In secular France, a female rabbi dares to bring religion into public life

PARIS — The synagogue is hidden in a parking garage.

Outside, a police guard. Inside, a woman rabbi — one of only three in France — and a growing liberal congregation.

In a country where official Jewish life is overwhelmingly Orthodox, Delphine Horvilleur is something of a scandal, a married mother of three who defies centuries of gender norms in a manicured corner of French public life. A cause celebre, she remains unrecognized by France’s central Jewish authority. Extremists regularly threaten her on social media.

But what is perhaps most scandalous about “Madame le Rabbin,” as she is often called, transcends Jewish politics. Unlike the United States, France is a staunchly secular country that expressly bans religion from public life. In violation of that long-standing separation, Horvilleur is insisting that religion should play a role in this Western society, which is struggling with religious fundamentalism, both foreign and homegrown.

"So many here have the impression that when people want to express their religion, it’s just that we want halal meats or that we don’t want exams on Shabbat. But it’s not that at all,” she said, sipping green tea in the cafe beneath her daughter’s dance studio. “People are in search of a dialogue with their personal identities and how they relate to their identities as a citizen.”

Somewhat distinctly, France expects its citizens to bracket their affiliations with any particular identity group in favor of “the Republic,” an abstract community of equal citizens who bear no difference from one another, at least in theory. To that end, the state refuses to collect data on race, ethnicity or religion — categories that, officially, are not supposed to exist.

Horvilleur takes issue with this line, and her argument is that one can easily be French as well as something else. “I’m Jewish, yes, but I’m not just Jewish — I’m French, a woman, a mother, many things. Whenever I say that, people always tell me, ‘Ah, what courage!’ And that just shows you how much work there is to do.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/in-secular-france-a-woman-rabbi-dares-to-bring-religion-into-public-life/2017/11/18/006f8066-ca0a-11e7-b506-8a10ed11ecf5_story.html