MOUNT VERNON — Rabbi Deborah Brin, who in 1988 helped lead the first women’s prayer service at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, will speak Thursday, Jan. 24, at Cornell College on Jewish feminism and its impact on the North American and the Israeli Jewish communities.
Her lecture, “The Feminist Transformation of American Judaism,” is at 11 a.m. in Hedges Conference Room of The Commons. Admission is free.
Brin, associate chaplain at Grinnell College since 1997, is a longtime participant in the Jewish feminist movement. She was raised in the Jewish community of Minneapolis during the 1960s and earned a bachelor’s degree in religious studies at Macalester College. She entered rabbinical school in 1979, when only the Reform and Reconstructionist seminaries in the United States were accepting female students; fewer than 25 women had been ordained worldwide.
Prior to her appointment at Grinnell, she was a hospice chaplain in Albuquerque, N.M., and a congregational rabbi for a Reconstructionist synagogue in Toronto. During her tenure as the spiritual leader of Darchei Noam, she was the only female rabbi in Canada. Her work is included in a forthcoming book on the “Women of the Wall” to be published in 2002 by Jewish Lights Publishing.