Sally Gottesman

Last updated

Sally Gottesman is the founder and president of The Eleemosynary Group, consultants to non-profit organizations based in New York City.

Contents

Career

Gottesman is the Chair of Encounter and was the cofounder of Moving Traditions and served as Founding Chair of the Board. Gottesman served on the Board of Directors of American Jewish World Service, Bikkurim, Jewish Women's Archive, Jewish Meditation Center of Brooklyn, American Friends of Yedid, and Storah Telling. [1] Gottesman received her B.A. from Wellesley College and her master's degree in Public and Private Management from Yale University. [2] She was formerly a consultant for KPMG and New York Regional Director of the New Israel Fund.

Through her work with Moving Traditions, she started the Bat Mitzvah Firsts project, which conducted surveys over the Internet to collect stories of women's experiences. [3] With the results of the survey, Moving Traditions and The National Museum of American Jewish History have collaborated to organize a traveling exhibition, Bat Mitzvah Comes of Age, featuring the story of how, in less than a century, individual girls, their parents and their rabbis challenged communal values to institute this now widely practiced Jewish ritual of the Bat Mitzvah. [4] Gottesman writes regularly about philanthropy and progressive Jewish issues.

Publications

Articles and works include:

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Women in Judaism</span> Role of women in Judaism

The role of women in Judaism is determined by the Hebrew Bible, the Oral Law, by custom, and by cultural factors. Although the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature mention various female role models, religious law treats women differently in various circumstances. According to a 2017 study by the Pew Research Center, women are slightly more numerous among worldwide Jewish population (52%).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bar and bat mitzvah</span> Jewish coming of age rituals

A bar mitzvah (masc.) or bat mitzvah (fem.) is a coming-of-age ritual in Judaism. According to Jewish law, before children reach a certain age, the parents are responsible for their child's actions. Once Jewish children reach that age, they are said to "become" b'nai mitzvah, at which point they begin to be held accountable for their own actions. Traditionally, the father of a bar or bat mitzvah offers thanks to God that he is no longer punished for his child's sins.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bella Abzug</span> American politician from New York

Bella Savitzky Abzug, nicknamed "Battling Bella", was an American lawyer, politician, social activist, and a leader in the women's movement. In 1971, Abzug joined other leading feminists such as Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, and Betty Friedan to found the National Women's Political Caucus. She was a leading figure in what came to be known as eco-feminism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sally Priesand</span> American rabbi

Sally Jane Priesand is America's first female rabbi ordained by a rabbinical seminary, and the second formally ordained female rabbi in Jewish history, after Regina Jonas. Priesand was ordained by the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion on June 3, 1972, at the Plum Street Temple in Cincinnati. After her ordination she served first as assistant and then as associate rabbi at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York City, and later led Monmouth Reform Temple in Tinton Falls, New Jersey from 1981 until her retirement in 2006. She is featured in numerous books including Rabbis: The Many Faces of Judaism and Fifty Jewish Women who Changed the World.

Jewish feminism is a movement that seeks to make the religious, legal, and social status of Jewish women equal to that of Jewish men in Judaism. Feminist movements, with varying approaches and successes, have opened up within all major branches of the Jewish religion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Women of the Wall</span> Jewish feminist organization

Women of the Wall is a multi-denominational Jewish feminist organization based in Israel whose goal is to secure the rights of women to pray at the Western Wall, also called the Kotel, in a fashion that includes singing, reading aloud from the Torah and wearing religious garments. Pew Research Center has identified Israel as one of the countries that place "high" restrictions on religion, and there have been limits placed on non-Orthodox streams of Judaism. One of those restrictions is that the Rabbi of the Western Wall has enforced gender segregation and limitations on religious garb worn by women. When the "Women of the Wall" hold monthly prayer services for women on Rosh Hodesh, they observe gender segregation so that Orthodox members may fully participate. But their use of religious garb, singing and reading from a Torah have upset many members of the Orthodox Jewish community, sparking protests and arrests. In May 2013 a judge ruled that a 2003 Israeli Supreme Court ruling prohibiting women from carrying a Torah or wearing prayer shawls had been misinterpreted and that Women of the Wall prayer gatherings at the wall should not be deemed illegal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paula Hyman</span>

