People’s Choice: Women Cantors and Congregational Agency

• In Event: Reading Different Genres for Gender

Abstract

The role of the cantor is flexible and multivalent, reflecting the values of the community the cantor serves as well as that community’s desires for the sound and presentation of their prayer. The cantor is a visionary (hazzan), a master of prayer (BA'AL TEFILLAH), and the representative of the community (SHELIACH TZIBBUR). It is in this latter aspect that American congregations have used their choice of cantor to express their own ideas about Jewish prayer, and the makeup and values of Jewish community. Rabbis must be institutionally ordained, but cantors need not be; consequently, a congregation’s unusual choice of cantor may reveal changing attitudes toward cultural norms.
Here, I discuss three women, all of whom served as cantors in unusual circumstances. None of them were ordained, and none served in eras when women commonly held the position. The congregations that hired Julie Rosewald in 1884, Betty Robbins in 1955, and Julie Engel in 1977 all assumed a certain degree of cultural risk in doing so. However, in choosing to be represented in prayer by women, these congregations also made statements about the nature and values of their communities that they could not make through their choice of rabbi.
Drawing on work by Judith Pinnolis and Judah Cohen as well as archival research, I place these cantors in the context of the communities they represented. Each community, for its own individual reasons, chose to be represented in prayer by a woman, making the choice through its own agency, without the institutional guidance or direction of a rabbinical school or seminary. Such choices reveal both a congregation’s Jewish values and its negotiation with changing standards of modernity in the society of which it is a part.

Author

• Rachel Adelstein