Rachelle Fraenkel

Rachelle Fraenkel is the Dean of Students at Nishmat, The Jeanie Schottenstein Center for Advanced Torah Study for Women, and a teacher at Matan Women's Institute for Torah Studies who became an international speaker after her son, Naftali Fraenkel, was kidnapped and murdered along with two other Israeli teens in 2014. She lives in Nof Ayalon, Israel, and received a B.A. in Biology from Bar Ilan University.[1] At Matan, she teaches Talmud and Jewish law. She serves as a halakhic advisor for families observing the rabbinic laws of niddah (menstrual purity).[2] Rachelle was in the first graduating class of Matan's Advanced Talmud Institute and she is the director of Matan's new Hilkhata Institute (Advanced Halakha Program).[3]

She received press attention for her response to the crime and her visit to the parents of a Palestinian victim. She was invited to speak at the United Nations Human Rights Council.[4] According to the New York Times, "She has become an international public figure, traveling to Geneva to speak to a United Nations committee, giving television interviews, meeting Israel's president and prime minister."[5]

At her son's funeral, Ha'aretz reported: "When Rachelle Fraenkel recited the Kaddish, the chief rabbi said 'Amen': The Mourner's Kaddish has never before been recited in public in Israel by an Orthodox woman of such stature and in front of cameras."[6] (In general, women do not publicly recite the mourner's Kaddish prayer in Orthodox liturgy.) The article said:

Rachelle Fraenkel became a public leader, a national heroine and, just as important, a religious heroine as well, over the 18 days that her son and his friends were missing. Both men and women looked up to her because of her restraint, her faith and the profound statements she made about the prayers being offered for the three boys’ return. Her statement to the teenage girls praying with her at the Western Wall that, "God is not our servant," revealed a new religious language.[6]

In November 2014, she spoke at an alternative rally in Tel Aviv commemorating the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.[7]

On January 1, 2015, a new $25,000 Israeli Unity Prize was announced in memory of the slain teenagers, with Fraenkel as one of the prize judges.[8]

Speeches and writing

References

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