Times of Israel reports that the chief rabbi of Efrat, Shlomo Riskin, appointed Jennie Rosenfeld as director of a rabbinical court for property claims in the West Bank town of Efrat (without serving on the court). Last year he appointed her the first female communal spiritual leader of a modern Orthodox community in the city.
Rosenfeld recently completed a five-year course for women in Talmud and Jewish law at the Susi Bradfield Women’s Institute for Halachic Leadership at Midreshet Lindenbaum in Jerusalem.
The Jerusalem Talmud (Shavuot 4:1) states unequivocally that women cannot be judges. The ruling is also codified in the Code of Jewish Law (Shulchan Aruch, Choshen Mishpat 7:4). This was upheld over thousands of years until our times when Rabbi Riskin and other leaders in the modern Orthodox world decided that feminism concerns trumped Jewish law; however, let us call their belief system by its correct name: Conservative – not Orthodox – Judaism.
