The Shul Battle Over Mixed Seating and the Mechitza
On Parshas Terumah and how the shul is like a mini-Temple
The accompanying shiur is available on the Orthodox Union's parsha learning app: All Parsha.
I grew up across the street from my shul. In fact, my parent’s home used to be on the actual property of the shul until they picked up our home, put it on the back of a truck, and moved it across the street. My parents bought the house after this move (fun fact: the realtor for the home was the brother of Rav Yaakov and Noah Weinberg, Roshei Yeshiva of Ner Israel and Aish HaTorah, respectively), but growing up, the connection between our home and the shul persisted.
There is a positive and a negative growing up as a child in such close proximity to a shul. It makes the walk easier: You could go home to use the bathroom, and there was never any need to bring a baggie full of snacks to shul. But there were also obvious downsides. The shul, as a kid at least, felt like a part of my home—and not the dining room. We would run around the shul property as if it were a playground.
I remember once, when I was around seven or eight, we got into a massive spitball fight on the shul grounds. We wet the paper towels from the shul bathroom and starting flinging them at one another. My father discovered what happened and made me pick up every single one thrown.
“A shul is a mikdash me’at,” my father told me—a miniature, so to speak, of our Beis Hamikdash.
I was shocked.
The Beis Hamikdash had grandeur, miracles, and divinity. Our shul needed renovations. Would the Beis Hamikdash have a candyman, I remember wondering as a kid.
Was this simply a scare tactic that my father told me in order to avoid future spitball fights on shul grounds or is the connection between our shuls and our Beis HaMikdash more substantial?
To understand all this, let’s explore one chapter in the incredible history of the contemporary synagogue: the battle over mixed seating in shuls.
Behind nearly every older synagogue is some battle or controversy over the existence, the size, or the style of the mechitza (partition). My childhood shul is no different. I still remember when they changed the mechitza from a lowkey metal lattice to an imposing one-way mirror-like material. And like many shuls that have undergone such transformations, a few families left for a partition they found less divisive.
In Professor Jonathan Sarna’s classic article, “The Debate over Mixed Seating in the American Synagogue,” he writes emphatically:
The extent to which men and women were separated in the synagogues of antiquity has been disputed. There can, however, be no doubt that separate seating of one form or another characterized Jewish worship from early medieval times onward. The idea that men and women should worship apart prevailed in many Christian churches no less than in synagogues—although the latter more frequently demanded a physical barrier between the sexes—and separate seating remained standard practice in much of Europe down to the contemporary period.
So what changed?
Initially, the Reform movement did not support mixed seating. The Hamburg Temple in Germany, considered the first Reform congregation, turned down a major donation that was contingent on men and women sitting together. The Reform movement, which emerged in the early decades of the 19th century suggested many synagogue changes—including organ playing, praying in the native language instead of Hebrew, and even abolishing banging for the name Haman during megillah reading. Reform temples were even called “temples” as a nod to the Temple of Jerusalem—they wanted to build a Judaism in Europe and discard the longing for the Jerusalem Temple. Mixed seating was not on the original list.
Many early shuls had a balcony for women. In 1845, the Reform Congregation of Berlin instituted separate seating for men and women but without a mechitza—men and women sat together on the same floor on different sides of the aisle.
Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise popularized the term “family seating”—a synagogue where an entire family, mom and dad, brothers and sisters, could all pray together. A common refrain emerged: “Families that pray together, stay together.”
Wise’s plan, however, was not successful. The women in his congregation were not so enthusiastic about sitting among the men. Rabbi Wise had already been tussling quite a bit with his synagogue’s lay leadership over some of his radical reforms and bulldozer personality. He was fired two days before Rosh Hashanah. In a move that I could clearly envision George Costanza doing, had he entered the rabbinate, Wise showed up to synagogue for the High Holiday services anyway. He felt his firing was unjustified. As Rabbi Wise was taking the Torah from the Ark, the president of the shul knocked his hat off. A fight broke out on Rosh Hashanah, and the police had to intervene to restore order. On the second day of Rosh Hashana, Rabbi Wise began his own congregation, eventually called Anshe Emeth. This breakoff, according to Sarna, is usually credited with being the first fully mixed seated synagogue in the world.
As women’s societal role improved, scrutiny of mixed seating increased as well. In 1744, Dr. Alexander Hamilton (no relation to the famed subject of the Broadway show) compared separate seating behind a mechitza to a chicken coop. (I vaguely remember my grandmother saying something like that.) Traditional mechitza seating began to seem more and more like a relic of an antiquated view of women. So mechitza battles were always more than just about the mechitza, or even Jewish law—they became symbolic—egalitarianism vs. chauvinism, progress vs. tradition.
