…in an unprecedented move by the ministry, the Shalom Hartman Institute Midrashiya Girls’ High School has received a five-year mandate to develop an authentic and coherent educational vision that fuses respect for Jewish tradition and learning, obligation to Halacha and feminist ideology….The new curriculum, which the Midrashiya is in the first year of developing and hopes to have finished within four years, will first and foremost reflect the school’s ideology in that it will be open to questions, encourage respectful critical discussion, introduce textual female models and discuss topics from a feminist angle. It aims to create a religious and spiritual atmosphere bound by Halacha, which honors Jewish tradition and way of life but also enables women to play an active and leading role in the religious life, spiritual dialogue and the religious public sphere. It is already being implemented and tested in the school.“We work with teachers in the field to develop this curriculum,” explains Renana Ravitsky Pilzer , head of the school’s beit midrash and one of three educators (the other two are from the Hartman Institute) writing the new Orthodox feminist curriculum for the Education Ministry. “No ivory tower here. We are interacting with the teachers and the girls as we go along. We write the curriculum, and then we check it out in the field and refine it. So that when it is ready, we know it will really work.”
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