By Tamar CroogWomen’s Initiative for Jewish Studies at Young Israel of New Rochelle is proud to present Dr. Ahuva Liberles on Wednesday, March 23 at 8 p.m. on Zoom. Liberles will be the sixth speaker of the 2021-2022 season in the monthly scholarly programming offered by WIJS at YINR.

Liberles will speak on the topic “Making Jewish Law Accessible to the Physically Impaired: Adele’s Journey to the 15th-Century Bavarian Mikvah.” The lecture will introduce us to a medieval Jewish woman, Adele, who was paralyzed from the spine down—probably as a result of an illness—and joined forces with the local rabbi to find a way to fulfill her religious duties. By fighting for her right to be as any other Jewish woman, she succeeded in creating women’s covenants and making halachic history. The lecture will further discuss where these rulings stand today and what remains to be done in terms of halacha and accessibility.

This lecture topic is timely as February was Jewish Disability Awareness, Acceptance and Inclusion Month. Established in 2009 by the Jewish Special Education International Consortium, JDAIM is an attempt to unite the Jewish community in raising awareness and championing the inclusion and active participation of all Jews in Jewish life and ritual.

Liberles is a Blaustein postdoctoral associate of medieval history in the Judaic studies Program at Yale University. She has written articles on a variety of topics in Western European Jewish history of the Middle Ages. In 2020, she received her Ph.D. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She was a doctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters, a Kreitman postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Jewish History at Ben-Gurion University and research fellow at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Her research interests include pre-modern Jewish history (1100-1500), social and intellectual history, the study of conversion, family life, marginality and the interreligious relations between Christians and Jews.

All WIJS programming is open to women and men. Please visit www.yinr.org/wijs  to view the complete WIJS 2021-22 schedule. For more information, to be added to the WIJS email list, or for Zoom information, please call 914-636-2215 or email: [email protected]. Individuals on the WIJS mailing list will automatically receive the Zoom information.

By Tamar Croog