Soon enough, as controversies often do on these shores, the battle moved from community ideology into the courts.
One of the earliest court cases involving mixed seating in the synagogue was Israel J. Solomon v. The Congregation B’nai Jeshurun, and others. In 1875, Israel Salomon (his last name was misspelled in the court documents), petitioned the court to stop his congregation, B’nai Jeshurun, from instituting mixed pews, which he felt were immodest. While Salomon sought the expertise of a select few scholars proficient in traditional Jewish law, the congregation, aiming to strengthen its position in advocating for innovation, had Rabbis David Einhorn and Isaac Mayer Wise, both known for their radical reformist views, testify on its behalf. The judge ruled in favor of the congregation—the community’s vote could not be stopped by a minority objection.
By the 1950s, mixed seating became fairly common in non-Orthodox synagogues. Even many Orthodox shuls did not insist on a strict mechitza—by some estimates about 50% of Orthodox rabbis led shuls that allowed some form of family seating. For instance, in my father’s shul in North Adams, MA, they first only allowed elderly women to sit in the men’s section, so long as it was in the back. Eventually, the entire shul became mixed—though my Zaide was one of the few who insisted on continuing to sit separately. Professor Marshall Sklare called the mechitza, “the most commonly accepted yardstick for differentiating Conservatism from Orthodoxy.”
Salomon’s lawsuit against B’nei Jeshurun would not be the last time the American legal system weighed in on mechitzas.
Perhaps the most famous case began in 1955 when Beth Tefilas Moses, a Michigan synagogue with an outstanding name, proposed introducing family seating. One member of the shul, Baruch Litvin, described by Jonathan Sarna as “cordially disliked” by many other members of the shul, led a court battle to prevent the abolishment of the mechitza. These were not easy battles in the 1950’s, as many thought, not without basis, that Orthodox Judaism would soon disappear, and the Conservative movement would lead American Jewish life.
Litvin had a creative approach to the lawsuit, Davis v. Scher. Instead of arguing whether Jewish law, in fact, insisted upon mechitzas, the lawsuit was based on an American law that stated that “a majority of a church congregation may not institute a practice within the church fundamentally opposed to the doctrine to which the church property is dedicated, as against a minority of the congregation who adhere to the established doctrine and practice.”
Basically, religious congregations were not a majority rule—a new majority could not make major changes to a religious community without everyone on board. While the lower courts initially ruled in favor of the congregation, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled in favor of Litvin and his vocal minority thereby preventing the shul from abolishing the mechitza.
For the next decade, at least, mechitza became the third-rail battleground issue that eventually accelerated the widening of the gulf between Orthodox and Conservative practice that we see today. Thankfully, Litvin did not rest even after his significant legal victory. He correctly understood that regardless of the significance of the Michigan Supreme Court’s ruling, that alone would not win over the hearts and minds of the next generation of Jews who increasingly began to see the mechitza as a relic of an antiquated past.
In 1959, following his legal victory, Baruch Litvin published The Sanctity of the Synagogue, a formidable tome, that presents the halakhic and theological justifications for the mechitza. It is really an incredible volume both for its contributions to Jewish law, but also as a snapshot of Jewish history. After presenting the details of the lawsuit, Litvin includes essays that explain the halakhic justification and the essential need for synagogues partitions. Included are essays from Rav Ahron Kotler, Rav Moshe Feinstein, Rav Soloveitchik, Rav Kook, Rav Herzog, and Rav Israel Brodie. He also included less legalistic essays designed to appeal to the hearts and minds of contemporary Jews in the 1950’s including essays from Rabbi Dr. Leo Jung, Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm, and Rav Menachem Mendel Kasher.
It is clear from the volume he wanted the essays and contributors to represent a wide stream of Orthodox Jewish life. Interestingly, Rabbi Lamm’s essay is slightly censored—a discussion about Kinsey’s theory of sexuality was relegated to a footnote, even though in the original it was included in the body of the essay.
I am lucky enough that my personal copy has historic significance in its own right. My dear friend and acclaimed bookseller, Israel Mizrahi, sent me the personal copy that once belonged to Rabbi Moshe Sherer, leader of Agudath Israel. In a brief note, Litvin thanks Rabbi Sherer for his efforts advocating for mechitzas and providing support for the book. Apparently, Litvin, in order to galvanize Jewish leadership around this issue, mailed copies of his book to both Orthodox and non-Orthodox rabbis. One interesting copy, sent to me from someone on social media, is the volume he sent to Rabbi Ira Eisenstein, the son-in-law of Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan and one of the early founders of the Reconstructionist movement. In his note to Rabbi Eisenstein, he urges him to read the book and “hew to the line and let the chips fall where they may.” The final words are underlined by Litvin for emphasis.
