Rabbi Andrea Weiss, z”l Playlist

After spending 28 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, Chester Hollman III was exonerated in July 2019. His heartbreaking experience, the subject of the Netflix documentary “The Innocence Files, Episode 7: Wrong Place, Wrong Time,” offers a compelling perspective on the meaning of freedom and justice as we approach Passover. Probe the larger issues of injustice and racism in our justice system today in this conversation between Holman and his attorney Alan Tauber.

Performance by The Braid of an excerpt from the play “Stories from the Fringe,” about 18 pioneering women rabbis revealing their journeys.

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Rabbi Andrea Weiss, Ph.D., Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Provost, says: “Today, I will read a list of women who wanted to become rabbis but were denied that opportunity during the nearly 50 years between 1923, when Martha Neumark’s request for a High Holy Day pulpit led the HUC Board to vote against the faculty and the CCAR and restrict ordination to men, and 1972, when Rabbi Sally Priesand became the first woman ordained by a seminary. Today, we remember four persistent women who studied at the Hebrew Union College and Jewish Institute of Religion in the 1920s and 30s but were not allowed to become rabbis: Martha Neumark, Irma Levy Lindheim, Dr. Dora Askowith, and Helen Levinthal Lyons. Helen Levinthal deserves special recognition as the first woman who completed the entire JIR rabbinical school curriculum, the first woman who should have been ordained a rabbi.”