Our colleague, our teacher, and our friend, Rabbi Mayer Rabinowitz, spent his professional and academic career not just as a Talmud teacher and scholar at the Jewish Theological Seminary, but also as a prolific halakhist who wrote many teshuvot for the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards (CJLS). During this period, Rabbi Rabinowitz also served as the dean of the seminary’s List College and subsequently as the dean of the seminary’s graduate school. What is more, for just over thirty years, he served as the first av beit din of the Joint Beit Din (JBD) of the Conservative Movement, the beit din that took exclusive responsibility for certifying gittin and annulments (hafqaʿot qiddushin) in the Conservative Movement. The JBD was originally sponsored by the three national institutions of the Conservative Movement, namely, JTS, the Rabbinical Assembly (RA), and the United Synagogue of America, now the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism. Over time, the JBD became the exclusive responsibility of the RA.
Rabbi Rabinowitz was born in the Bronx, the youngest child of Rabbi Simcha and Devora Rabinowitz. His father was a Conservative rabbi, ordained in 1931 at JTS. His mother was active in Mizrachi Women and became its national president, a voluntary position that she held for many years. He was raised in a traditional Jewish home and one that was ardently Zionist. After World War II ended in 1945, when Mayer was only seven years old, the family moved to British Mandate Palestine so that his parents could help in resettling and in educating children who survived the Shoah and who in many cases were orphans.
After the family’s first year in British Mandate Palestine, the British refused to renew the required visas that would have allowed Mayer’s family to remain in Palestine, and they were forced to return to the United States in 1947. Reluctantly, Mayer’s family returned to the United States, and his father took a pulpit in the New York area so that his wife could commute to the Mizrahi office in Manhattan and thereby continue her work helping the resettlement of children in Israel. When the State of Israel declared its independence, the Rabinowitz family returned to Israel to continue the work that they had started in 1946. Mayer completed his elementary school education and his first year of high school in Israel, after which the family returned to the United States again, where Mayer completed high school at Yeshiva University High School for Boys, after which he attended Yeshiva College, where he earned his B.A. and M.A. degrees.
Mayer’s family moved back and forth between Israel and the Bronx during the late 1940s and through the early 1950s to continue to support the immigrants who were arriving in Israel after the Shoah. Many of the children, especially children whose parents were murdered during the Shoah, arrived in Israel without family. Mayer’s father directed a residential school for these orphans. During this period, Mayer was housed in a dormitory room with boys his own age. He remembers vividly how his roommates would wake up screaming from the nightmares they were having, as they were reminded of their horrendous experiences during the war.
Although Rabbi Simcha Rabinowitz and his brother, Rabbi Hayim Rabinowitz, came from a long line of traditional rabbis, Simcha understood that women had important roles to play and important work to do so that the Jewish people could transition from the world of late nineteenth-century Eastern Europe and create a more modern and more vibrant Jewry, both in Israel and in North America. Simcha’s decision to remain a rabbi in the New York area so that his wife could continue her important work appears to have been a subtle, but significant factor in Mayer’s approach to expanding the role of women in public ritual once he became a rabbi, from counting women as part of a minyan to advocating on behalf of women being admitted to the JTS rabbinical school.
Mayer’s home life was a classical traditional, shomer Shabbat home. While he remembers studying with his father and his older brother, he particularly remembers the family singing zemirot on Shabbat and learning how to daven and how to read Torah from his father, so that he would later be able to serve as a baʿal tefillah and a baʿal qeriah during the Yamim Noraʾim. Singing zemirot at the Shabbat table became a tradition that Mayer and his wife, Renah, continued with their own children and Shabbat guests.
After he earned his M.A., Mayer spent a year in Israel, after which he applied for admission to the JTS rabbinical school, where he knew that he would have the opportunity to study with the great rabbinic luminaries of the day: Professors Saul Lieberman, Hayyim Zalman Dimitrovsky, and David Weiss Halivni. Mayer was ordained as a rabbi at JTS in 1967. Upon ordination, Rabbi Mayer Rabinowitz was invited to join an elite group of students at the Institute of Advanced Studies at JTS, which was dedicated to the advanced critical study of Talmud and its medieval critical commentaries. Rabbi Rabinowitz completed his Ph.D. in 1974, having prepared a critical edition of Sefer haMordechai on Massekhet Gittin. The dissertation was published by JTS in 1990.
