Forty Years Later: The Rav’s Opening Shiur at the Stern College for Women Beit Midrash
By Saul Berman
- October 9, 2017 All credit goes to him and to thelehrhaus.com
In late 1976, Dr. Haym Soloveitchik and I met to discuss Jewish Studies at Stern College for Women. Dr. Soloveitchik told me that he never understood why Talmud was not being more systematically taught at Stern College. He had been raised with the impression that it was natural for women to study Talmud. As a child, Dr. Soloveitchik had studied with his father, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, together with his older sisters, Atarah and Tovah. When he began, at the age of ten, studying Talmud with the Rav, Dr. Soloveitchik joined as a junior participant in their class. The same culture was manifest at Maimonides School in Boston, which his father and mother, Dr. Tonya Soloveitchik, had founded, and where boys and girls studied Talmud in the same classes.
By this time, many of Stern’s Jewish Studies courses made use of Mishnah, Talmud, and its commentaries. The undergraduate women used these texts, engaging with them as primary sources to study Jewish Law, Jewish History, and Biblical Exegesis. Yet, Stern College did not make room in the schedule for its students to acquire the skills to develop competence in independent text study. This is how the movement to introduce intensive Talmud study at Stern College was born.
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