Taking Solace in Our Partners: Women's Rabbinic Network

Sometimes it feels as if everything has changed since October 7. The brutality of the attacks and the devastation of the war have stunned us. The silence of those we once called friends and the abandonment by those we considered allies have left us reeling.

Even in these challenging times, we take great solace in the continuing partnership between Women for Reform Judaism (WRJ) and the Women’s Rabbinic Network (WRN), and our mutual commitment to justice, equity, and the safety and advancement of women. Through the financial support WRN has received as a YES Fund grantee, we have been able to uphold this shared mission even in these most difficult days.

As a partner organization that represents our Reform Movement’s female, genderfluid, and non-binary rabbis worldwide, WRN immediately understood the imperative to support our rabbinic colleagues in Israel following October 7. Even as these courageous colleagues grappled with their own shock, displacement, and loss, the communities they served were looking to them for guidance, safety, and comfort. WRN was determined to provide these rabbis with spaces that offered that same guidance, safety, and comfort.

Fortunately, due to the generosity and partnership of WRJ, we at WRN already had fostered and maintained the connections necessary to extend the needed support. In the past years, WRJ’s support assisted our immediate past Vice President of Membership and Outreach Rabbi Heather Miller in re-envisioning the relationships between WRN rabbis in North America and those around the globe, especially in Israel. Through improvements to the language of WRN communications— a Membership Task Force including international members, innovative VirtuALL Zooms scheduled at times convenient for our Israeli colleagues and designed to bring together WRN members to learn from and enjoy sacred time with each other, one-to-one phone calls and Zoom meetings with international and Israeli colleagues, and special outreach to newly-ordained female Israeli rabbis — our stateside members have already deepened our connections with their Israeli counterparts. Amplifying these connections was the attendance of Israeli colleagues, including Rabbi Nava Hefetz representing MARAM (the Israeli Council of Progressive Rabbis), – at WRN’s biannual convention in Jerusalem after the CCAR convention in Israel.

With this framework in place, WRN was uniquely positioned to offer what WRN Executive Director Rabbi Mary Zamore calls “connection and koach (strength)” to WRN rabbis in Israel. Group gatherings via Zoom, one-on-one calls and meetings, suggestions and support from stateside WRN members who had led their own communities through trauma, and a constant flow of offers of assistance and messages of love created holy spaces of guidance, safety, and comfort – as well as places to be heard and assisted, or simply a place to be held in respectful silence.  

It was also the vision of WRJ that made possible the joint WRJ and WRN February 2024 mission to Israel – titled “We Will Not Be Silent.” The mission brought these connections into physical space, and that magnified them for the mission participants and those with whom they shared their powerful experiences. Both WRJ and WRN continue to raise awareness about the sexual violence perpetrated on October 7, ignored by so many, including the UN and numerous human rights and feminist organizations.

Even in this year unlike any other, the “regular” work of WRN continues. Among the most exciting fruits of the ongoing partnership between WRJ and WRN is the advancement of the Reform Pay Equity Initiative (RPEI). Over the past year, WRJ and WRN representatives and leaders have completely revised the RPEI website, which is hosted on the WRJ website; the new and updated site is more easily navigated and features timely and helpful material. WRN and WRJ continue to collaborate on RPEI, leading cohorts through trainings in equitable hiring and pay, providing resources for employees and employers, and analyzing and publicizing pay equity trends throughout the Reform Movement.

The constant partnership between WRJ and WRN is a source of great pride, and the financial support of the WRJ YES Fund is a source of great gratitude. In dark days and – God willing – better times, we pray that it will continue to bring goodness, justice, and equity into our world that so greatly needs them.