Rabbi Rabinowitz spent his entire academic career at JTS. He was initially appointed to the department of Talmud, where he taught classes in Talmud and codes. After serving as the dean of List College and the seminary’s graduate school, Rabbi Rabinowitz was asked to serve as the chief librarian of the JTS library upon the retirement of Professor Menachem Schmeltzer from that post, in 1987 a library still renowned as one of the largest collections of Judaica outside of the State of Israel. In that role, Rabbi Rabinowitz began the process of digitizing the library’s enormous holdings, making them more accessible to serious scholars around the world. He also instituted exhibitions of some of the library’s rare holdings, whether at JTS or displayed around the world. In addition to Rabbi Rabinowitz’s teaching and administrative responsibilities, he made time to serve on the CJLS and to serve for thirty years (from 1989 until 2019) as the first chairperson and av beit din of the JBD, a post he filled until his retirement.
It is through his writings for the CJLS and his work on the JBD that Rabbi Rabinowitz’s halakhic impact is most apparent. He authored or coauthored fourteen responsa, including one promoting the idea of ordaining women as rabbis. Rabbi Rabinowitz rarely missed a meeting of the CJLS, and, while the discussions at the meetings were unfortunately never recorded, I distinctly remember his active participation in the discussions, asking questions and raising halakhic precedents that either supported or countered the opinions of responsa written by other colleagues. Rabbi Rabinowitz’s own teshuvot that were approved at the meetings of the CJLS were subsequently published by the RA in two volumes of responsa dating from 1980 through the year 2000. Most of his responsa relate to hilkhot ʿorekh ḥayyim, but he has also written responsa related to the other three sections of Shulhan Arukh. From his teachers, especially Professors Lieberman and Halivni, Rabbi Rabinowitz not only learned how to read a text—whether a gemara, a text from one of the Rishonim or citation from Shulhan Arukh or one of the other codes and their keilim—but he also learned the fine skill of extrapolating from the classical text to demonstrate how it should best be applied in a contemporary situation.
Even when Rabbi Rabinowitz knew that his teachers would disagree with his understanding of how the text applied today, and even when he disagreed with the position taken by a colleague whose teshuvah was being discussed at a meeting of the CJLS, he remembered that at least some of his teachers would always show respect and due deference to an opinion with which they themselves would disagree. Mayer learned this deferential attitude from attending faculty meetings and watching the interactions of his colleagues, and he applied it when he evaluated the opinions of his own colleagues and members of the CJLS, with whom he sometimes sharply disagreed. Moreover, when students would ask Mayer a halakhic question, he often did not give a pesaq din but instead sent them to the colleague whom Mayer felt would give them the answer they needed—which was not necessarily the answer written in one of the codes or the answer that he might have given himself.
Among the many teshuvot that Rabbi Rabinowitz authored, the one that has had the most impact and is the most widely known is his Pesah Guide, written in 1984, either because laypersons read it almost every year or because congregational rabbis use it as their basis for answering questions about Pesah preparations and restrictions. While the Pesah Guide teshuvah is updated every year to incorporate new situations, Rabbi Rabinowitz’s original responsum provided the impetus for creating an all-inclusive guide for Pesah observance that is grounded in traditional restrictions and leniencies but addresses questions and provides answers that specifically incorporate the legal thinking of Conservative rabbis and halakhists.
Reading Rabbi Rabinowitz’s responsa, we immediately see his familiarity and comfort with reading and understanding the sources and then analyzing the relevant texts so that he can make a clear pesaq halakhah. In his responsum on whether a kohen is entitled to the first ʿAliyah midʾoraita or mid’rabbanan, Rabbi Rabinowitz concludes that the practice is mid’rabbanan. Nonetheless, despite it being a long-standing tradition that a kohen receive the first ʿAliyah, Rabbi Rabinowitz concludes that, “as historical and sociological realities change, so we must adapt our application of the principle of mipnei darkhei shalom, which served as the the justification of the gemara for the reason that kohanim receive the first ʿAliyah.” He therefore writes that where a rabbi feels that his/her community is better served by substituting “rish-on” for “kohen,” that rabbi has the authority as the mara dʾatra to call up a non-kohen for the first ʿAliyah. Rabbi Rabinowitz follows the opinions of Tosafot, Tosafot haRosh, and the Rivash that always calling a kohen for the first ʿAliyah is only a minhag. The kohen’s ḥazaqah on having the first ʿAliyah is based on an asmakhta derived from the word וקדשתו in Leviticus 21:8. The school of Rabbi Yishmael taught in a baraita that the context in which the word וקדשתו appears in the Torah implies that kohanim have first order of position in any act that could be considered a mitzvah whose performance enhances qedushah (religious sanctity). This, the baraita argues, would mean that, according to the Torah, a kohen is always entitled to the first ʿAliyah. Rabbi Rabinowitz argued that an asmakhta is exactly that, a rabbinic support, and not the basis for a “Torah-based” ruling. Instead, it was a rabbinic enactment intended to maintain peace in the community, so that there would be no arguments about who was worthy enough to be entitled to the first ʿAliyah to the Torah. Therefore, the local rabbi has full authority to make the change and call someone other than a kohen to the Torah for the first ʿAliyah; he or she is not violating a Torah-based obligation to exclusively call a kohen for the first ʿAliyah, since such a Torah-based obligation does not exist. While this move is implicit in the text, Rabbi Rabinowitz makes this permissibility explicit, thereby expanding the application of what was implicit, but not typically applied in the orchestration of the Torah service.
