One sundown last week, Kol Nidre, the mournful prayer-hymn in which good Jews ask God to release them from unfulfilled vows, throbbed in countless synagogues. It was the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement dedicated to fasting and turning toward God. At Yom Kippur's sunset, a blast on the shofar (ram's horn) brought to a close the ten-day high holidays of the new Jewish year. To Congregation B'nai Sholaum in Brooklyn, N. Y., the first day's sun of year 5700* brought something new—a woman in the pulpit. Helen Hadassah Levinthal, comely in academic gown and four-pointed choir-singer's cap, preached at the three big holiday services, as near to being a rabbi as a female might be. Last summer, at Manhattan's Jewish Institute of Religion, she was the first woman anywhere to pass a course of studies for the rabbinate.
Twelve generations of Levinthals gave their people rabbis, the last two of them Bernard Louis Levinthal, at 74 the "Dean of the Orthodox Rabbinate" in the U. S., and his son, Israel Herbert Levinthal, director of the Brooklyn Jewish Centre. The succession was broken when the only male in the present generation, Lester Lazar Levinthal, went to Harvard to study law. Though Helen Hadassah Levinthal could not take her brother's place, she was guided in her studies by a Jewish precept: " 'Study the law for its own sake'—that is, for its richness and beauty, the intellectual pleasure and spiritual edification one receives."
*Figured from the Creation.