Paula Hyman was a social historian and the Lucy Moses Professor of Modern Jewish History at Yale University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Letty Cottin Pogrebin</span> American author, journalist, lecturer, and social justice activist

Letty Cottin Pogrebin is an American author, journalist, lecturer, and social activist. She is a founding editor of Ms. magazine, the author of twelve books, and was an editorial consultant for the TV special Free to Be... You and Me for which she earned an Emmy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gertrude Weil</span> American social activist

Gertrude Weil was an American social activist involved in a wide range of progressive/leftist and often controversial causes, including women's suffrage, labor reform and civil rights.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Women rabbis and Torah scholars</span>

Women rabbis are individual Jewish women who have studied Jewish Law and received rabbinical ordination. Women rabbis are prominent in Progressive Jewish denominations, however, the subject of women rabbis in Orthodox Judaism is more complex. Although Orthodox women have been ordained as rabbis, many major Orthodox Jewish communities and institutions do not accept the change. In an alternative approach, other Orthodox Jewish institutions train women as Torah scholars for various Jewish religious leadership roles. These roles typically involve training women as religious authorities in Jewish Law but without formal rabbinic ordination, instead, alternate titles are used. Yet, despite this alteration in title, these women are often perceived as equivalent to ordained rabbis. Since the 1970s, over 1,200 Jewish women have been ordained as rabbis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jewish Women's Archive</span> Non-profit organization in the USA

The Jewish Women's Archive (JWA) is a national non-profit organization whose mission is to document "Jewish women's stories, elevate their voices, and inspire them to be agents of change."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Moving Traditions</span>

Moving Traditions is a Jewish non-profit organization that runs educational program for teenagers. The organization was founded in 2005 and is based in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania.

The Berman Jewish DataBank, founded as the North American Jewish Data Bank, is the central online source for social scientific studies of North American Jewry and world Jewish populations and communities. The DataBank's primary functions are to acquire and archive materials from quantitative studies of North American Jews, including data sets and reports, and to encourage and aid the production and utilization of quantitative research on North American Jews.

Daniel S. Brenner is an American rabbi. Brenner is chief of Education and Program at Moving Traditions. Brenner was the founding executive director of Birthright Israel NEXT and he directed graduate-level training programs at Auburn Theological Seminary and at CLAL- the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, both in New York City. In 2009, he was named by Newsweek Magazine as one of the fifty most influential rabbis in America.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chabad affiliated organizations</span> Organizations affiliated with the Chabad movement within Hasidic Judaism

Chabad affiliated organizations and institutions number in the thousands. Chabad is a Hasidic movement, a branch of Orthodox Judaism. The organizations and institutions associated with the movement provide social, educational and religious services to Jews around the globe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aryeh Frimer</span> Israeli chemist and rabbi

Aryeh Abraham Frimer is an American-Israeli Active Oxygen Chemist and specialist on women and Jewish law.

Carole Beth Balin is a Reform rabbi and professor of Jewish history at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City. Her research interests include Eastern European and American Jewish history, the history of Reform Judaism, and gender studies. She received laudatory reviews for her 2003 book To Reveal Our Hearts: Jewish Women Writers in Tsarist Russia, and has co-edited two other books. She is a co-curator of "Bat Mitzvah Comes of Age", a traveling exhibition sponsored by the Smithsonian-affiliated National Museum of American Jewish History and the Moving Traditions Jewish non-profit.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Judith Kaplan Eisenstein</span>

Judith Eisenstein was an author, musicologist, composer, theologian and the first person to celebrate a bat mitzvah publicly in America.

Bat ha-Levi (12th-century), was an Iraqi Jewish scholar. She gave lessons to male students and had a remarkable position for a Jewish woman in 12th-century Iraq.

References