Conservative Cantors Vote to Admit Women Members

NEW YORK —  The executive council of Conservative Judaism’s Cantors Assembly has voted 29 to 1 to admit qualified women to membership, a step that means the great majority of American synagogues would welcome women as worship leaders as well as rabbis.

The liberal Reform branch of Judaism has been ordaining women rabbis and cantors for more than a decade, whereas Orthodox synagogues contend that Jewish law denies both roles to women.

Conservative Judaism has been ordaining women as rabbis since 1985, and the branch’s Jewish Theological Seminary in New York has been certifying women as cantors since 1987--thus putting pressure on the cantors’ professional organization to welcome them into their ranks.

In practice, a number of Conservative synagogues hired women cantors in the last decade. Linda Rich-Freed of Los Angeles was the first woman hired as full-time cantor by a Conservative synagogue.

Each year since 1988, the membership meeting of the Cantors Assembly has come close to admitting women but always fell short of the two-thirds margin that was considered requisite.

Cantor Robert Kieval of Rockville, Md., president of the Assembly, said that “after long and serious study of the issue and examination of the bylaws, and upon the advice of legal council, the executive council concluded that the admission of qualified women to membership in the Assembly did not require a two-thirds vote, since it was not an amendment to the bylaws but fell properly within the purview of the council itself.”