges for violating the victims’ civil rights, but the all-white jury was deadlocked, with one juror saying she could not convict a preacher. Seven others were convicted, but none served more than six years. The case received nationwide attention and hastened the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.
However, it took exactly forty-one years to bring the eighty-year-old Killen to justice. Witnesses said Killen rounded up carloads of Klansmen to intercept the three men and helped arrange for a bulldozer to bury the bodies. On June 21, 2005, he was found guilty of three counts of manslaughter and sentenced to three consecutive twenty-year prison terms.
The horror these young men endured has been memorialized in books and films, including
Mississippi Burning.
A new film about the event,
Neshoba
(working title), is currently near completion.
“It took so long,” says Dr. Goodman, “because there was a lot of evidence to sift through. The DA and attorney general were terrific.”
Speaking of her family—and her son, she adds, “My son was raised in our family to be the kind of person who believed we are a country of laws. His grandfather, a lawyer, was a man who
felt if you believe in something, do it. Being a DOER requires that if you believe something is wrong and you have values, you do the right thing. I was told by my parents to, ‘Make your own decision.’ My mother was a community person. And then my husband and I taught each other.” And they taught Andrew.
Our priority is “To work for freedom, which is what we did in the 1950s—and today.”
“The verdict was about justice. I don’t believe in capital punishment. I believe in justice and my wonderful son would have agreed. He was raised by our family to be the kind of person who believed we are a country of laws… and to do the right thing.”
— Dr. Carolyn Goodman, speaking with me after the conviction, forty years later, of Edgar Ray Killen for the murder of her twenty-year-old son, civil rights worker Andrew Goodman
ENTLS!
S
CHOLARS,
R
ABBIS
—
AND
J
EWISH
M
OTHERS
D
espite the fact that, for centuries, Jewish females did not participate in most aspects of religious life, many were far more emancipated than their country “women.”
We start with Eve.
The first mention of Eve (Genesis 3:20) calls her
ishah,
or “woman” (from
ish
meaning “man”). Adam called her woman or wife. The rabbis had no doctrine of Original Sin regarding Eve in the Garden, since it was removed by the Israelites.
Each and every Jewish woman is a descendant of the matriarchs: Sarah (wife of Abraham, the first Jewess, who gave birth to the Jewish people), Rivkah/Rebekah (wife of Isaac and mother of Jacob and Esau), Rachel (daughter of Laban, favorite wife of patriarch Jacob, and mother of Joseph and Benjamin),
and Leah (wife of Jacob and mother of six of the twelve tribes). NOTE: More information about these women can be found in countless biblical resources and articles. I recommend the Dawn R. Schuman Institute for Jewish Learning.
It is incumbent upon every Jewish woman to remember her roots. Each of these builders of the House of Israel contributed a distinctive quality, which together produced the unique character of our Jewish people. The role of the Jewish woman is of crucial importance since she is the
akeret habayit,
the foundation of the home, who determines the character and atmosphere of the household, and the future of the children. This is considered the true work of Jewish mothers.
There can be no greater fulfillment for a Jewish female than to be a worthy descendant of the matriarchs. The process is achieved by actively pursuing one’s own development while simultaneously working for the preservation and growth of our people.
An interesting aspect of the matriarchs is their imperfection. Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel were initially barren, which was considered a serious imperfection in Jewish tradition at that time. And it is also noted that Leah had a visual disability.
I
n “The Women’s Torah Commentary,” Rabbi Lori Forman challenges traditional notions with a feminist perspective. Eve is often portrayed as an empty-headed wife who seduced Adam into sin. Rabbi Forman feels this paved the way for the religious denigration of women, because she sees Eve as a model of adventure and curiosity, rather than disobedience. She believes Eve should be recast as the woman who reached for “what was good, pleasant, and intellectually empowering.”
Miriam was at least seven years older than her brother Moses. Some sources indicate that she was one of the midwives who rescued Hebrew babies from Pharaoh’s edict (Exodus 1:15-19).
Miriam was the first woman described in scripture as a prophetess (Exodus 15:20), and is said to have prophesied that her parents would give birth to one who would bring about the redemption of their people.
Yocheved, the mother of Moses, saved her child by putting him in a basket in the Nile, to be found by Pharaoh’s daughter. But it was Miriam who waited among the bulrushes while Moses’s ark was in the river, watching over him to make sure he was safe (Exodus 2:4). When Pharaoh’s daughter drew Moses out of the water, Miriam arranged for their mother, Yocheved, to nurse Moses and raise him until he was weaned (Exodus 2:7-9).
Miriam died in the desert like her brothers, before our people reached the Promised Land.
Rashi, the great twelfth-century French rabbi, had three daughters believed to be named Yocheved, Miriam, and Rachel. They were highly educated, assisted in the publication of their father’s works, and it is also believed they rendered legal decisions in his absence. They gave birth to some of the leading Jewish scholars (male) of their time. In the sixteenth century, Miriam, a descendent of Rashi, and the mother of Rabbi Solomon Luria, lectured at a seminary from behind an opaque screen.
A
lthough most think Jewish women entered the professions in the late nineteenth century, they were medical practitioners during medieval days. Hava (or Hana) was a surgeon who came from a prominent medical family, and there are reports of her rescuing a male, Poncius Procelli, who was attacked in his most “intimate” organ. When asked if she had palpated the wound, she replied that her son Bonafos did the actual “handling,” while she instructed and prescribed the required medications.
At the turn of the seventeenth century, Rivkah bat Meir Tiktiner of Poland and Prague wrote an early ethical book in Yiddish,
Mekenet Rivkah,
which, in part, advises mothers “… about the education of daughters. Our sages said, ‘If a daughter comes first, it is a good sign for sons. … she will be able to help the mother in the education of children who come afterward. Thus, every woman should try to educate her daughter to good deeds.’”
L
ouise Scodie wrote an article about Regina Jones titled “A Forgotten Pioneer of Faith.” Regina was born in 1902 in Berlin, and attended the city’s center for Jewish studies
(Hochshule fur die Wissenschaft des Judentums).
This qualified her as a religion teacher but she was determined to become a rabbi. She encountered the predictable opposition until Rabbi Max Dienemann in Offenbach ordained heron December 27, 1935 and thus made the thirty-three-year-old the first female rabbi in history. Jones gave sermons and performed pastoral duties working among Berlin’s Jewish community—a role she continued after she was deported to the Czech Ghetto Theriesenstadt in November 1942. She was murdered at forty-two in Auschwitz on December 12, 1944. Though Regina never stopped fighting or challenging the rabbinical patriarchy, her place in Judaic history was largely swept aside.
On December 12, 1950, Paula Ackerman became the interim “spiritual leader” of Temple Beth Israel in Meridian, Mississippi, after her husband (the congregation’s rabbi) passed away. Although she lacked official ordination, the state of Mississippi permitted her to perform marriages. She was allowed to
act
as a rabbi because of a result of a ruling in Reform Judaism.
She was born Paula Herskovitz and married Rabbi William Ackerman in 1919. As a
rebbitzin
(rabbi’s wife), she taught in the Hebrew school, helped out with the sisterhood, and even took her husband’s place on the pulpit whenever he was absent or ill.
After her husband died, fifty-seven-year-old Paula was asked to temporarily fill in until the synagogue could get another rabbi. Ackerman saw the challenge as giving her life meaning by opening doors for women to train for congregational leadership.