In the 1950’s, those early years of American Orthodoxy, there were few who could make the case for mechitzas in a way that would resonate with contemporary Jews. Rabbi Emanuel Feldman in his book Tales Out of Shul recalls that when he first became rabbi in Atlanta, he rolled out a mechitza for the recitation of selichos. Congregants stormed out and the next day the mechitza was gone. Rabbi Feldman threatened to leave if the mechitza was not returned. Without a word from the lay leaders, it reappeared before Rosh Hashanah.
Perhaps the two most outspoken voices who made the case for the importance of the mechitza were Rav Soloveitchik and his student Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm. Each respectively understood the significance of the issue and had a command of the American language and sentiments that allowed their words to penetrate. In 1959, Rabbi Lamm published, “Separate Pews in the Synagogue: A Social and Psychological Approach”—this essay was later included in Litvin’s volume albeit, as mentioned, with some slight maneuvering.
In Rabbi Soloveitchik’s collected letters, Community, Covenant, and Commitment: Selected Letters and Communications, several letters address this issue. Far too many to quote at length, though each is worthy of reading.
One letter—translated from his original Yiddish and also included in English translation within the Litvin volume—stands out. There, Rabbi Soloveitchik wrote his famous guidance to a young student that “it was better for him to pray at home both Rosh ha-Shanah and Yom Kippur, and not cross the threshold of that synagogue,” referring to a shul with mixed seating. It was better to miss shofar, Rav Soloveitchik explained, rather than pray in a synagogue with mixed seating. He gives several reasons, two of which I would like to quote:
Firstly, Rabbi Soloveitchik mentions the more classic halakhic argument that “the separation of the sexes in the synagogue derives historically from the Sanctuary, where there were both a Court of Women and a Court of Israelites.” The Talmud emphasizes this distinction, and although the laws of mechitza are not mentioned in the Shulchan Aruch, most contemporary halachic decisors couch their ruling on this. “In its martyr’s history of a thousand years,” Rabbi Soloveitchik writes, “the people of Israel have never violated this principle.”
He also adds a different reason that directly addresses the refrain that became common in the non-Orthodox world, “families that pray together, stay together.” This notion, Rabbi Soloveitchik argued, amounted to the Christianization of the synagogue. Jewish prayer, explained Rabbi Soloveitchik, was designed to be a lonely experience.
Prayer means communion with the Master of the World, and therefore withdrawal from all and everything. During prayer man must feel alone, removed, isolated. He must then regard the Creator as an only Friend, from whom alone he can hope for support and consolation.
As crucial as Rabbi Soloveitchik understood this battle was, he also had a prescient confidence that it would be won. “And I do not believe this battle,'“ he writes, “will be a lost one.” American Jewry’s common sense, he hoped would prevail and people would understand the solemnity that a mechitza brings to the prayer experience. History, I believe, has proven Rabbi Soloveitchik correct in that regard as well.
Build Me a Sanctuary, Hashem tells the Jewish People, so that I may dwell among them.
We may no longer have the original Sancturary, the Beis Hamikdash in Yerushalyim, but our shuls continue to serve as enduring mini-Batei Hamikdash throughout the world, the Talmud explains. Which is why, Rav Schachter writes, so many of the laws and structure of the synagogue parallel those of the Beis Hamikdash (see Eretz HaTzvi #12). The placement of the bimah, the centrality of the aron, and yes, the need for a mechitza.
There remains an important distinction between our shuls and the Beis Hamikdash.
The Beis Hamikdash, Rav Soloveitchik writes, is where God invites us into His house; our shuls are where we invite God into our collective house. And while we take solace that we continue to serve as God’s host, we continue to long for the day where we will once again be hosted in God’s home.
Shabbos Reads — Books/Articles Mentioned
The Debate over Mixed Seating in the American Synagogue, Jonathan Sarna
The 1840s and the Creation of the German-Jewish Religious Reform Movement, Steven Lowenstein
The Sanctity of the Synagogue, Baruch Litvin
Tales Out of Shul: The Unorthodox Journal of an Orthodox Rabbi, Emanuel Feldman
Separate Pews in the Synagogue: A Social and Psychological Approach, Norman Lamm
Community, Covenant, and Commitment: Selected Letters and Communications, Joseph B. Soloveitchik
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It should be noted that both halachikly (according to R Moshe Feinstein) and according to the Temple of antiquity itself, the best “setup” is the balcony.
Fascinating.