OpinionJournal - Taste: Prayer Behind the Partition

re: Lucette Lagnado writes, "As a little girl, I was both enamored of the women's section at the back of my Orthodox synagogue and tormented by it. I lived for Saturday mornings, when my mother and I left our Brooklyn apartment and walked around the corner to sweet, friendly Young Magen David and the cozy partitioned area reserved for women only. It was its own world: intimate, charming, a place that encouraged friendship as well as prayer. Safe at last, I'd think, as I put the rough schoolweek behind me...[snip]...Fast-forward to 20th-century America, where the Reform and Conservative movements made a point of allowing families to sit together. The mehitzah all but vanished from their grand new temples sprouting in suburbia. With the rise of the women's movement, the divider became almost a symbol of female oppression--antiquated and vaguely contemptible. Even some Orthodox shuls did without a formal partition, according to Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb of the Orthodox Union in New York. /They've made an odd and tortuous comeback, these dividers, fueled in part by a resurgence of Orthodox Judaism. Some other branches of Judaism, including ones that did much to try to include women, are hurting--while Orthodox Judaism is booming. "People in this crazy world are looking to be anchored...they are looking for greater discipline," says Rabbi Marc Schneier, who runs the Hampton Synagogue in chic Westhampton Beach..."...