About this project

This site began as project for the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute, where I was ordained in August 2023. The Kohenet Institute teaches feminine, earth based approaches to Jewish practice, using 13 specific archetypes or netivot of female religious leadership defined by the institute's founders, Rabbi Jill Hammer and Taya Shere. Implementing a skilled, close reading of biblical text alongside other contemporary sources, Rabbi Hammer has demonstrated persuasively that, before and even after the building of the temple in Jerusalem and the centralisation of the Israelite cult, women as well as men served as ritual leaders or priestesses. Documenting how these priestess roles have been gradually sidelined and repressed, Hammer's detailed research shows that, albeit often banished to the realm of folk ritual, elements of these ancient feminine practices have survived.

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In the Hebrew Priestess (2015), Hammer demonstrates that even in the modern period 'the remnants of the priestesshood remain for those who seek them out.' (Hammer and Shere, 2015.) Reconsidering women's domestic practices in the context of ancient priestess traditions, she lends them a significance that is usually overlooked in male-authored sources describing them as secondary and unimportant. For example, Hammer connects the women's custom of sewing Torah gartlekh (belts) or curtains for the holy ark - both common in Eastern Europe - to the female 'weavers' of the temple, who were accorded the same privileges as male priests. Whether or not they would have welcomed the title 'priestess' - a radical innovation even in today's Jewish practice - this 'priestess' framework nonetheless might also help us to appreciate the importance with which Jewish women in Eastern Europe viewed their practice, which was often carried out with emotion and fervour sometimes mocked by their male counterparts. As Hammer also highlights, some of the tkhines said by women at the shabbes table actually compare the reciter to the  high priest, demonstrating a familiarity with Talmudic texts that describe the table as a stand-in for the temple altar, and an appreciation of their own importance as the kindlers of light and bakers of bread (a replacement of the temple sacrifice) for that temple. 

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As a historian and a student of Yiddish literature, I have found the Kohenet 'netivot' to be a useful framework through which to reconsider the women's religious practices described in Yiddish sources. Indeed, it is striking how clearly some of Hammer and Shere’s priestess archetypes map clearly on to the professional female ritualists documented on this site. As ethnographer Abraham Rechtman noted,  the shtetl mourning woman or klogerin was a clear manifestation of the biblical mekonenet. Another netivah - the midwife - also shows up in the shtetl as an important facilitator not only of physical birth but of the spiritual transition that it entailed. The feldmesterins, zogerkins and opshprekherkes, all of whom in their own ways tended the veil between the world of the living and that of the dead, using the connection between these worlds for healing and protection, demonstrate many of the characteristics of the biblical shamaness or 'Ba'alat Ov' - translated by Jill Hammer as the 'keeper of an ancestor spirit.' [Hammer and Shere, 2015.] Even in the deeply gendered, patriarchal world of the shtetl, these 'priestess pathways' - whether or not they would have been described as such at the time - persisted. 

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From my own experience, the practices documented here have the potential not only to help us better understand the Jewish past, but also to enrich the Jewish present. As I mention in my introduction to this site, these female ritualists performed two very important functions for their communities. Firstly, they helped to facilitate a healthy, public expression of emotion that both helped their clients process and find relief, but also created a strong sense of community cohesion in which every problem or tragedy was shared by everyone. Secondly, they looked after the connection between the living and the dead, allowing for a continued relationship that, whether or not we share their beliefs about the afterlife, is psychologically very healthy. Anyone who has lost anyone knows that the dead never fully leave us, and these rituals that allow us not just to memorialise them but to talk to them, even to ask them for help, allow for a sense of connection that is often missing from today's Jewish grief customs.

With most of the sources from which we can study the Jewish past produced by a learned male one percent, ‘the history of Jewish religious life as it has been written is chiefly the history of the educated elite.’[Weissler, 1987]. I hope that this site will provide a valuable resource to scholars trying to address this imbalance, as well as anyone seeking to revive and reclaim those parts of Jewish tradition that have been sidelined or neglected. Quite simply, these women, who served not only their living communities but also the ancestors who came before them, deserve to be remembered. At the same time, by reminding us that Judaism has always been more than great sages and rabbis, I hope that these sources might help us imagine a Judaism and a world beyond patriarchy. 

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