In yet another teshuvah Rabbi Rabinowitz demonstrates his independence in rabbinic judgement when he demurs on the postion of his friend and colleague, Rabbi Joel Roth, on a question about whether the daughter of a kohen may be called to the Torah for the kohen ʿAliyah. While Rabbi Roth permits the daughter of a kohen to be called to the Torah for the kohen ʿAliyah, his teshuvah concludes that daughters of kohanim and leviyim are entitled to the same ʿAliyot as their fathers and to none of the other six ʿAliyot. Their status as bat kohen is inalienable, even if they are married to an Israelite. Rabbi Rabinowitz voted against Rabbi Roth’s opinion, perhaps in light of his own teshuvah that the entitlement of kohanim to the first, so-called kohen ʿAliyah, is only a rabbinic enactment and is not mandated by the Torah.
Finally, Rabbi Rabinowitz’s teshuvah on the permissibilty of the ordination of women is remarkable in many ways. As a member of the Talmud faculty, he was by far in the minority in supporting the ordination of women. More significantly, he tackles four distinct roles that rabbis are typically asked to fulfill: mesadder qiddushin, counting as one of ten persons to make a minyan, serving as a shaliaḥ tsibbur, and serving as an ʿeid. Rabbi Rabinowitz responds to each of these potential obstacles seriatim, using classical rabbinic sources together with logic and sound reasoning to undermine, if not to refute, the thinking behind these classical objections to the ordination of women. Rabbi Rabinowitz’s more liberal and modern approach to these and other issues that were raised to attempt to block the ordination of women at JTS may very well have been influenced by the active role his late mother took in the community outside the home and his father’s willing accomodation to the expanding role of women in contemporary society.
Rabbi Rabinowitz’s most stellar contribution to the growth of the status of halakhah in the Conservative Movement and to the necessity of freeing women from the possibility of becoming ʿagunot was in his exemplary work as the av beit din of the JBD. At the urging of then-chancellor Ismar Schorsch to reestablish a central beit din co-sponsored by all three arms of the movement (JTS, the RA, and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism), Rabbi Rabinowitz accepted the challenge of negotiating with all three arms so that they would agree to create one independent beit din that would take exclusive responsibilty for all questions relating to Jewish divorce. While the late Professor Edward Gershfield had been the unchallenged mesadder gittin for the movement for over twenty years, ever since the passing of Professor Boaz Cohen in 1968, there were only two or three mesadderei gittin who had been trained by Professor Cohen who were handling gittin across North America.
Rabbi Rabinowitz set up a number of parameters for organizing the JBD. First, there would be nine members on the JBD, three appointed by each of the partners. Second, all members of the JBD would need to be ordained rabbis and members of the RA, but they did not need to be certified mesadderei gittin. Finally, other than a few colleagues who had trained under Professor Cohen and been certified by him as mesadderei gittin (no more than four), all other members of the RA who had been writing gittin independently would be required to submit a file summarizing their training, their experience, their professional practices as mesadderei gittin, and copies of a number of their gittin.
Among the early questions faced by the JBD was how to handle cases that involved recalcitrant husbands who absolutely refused to participate in the get process, or who set conditions such as demands for money from their former spouse before they would consider participating in the get process. Another tricky issue was what to do when the former husband could not easily be located or when either spouse was mentally incapacitated or had returned to his/her former religion after being civilly divorced.
A third challenge was training a new cohort of mesadderei gittin. In 1989, besides Professor Gershfield, there were only three known active certified mesadderei gittin: Rabbi Ben Zion Bergman (z″l), Rabbi Yehezkel Musleah (z″l), and Rabbi Israel Silverman (z″l). Others would surface as we began the certification process, but all of them were retired or approaching retirement. Much to our chagrin, we also discovered that there were RA colleagues who had no formal training in the laws and procedures for writing and delivering a get, yet who were advertising their services as experts in Jewish divorce. What is more, ever since the CJLS approved hafqaʿat qiddushin as a halakhically viable means of annulling a Jewish marriage when it was impossible to gain the cooperation of a former husband to authorize the writing and delivery of a get so that his former wife could move on with her life unencumbered by being “bound and anchored” (agun) to a man to whom she was no longer married, the JBD discovered that a number of our colleagues were using hafqaʿat qiddushin as their first choice alternative rather than requiring a get for a divorced woman to remarry with huppah and qiddushin. In light of all the laxity in the area of gittin, and in light of how few RA members were certified mesadderei gittin, Rabbi Rabinowitz asked Rabbi Silverman to arrange a course to train a new cohort of mesadderei gittin. Within a year or or so, nearly a dozen RA members had completed their training and were certified. With the increase in the number of mesadderei gittin, the number of cases, not surprisingly, increased.
