Priestesses of the Shtetl? The Jewish Women Spiritual Leaders of Eastern  Europe by Annabel Gottfried Cohen

‘Four thousand years ago, in the ancient Near East, women were poets, drummers, scholars, dancers, healers, prophets and keepers of sacred space.’ In The Hebrew Priestess (2015), Rabbi Jill Hammer argues that as the Israelite cult became more centralised, leadership roles were restricted to men and women’s spiritual leadership was gradually repressed. Yet, as Hammer and co-author Taya Shere demonstrate, ‘the remnants of the priestesshood remain for those who seek them out.’ Combining a close reading of biblical and rabbinic texts, alongside other contemporary sources and archaeological evidence, Hammer has identified thirteen models or netivot of feminine Jewish leadership, which she argues persisted, albeit in altered and marginalised forms, into the medieval, early modern and even modern periods. My own research supports these conclusions, suggesting that Hammer’s netivot framework provides a useful lens by which to better understand Jewish women’s traditions that, in a patriarchal culture, have often been marginalised.

In Eastern Europe – home at the turn of the 20^th century to around 40% of global Jewry – Jewish women served their communities as midwives, healers, incantation-sayers, cemetery- and grave- measurers, keepers of connections with the dead and professional mourners. The Yiddish titles of paid, professional women ritualists – bobes, opshprekherkes, feldmesterins, kneytlekh-leygerins, zogerins and klogmuters – appear frequently in modern Yiddish literature, albeit usually as background characters who are often portrayed as somewhat silly and superstitious. As in other times and places, Ashkenazi women’s rituals, customs and prayers were often treated by the male intellectual elite as secondary to the ‘official’ patriarchal tradition; part of a distinct feminine ‘folklore.’ Yet the frequency with which these women appear not just in fictional accounts of Eastern European Jewish life, but also in memoirs, ethnographic studies and memorial books, is testimony to their prevalence and importance. A study of these sources reveals that they were, in fact, a vital part of the fabric of Jewish religious life. In contrast to the stereotypes that surround them, texts describing real, remembered women – Gitele the gabete of Koriv, Bobtshke Kilikovski Cohen of Volovisk, Y. Y. Trunk’s feldmesterin and opshprekherke of Hendrikov – suggest that they were often educated, high-status and respected female elders.

I became interested in these women ritualists in 2018, as a student at both the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute and at the Paris Yiddish Center. Studying Yiddish literature intensively, I was struck by how often I encountered women ritual leaders whose practices seemed to fit into the framework offered by Jill Hammer’s netivot. Indeed, two of Hammer’s ‘priestess pathways’– the midwife and the mourning woman – seem to have quite simply survived in the shtetlekh of Eastern Europe, where, while they may not have been identified as priestesses, they nonetheless served their communities in roles similar to those described by Hammer in the Hebrew Priestess.

As in previous periods of Jewish history, midwives in Jewish Eastern Europe were important communal functionaries, valued not just for their practical role in childbirth, but for the spiritual skill involved in guiding an unborn soul into the living world. Midwives retained connections with the children they had helped to birth throughout their lives and even – it was believed – after their deaths. In some towns, a midwife’s death would be honoured by all the people she had helped bring into the world. Midwives often also worked as healers, and ethnographic studies reveal an overlap between the role of the midwife and that of the opshprekherke – a type of healer skilled in incantations against the evil eye. On the eve of World War One, opshprekherkes were still found ‘in literally every town, big and small, of Ukraine’, and were ‘turned to in every case of trouble and misfortune.’ Many of them worked in institutional religious jobs as ritual bath attendants, and their incantations – like the Yiddish prayers used by other women ritualists – contained numerous references to Jewish lore and biblical ancestry. While aspects of their practices overlapped with those of non-Jewish healers, these were not pagan witches living on the outskirts of town. 

While shtetl midwives and incantation sayers helped birth, heal and protect living souls, professional mourning women known as klogerins, klogmuters and baveynerins facilitated the process of grief at the end of a life. As twentieth century ethnographers also observed, Jewish mourning women were not unique to Eastern Europe, but have existed since ancient times, known in Hebrew as mekonenot (Jeremiah 9:16). Fascinatingly, klogerins’ practices, as well as the structure of their klogenishn (laments) demonstrate not only a historical continuity, but also share features with Jewish wailing women in modern Yemen, as documented by Tova Gamliel. In the words of Kohenet Rachel Rose Reid, ‘our ancestresses were carrying things mouth to ear for so long, and so many miles apart.’

In the shtetls of Eastern Europe, mourning women were just one type of ‘cemetery Jewess’, as one source describes them. While women’s religiosity in the shtetl is usually portrayed as confined to the home, my research suggests that, at least in Eastern Europe, the cemetery was, in fact, one important public institution that was often considered a women’s domain. As well as facilitating public mourning, klogerins, cemetery-measurers and and zogerins or ‘speakers’ used prayer and ritual to maintain the connection between the living and the dead – a connection that played a vital role in healing and protecting the living. The Ba’alat Ov (I Samuel: 28) – another model of female leadership, translated by Hammer as ‘keeper of ancestor spirits’ – was also alive and well in the shtetl.

Taken together, these women ritualists all seem, in one way or another, to have played a leading role in two crucial facets of spiritual life. Firstly, they tended the relationship between the physical and spiritual realms – the world of spirits and deceased ancestors that was ever present in traditional Ashkenazi Jewish culture. Skilled in communicating across the boundary that separated these realms, they also helped to keep that boundary in place. While some brought over souls that were ready to be born, others used prayers, laments and ritual technologies like soul-candles to heal the living and prevent them from crossing over before their time. Secondly, women ritual leaders helped model and facilitate the expression of sadness, fear and grief. In a world of so much death and destruction, their practices have much to offer us.

BIO Annabel Gottfried Cohen is a PhD Student in Modern Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary, a Kohenet and a writer, teacher and translator. She is currently a lecturer in Yiddish language and culture at the Sorbonne Université Paris. She publishes her translations of sources relating to Ashkenazi women’s ritual on a website www.pullingatthreads.com, and has taught multiple courses, workshops and lectures on the topic at Beit Kohenet, Yiddish New York, the Jewish Theological Seminary, Yale University, Georgetown University, City College New York, Wheaton College, Yiddish Summer Weimar and elsewhere. This summer, she will be teaching two online courses: ‘Threading Stones: an Elul Tradition’ with Sarah Chandler and Eleonore Weill at Ritual Well; and ‘How to talk to the dead in Yiddish’ – a course for intermediate to advanced Yiddish speakers with the Workers Circle.