 
An Advisor Of Her Own
Ten Years Of Nishmat’s Keren Ariel Yoatzot Halachah Program
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By Toby Klein Greenwald
Published on Thursday, October 15, 2009 -
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Along with the laws of Shabbat and kashrut, the laws of taharat ha’mishpachah, family purity, are among the linchpins of the Jewish home. Those of us who have the privilege of being the parents of married children who adhere meticulously to halachah have the z’chut to share with them both the joy and—sometimes—the struggles.
About four days before the marriage of one of my daughters, she called me into her bedroom. She was standing nervously by the window, not sure of her halachic status. I gave her my own opinion that it was okay. “But why wonder?” I said. “There is a yoetzet halachah who lives five minutes away.”
We called up a rebbetzin from a nearby community, who is also a renowned Tanach teacher and one of the graduates of the Nishmat program for yoatzot halachah. She was home and told us to come right over.
The young rebbetzin said everything was fine, explained to my daughter why, and then proceeded to have a 20-minute conversation with her about the specific question and the laws of nidah in general. She put my daughter thoroughly at ease, and even though my daughter had studied all the laws with a very learned former teacher of hers, there was something in the level of expertise of this yoetzet halachah that apparently surpassed it. Knowledge, I thought, truly is power.
I confess—I sat there and was guilty of desecrating the Tenth Commandment, the one that instructs us: Do not covet. I coveted the experience that that daughter and all other daughters of Israel could now have, one that I and my female peers did not have—the possibility of receiving a definitive answer to a question regarding nidah from a woman.
True, there were some questions that the rebbetzins, or wise women with whom we studied before our weddings, could answer. And we had been taught by them that there was nothing to be embarrassed about if we had to ask a rav a question on nidah; that it was all halachah and that the rav treated our questions like any other halachic question. But logic and feelings did not coincide.
As Rabbanit Chana Henkin, who founded the program in 1997, said in a televised interview, “It is a sea change.”
The Nishmat Keren Ariel fellowship program for yoatzot halachah is a two-year program that entails more than 1,000 hours of the highest level studies in the field of Jewish law—the same training Israeli rabbinical students receive to handle these areas—as well as supplementary studies in women’s health and psychology, an element unique to Nishmat. It is headed by Rabbi Yaakov Varhaftig and Rabbi Yehuda Henkin. Graduates are tested by a panel of halachic experts, including Rabbi Yitzhak Halevi, Rabbi Shlomo Levy, and Rabbi Eliezer Damari.
The program runs in strict compliance with halachah and has strong support of hundreds of rabbis from the Torah-observant world, say the Nishmat spokespeople, who also emphasize, “Yoatzot halachah do not replace rabbis. They work in tandem with rabbis on an ongoing basis in communities in Israel and abroad to ease the observance of and remove the guesswork from the laws of taharat ha’mishpachah.”
In 1999, Nishmat presented the first yoatzot halachah certificates to Tova Ganzel and Dr. Deena Zimmerman. At that time, the certifying rabbis stipulated that the authority of these yoatzot, and all others who would follow, would need to undergo a revalidation process every ten years. There have been 61 qualified yoatzot graduated. At the celebration on October 11, it was announced that the original ten-year limit on certification has been officially lifted.
“Because we understood the historic and political significance of creating women halachic experts—we were stepping where no one had in 3,000 years—we chose to proceed with caution,” said Rabbi Henkin. “Now, ten years later, the yoatzot halachah program is no longer just a promising experiment—it is a vibrant reality for the Jewish people. The achievements of the yoatzot are great, and their positive effect on the community at large is so clear that we are removing this restriction permanently.”
Regarding the good experience of dealing with yoatzot, Bet Shemesh resident Sara K. Eisen says, “I’ve asked questions that I probably would have just never asked and, instead, been needlessly stricter on myself. There’s no way I would ever ask intimate questions of a rabbi. I’d rather—and did choose in the past—ignorance and inconvenience over what I view as an inappropriate demand on women otherwise schooled in modesty: to share very private things with a man. Having a yoetzet halachah in Bet Shemesh has been liberating, comforting, humanizing, educational, and even inspirational.”
Yoatzot halachah have also addressed more than 100,000 inquiries via Nishmat’s Golda Koschitzky telephone hotline and Nishmat’s interactive website (www.yoatzot.org). ♦
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