Партнёрские миньяны: расширение участия женщин в ортодоксальной молитве.

Partnership minyan (pl. partnership minyanim) is a religious Jewish prayer group that seeks to maximize women's participation in services within the confines of Jewish law as understood by Orthodox Judaism. This includes enabling women to lead parts of service, read from the Torah, serve in lay leadership positions, sit in a more gender balanced format, and in some cases count as part of a minyan ("quorum") of ten men and ten women. Partnership minyanim began in 2002 simultaneously in New York and Jerusalem, and have now spread to over 30 communities in at least five different countries around the world.

The first two partnership minyanim were established almost simultaneously without connection to one another in 2002: Shira Hadasha in Jerusalem and Darkhei Noam in New York City. Both described in their founding materials the goal of maximizing women's participation in prayer services within the boundaries of Orthodox understandings of Jewish law. According to scholar William Kaplowitz, within six years there were over twenty other similar synagogues around the world, including: Minyan Tehillah, founded in 2003 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Shira Hadasha in Melbourne, Australia, Darchei Noam in Modi’in, and others in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Toronto, New Haven, Washington, D. C., and several more (including a cluster in the Tri State area alone). By 2014, an additional dozen or so were created in communities such as Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Mazkeret Batya and Beersheba in Israel, two in the United Kingdom, several on college campuses, high schools, and more. Some partnership minyanim differ over details—such as whether to wait for ten women or whether women can lead the hallel service—but they all retain certain basic practices. Within a partitioned service, women read from the Torah, make the blessing on the Torah, chant the weekly prophetical portion of the Bible known as haftarah, lead some parts of the service, teach Torah, make speeches, sit on boards, and take part in decision making. But women do not generally lead parts of the service that are thought to require a traditional quorum, or minyan—such as leading prayers known as kaddish and kedusha, which traditionally require the response of "amen" from ten men. The spread of partnership minyanim, according to Kaplowitz, does not follow a pattern based on proportionality to size of Orthodox populations. Rather, there are certain regions with clusters and other places with none at all. In his 2008 thesis, he noted: "The Los Angeles area, with around two times as many Jews as the Chicago area, has one partnership minyan to Chicago's three; Southeast Florida, with about twice as many Jews as Chicago, has none. New Haven has a partnership minyan, but Philadelphia, with around twelve times as many Jews, does not. Ann Arbor has a partnership minyan but neither Detroit, Cleveland, nor Baltimore, each with over twelve times as many Jews, does (United Jewish Communities, 2002). In fact, it is worth noting that there are no partnership minyanim in the Sunbelt except for that in Los Angeles; none west of the Atlantic seaboard and east of Michigan; and only one west of Chicago." In his research of this sprawl, Kaplowitz concluded that this is because the partnership minyan is a culture that is transferred one person at a time. The culture does not spread evenly; it spreads when one activist moves and decides to lead the new community towards change. The culture is carried by individuals who have developed an unwavering commitment to the model. In other words, the culture of partnership minyan is spreading because Orthodox people who participate in these kinds of prayer services often find that they can no longer be part of Orthodox services where women are relegated to "traditional" roles.

Public women's prayer services, as well as women's participation in standard public services, are both innovations over the past generation. Many rabbis have weighed in on their permissibility. The permitting rabbis have interpreted various earlier talmudic and halachic sources to either provide conceptual or indirect support for public women's prayer. Other rabbis have analyzed these arguments, and raised various forms of refutation.

The existence of partnership minyanim was preceded by an opinion by Modern Orthodox Rabbi Mendel Shapiro in 2001, subsequently joined by Bar Ilan University Talmud Professor Rabbi Daniel Sperber, positing that halakha (Jewish law) permits Orthodox women to be called to, and to read from, the Torah on Shabbat under certain conditions. These opinions rely on earlier authorities including the Magen Avraham. Dr. Joel B. Wolowelsky also expressed an opinion which, while not offering a formal opinion on the halachic issues, suggested that the partnership minyan enterprise was not necessarily inconsistent with an Orthodox hashkafah (outlook).

Rabbi Yehudah Herzl Henkin objected to Rabbi Shapiro's claims, but the core of his argument was not about halakha but about social practices. In addition to point by point halakhic counterarguments, he also said:
Regardless of the arguments that can be proffered to permit women's aliyot [Torah reading] today—that kevod ha tsibbur can be waived, that it does not apply today when everyone is literate, that it does not apply when the olim rely on the (male) ba`al qeri’ah and do not themselves read—women's aliyot remain outside the consensus, and a congregation that institutes them is not Orthodox in name and will not long remain Orthodox in practice. In my judgement, this is an accurate statement now and for the foreseeable future, and I see no point in arguing about it.

