In the women's section behind the mehitza of the synagogue: an analysis of four poems by modern Israeli poets

Abstract This article explores the literary representation of Jewish women's prayer experience taking place in the women's section (ezrat nashim) “behind the mehitza” of the Israeli Orthodox synagogue. The very act of literary writing about the synagogue prayer experience from a female perspective constitutes a distinctive and relatively recent phenomenon in Modern Hebrew literature, one which opens a window onto the complexity of women's existence within Jewish culture. The article opens with a poem by Yehuda Amichai, one of the great figures of Modern Hebrew poetry. Amichai's secular identity appears to inform his distinctive perspective, which contrasts with that of the three women poets whose work is examined in the remainder of the article. Amichai, the male poet, portrays the women's section from the perspective of a child, casting it in an idyllic light. In contrast, the poems of the three women poets—Hava Pinchas Cohen, Esther Ettinger and Avigail Antman—are written from a maternal point of view, illuminating the difficulties and tensions inherent in that space. In the women's poems, which describe the prayer service taking place on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, key dates in the Jewish calendar, mothers' care for their children is elevated to a sacral sphere. Via prosaic and everyday maternal existence, the poems express theological insights extending far beyond their ostensibly “feminine” and “restricted” context, and provide an authentic reflection of the complexity of female life in Jewish culture.