Keeping track of all gittin was yet another challenge. Rabbi Rabinowitz saw to it that the RA would create a database and use student volunteers to input the data submitted by the mesadderei gittin. Student volunteers, even paid volunteers, were often hard to find, and there was regularly a backlog of unfiled submissions. Adding to the frustration was the fact that at least once or maybe twice, the database crashed, and the work of inputting the data had to start all over again. Eventually, the certified mesadderei gittin were taught how to input the data on their own. In this way, Rabbi Rabinowitz made the database a more complete resource for colleagues who needed to check if a get had been issued so that a divorcée could remarry halakhically.
Rabbi Rabinowitz was committed to the idea that gittin issued under the aegis of the JBD would meet all the standards of gittin issued by Orthodox batei din, but would be conducted with the dignity and compassion becoming two partners whose dreams of a lifetime together had been shattered. Rabbi Rabinowitz was aware that some of the rabbis who served on Orthodox batei din effectively ignored the women who were being divorced, and he insisted that our mesadderei gittin organize their own batei din, taking into consideration the emotional pain and stress each of the former marital partners would be experiencing before they met the beit din.
Rabbi Rabinowitz’s halakhic contribution and his Weltanschaung regarding the ongoing development of halakhah is best appreciated in his persistant advocacy for women. During his tenure as the av beit din, he advocated for the training of additional mesadderei gittin. Two cohorts have completed their studies. Already in the first cohort, at least two women were certified as mesadderot gittin, and one of them, Rabbi Karen Reiss Medwed, was the first mesadderet gittin to be appointed as a dayanit to the JBD. Currently, there are three women rabbis who serve as dayanot on the JBD. Rabbi Rabinowitz’s advocacy for the full and equal status of women in all aspects of rabbinic work has been manifested in the visible role they now play in the area of gittin and hafqaʿat qiddushin. To further protect the identity of women who serve as mesadderei gittin or as witnesses to the writing and/or the delivery of a get, the policy of the JBD is never to identify any of the mesadderei gittin or ʿeidim by name but, if asked who the officiants were, to simply say that they were halakhically kosher officiants. All those efforts have been the result of Rabbi Rabinowitz’s principled stance on the equal status of men and women in all aspects of halakhah.
Over the course of Rabbi Rabinowitz’s tenure as the av beit din of the JBD, he advocated for a broader use of hafqaʿat qiddushin when obtaining a get appeared to be impossible. At first, the JBD was reluctant to use hafqaʿat qiddushin in all but the most urgent situations. Rabbi Rabinowitz advocated on behalf of women who were becoming ʿagunot, because the negotiations with the former husband for his participation in the get process had become so protracted. He helped the members of the JBD develop a standard procedure for engaging with the former husband that could be achieved in a reasonable amount of time, and that would lead to hafqaʿat qiddushin when negotiations failed or dragged on for too long a period of time.
As a teacher and as a talmudist and halakhist, Rabbi Mayer Rabinowitz leaves his mark on Conservative Judaism. Always humble, never a self-promoter, he has been my teacher since I began rabbinical school more than fifty years ago. He has over the decades also become my colleague and my friend, as he has to many of us in the rabbinate and in the community. To this day, he continues to have an impact in the same way as he always has—humbly, quietly, and forever effectively.
Rabbi Lionel Moses is the Rabbi Emeritus of Shaare Zion Beth El Congregation in Montreal, Quebec where he has served for over 30 years. He was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 1977 and previously served congregations in Mamaroneck, New York, Jackson Heights in Queens and in Sacramento, California. He served more than fifteen years on the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, as well as two terms on the Executive Council and the Nominations Committee. He has been a member of the Joint Beit Din of the Conservative Movement since its inception in 1989 and has been its Chairperson and Av Beit Din for the past seven years. He has been involved in interfaith work in all the communities in which he has lived and has served as the President of the Montreal Board of Rabbis. Rabbi Moses is a Fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute, where he studied for three years. Rabbi Moses is married to Dr. Joyce Rappaport and they are the parents of three sons, each of whom works in the Jewish Community.