In 2013 British Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis stated that a partnership minyan service was not something which could take place in synagogues under his auspices. Rabbi Mirvis noted that this view was one unanimously held by every posek (halachic decisor) in the world.

Rabbi/Dr. Gidon Rothstein (author of Murderer in the Mikdash), in an article in the Rabbinical Council of America's journal Tradition, analyzed Rabbi Shapiro's arguments and concluded that

the attempt to read the talmudic concerns about women's aliyot out of relevance to contemporary Orthodox Jews has not meaningfully succeeded. Among other arguments, Rabbi Rothstein argued that even according to the lenient opinions that congregations can waive their "dignity", they can do so only on a temporary and situational basis, or as a concession to a particular circumstance after the fact, but not on a permanent basis. Even having a teenager as a regular Hazzan is not comparable, because:

Appointing a young cantor is a more regularized foregoing of waiving, but only until he matures; as Abba Eban once said when asked about the low median age of the State of Israel, it is a problem that passes with time. In each case other than R. Shapiro's, the foregoing is temporary and situational. A later Forward article (March 5, 2014) suggested that Orthodox authorities "have taken aim at the growing phenomenon of partnership minyans," citing many recent statements and articles by Orthodox rabbis and scholars and a reported incident where a rabbinical student at Yeshiva University was reprimanded for hosting a partnership minyan. According to the article, "the only institution in the country that seems open to the minyans is Yeshivat Chovevei Torah," a controversial rabbinical seminary in Riverdale.

Rabbi Yaakov Ariel, the chief rabbi of Ramat Gan, criticized these minyanim in Hazofe, arguing that they do not conform to Jewish law or to Orthodox ideals of prayer, in which men and women must be kept separate at all times. In his critique, Rabbi Ariel wrote that the violation of the "dignity of the congregation" involved refers to the sexual distraction that would be experienced if men and women were not kept separate. He argued that because this sexual distraction is part of human nature, waiving it is out of the question. He also wrote that there could be a problem of kol isha (hearing a woman's singing voice). He argued that partnership minyanim would cause a dispute that would result in a split in the orthodox community, and that women's participation harms the sacredness of the synagogue. Elitzur Bar Asher wrote a rebuttal.

Rabbi Aryeh A. Frimer, author of a number of scholarly works on the status of women in Orthodox halakha including Women and Minyan, wrote a critique of Rabbi Sperber's arguments in the blog post he entitled "Lo Zu haDerekh: A Review of Rabbi Prof. Daniel Sperber's Darka shel Halakha". Rabbi Frimer briefly critiqued Mendal Shapiro's argument that kevod hatzibur can be waived, arguing that it was unwaivable both because women have been exempted from prominent communal roles out of considerations of modesty, and because since in his view women are not obligated to read while men are, women cannot fulfill the obligation for men. Rabbi Frimer had two main disagreements with Rabbi Daniel Sperber. His first disagreement was with R. Sperber's view that the Beraita in Megilla 23a ("but the sages say we do not call a woman ") reflected only a recommendation or advice. He marshalled authorities who held that it was obligatory with permission a leniency available only for an emergency. In his view these authorities had the better argument. Rabbi Frimer's second and what he characterized as his most important objection was to R. Sperber's argument that kevod hatzibur could be overridden by the principle of kevod habriyot. He strongly objected to the idea of kevod habriyot overriding a rabbinic decree in its entirety, arguing that the kind of embarrassment or shame that would make it possible to invoke kevod habriyot had to come from factors (such as excrement or nakedness) external to the decree that occurred only in limited circumstances. He argued that a rabbinic decree cannot itself be regarded as shameful or embarrassing. To permit a rabbinic prohibition to be characterized as an embarrassment, R. Frimer argued, would give anyone "carte blanch" to abrogate any Rabbinic prohibition simply by saying "This offends me." He said that "Such a position is untenable, if not unthinkable." Accordingly, he argued that "kevod ha beriyyot cannot be invoked to nullify a rabbinic commandment, where the shame comes from the very fulfillment of the rabbinic injunction itself."

In the JOFA 10th Anniversary International Conference on Feminism & Orthodoxy (February 10–11, 2007), three members of these minyanim (Elitzur Bar Asher, Michal Bar Asher Siegal and Alanna Cooper), in a session under the title "Beyond Women's Issues: Partnership Minyanim Engages Orthodoxy", discussed issues they encountered and approaches to resolving them in implementing this style of worship, as well as their personal ideological approaches.