LBI London intern Katharina Hadassah Wendl has published an article exploring the work of a 1920s Neo-Orthodox woman. Raised in Frankfurt’s Neo-Orthodox community, Gella Sänger became the ‘first woman to have authored and published a handbook on Jewish law’.
Her handbook, Ishah el Achotah, sought to make ‘halachic (Jewish legal) discourse more accessible to a broader audience, especially their fellow Jewish women’. Despite achieving popularity upon publication, Sänger and her text became unacknowledged within the history of women writers. Wendl’s analysis reveals how Sänger’s engagement in halachic discourse foreshadowed the movement of Orthodox women writing about Jewish law that emerged in the 1980s.
Read the article here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09699082.2026.2643564#d1e173
