Q:
I heard about a synagogue that is willing to call a woman up to the Torah and I was told that there’s a Gemara that says that a woman was once called up for krias hatorah.
A:
I don’t know of any such Gemara but I do know that the Gemara says if you called her up she can be counted as one of the shiva kruyim; you can consider her one of the seven aliyos. Only that subsequently the gabbai is taken out in the backyard—I am saying this myself; it’s not in the Gemara—and they give him the treatment.
It means that it’s only a theoretical thing, this Gemara. Technically a woman can certainly be included in shiva kruyim but that it ever happened until they came to this medinah— where anything can happen—this I cannot tell you.
Unfortunately here in America there’s nobody that takes those gabbaim out into the backyard.
August 1975
