Pedagogy, Practice, and Parity: Prayer Experiences of Modern Orthodox Jewish Women in Toronto

Through the disciplinary lenses of Religion, Education, and Gender/Feminist Studies, my research discusses pedagogy, practice, and parity. I conducted research with 9 Jewish women who self-identified as being part of Toronto’s Modern Orthodox Jewish community. This stream of Judaism is unique, in that girls have the opportunity to be prayer leaders in school at a young age, even though there are no female prayer leaders in mainstream Modern Orthodox synagogues. Girls learn to pray together with boys for the first eleven years of their lives, while knowing that they will pray on the other side of a gender-partition when they become Bat Mitzvah at twelve years of age. And yet, despite being independent women with agency, and despite having many other options in Toronto’s diverse Jewish landscape, many women choose to remain in this particular community in adulthood. This retrospective research endeavour asked participants to reflect upon their adulthood prayer practices, as well as their girlhood experiences of praying in Jewish day school. Connections were explored, leading to discussions about identity construction and conceptions of self, gendered experiences, and contradictory practices. My research seeks to uncover the relationship between prayer education and identity formation for girls, and the implications that this has on women’s communal leadership roles in adulthood.