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As feminist conversations evolved, it was perhaps only a matter of time before Orthodox feminists decided they needed more. Orthodox feminists debated these issues for many years, negotiating a delicate dance of movement towards change and desire to remain “within” their traditional communities, institutions, and practices.

For several years, a variety of groups of men and women—precursors to the Partnership Minyan—quietly and privately made changes. A group called the Leader Minyan, in which women read from the Torah and led parts of the service, met monthly in Jerusalem. A handful of communities, such as at Pardes and Yedidya in Jerusalem, as well as small groups elsewhere in private homes, experimented with allowing women to lead Friday night Kabbalat Shabbat (Friday night psalms).

Then, in 2002, Orthodox feminists in two locations, unbeknownst to each other, decided to make more public steps towards communal change. The new Orthodox congregations they created—Darkhei Noam in New York and Shira Hadasha in Jerusalem (started by Orthodox feminist scholar Dr. Tova Hartman)—are based on a new model for women’s inclusion that seeks to make changes within communities of both women and men without sending women to a separate room, while maximizing women’s participation in services without violating the perceived letter of the halakhic law.

These communities enhance women’s participation in four main ways:   

1. Moving the partition. They change the shape of the sanctuary to be more egalitarian without removing the partition entirely, so that women and men sit side by side.
2. Placing the bimah in the middle. They place the bimah in the center under the partition so that people can access it from both sides of the partition.
3. Women leading certain parts of services. Women are allowed—and in some cases invited—to lead the parts of the services that are not considered to need a minyan (that is, parts that do not have “holy bits,” so that historically even boys under the age of Lit. "son of the commandment." A boy who has reached legal-religious maturity and is now obligated to fulfill the commandmentsbar mitzvah could fulfill those roles). The parts of the service that women can recite include:
   • Kabbalat Shabbat
   • The blessings upon awakening
   • Pesukei D’zimra (Psalms)
   • Torah chanting and Haftara chanting
   • Blessings on the Torah chanting (except the first two, Cohen and Levi) and on Haftara chanting (aliyot)
   • Blessings for the State of Israel, for the sick, etc. (Mi Sh’berach)
   • Blessings on the New Moon
   • Removing and replacing the Torah in the Ark
   • End-of-service passages (An’im Zemirot, Aleinu, etc.)
4. Women taking other leadership roles. Women are allowed to take on non-ritualistic roles as well, such as giving a sermon and serving as synagogue president.

Immediately following the opening of these two congregations—which shortly thereafter were dubbed “Partnership Minyan” in the Orthodox feminist community (Trachtman 2010)—the model sprouted new synagogues around the world, including in North America, Europe, Israel, and Australia. As these minyanim grew and spread, new customs evolved, such as women saying Hallel (the special prayer recited on holidays and the New Moon), women leading Friday night Ma’ariv (evening service), women blowing the Ram's horn blown during the month before and the two days of Rosh Ha-Shanah, and at the conclusion of Yom Kippur. shofar, or women reciting Kol Nidrei or Selichot (prayers of penitence) during the High Holidays.

Although there are some minor divergences between congregations—some wait for ten women before starting services, in addition to the traditional quorum of ten men; some do not allow women to recite Ma’ariv or Hallel; some use the word “Orthodox” to define themselves and some prefer “halakhic”—most of the core practices are consistent among the communities, even ones as distant from each other as Melbourne, Australia, and New York City. In addition, many partnership minyanim stand independently of communal rabbinic establishment. Most do not have official rabbis on staff, and some, such as Darkhei Noam in New York, Darchei Noam in Modi’in, and Shira Hadasha in Jerusalem, have compiled their own lists of halakhic resources .

By 2008, 22 partnership minyanim existed. By 2020, there were at least 83 in five countries, with new groups popping up all the time. An informal survey in 2020 listed 44 partnership minyanim in Israel, spread from North to South, with many in Jerusalem, Modi’in, and Be’er Sheva. According to the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, there are 31 in America, two in Australia, one in Canada, and five in the United Kingdom. These numbers are not exact, because no official network or umbrella organization joins these groups. Several small conferences have been  dedicated to exploring the phenomenon, and a Hebrew Facebook page exists, but it is not a movement or a denomination, nor are the congregations connected in any formal way. No official rules come from an overarching body, as in most denominations. Rather, each group emerges on its own from the grass roots. Groups form all the time, and without a central mechanism for tracking these formations, the information remains incomplete.

From the beginning, the model of the Partnership Minyan attracted both support and opposition from the Orthodox establishment. Halakhic arguments in favor began in the late 1990s, when Mendel Shapiro, a Jerusalem lawyer and non-practicing Orthodox rabbi, wrote an article about the halakhah of women and Torah reading, which became the legalistic blueprint for Shira Hadasha. Shapiro’s article—which was widely and excitedly circulated in the Orthodox feminist community before being published in the Edah Journal—challenged the most basic gender assumptions of Orthodox worship and paved the way for the events that followed (Shapiro 2001). His rationale revolved around a passage in the Babylonian Talmud (Megillah 23a) that reads: “All may be numbered among the seven [who are called to the Torah on Shabbat], even a minor and even a woman, but the Sages said: a woman is not to read from the Torah on account kevod ha-tsibur, dignity of the congregation.” Shapiro, arguing that there is no essential halakhic opposition to women’s leading parts of the service, worked to break not halakhah per se but rather Orthodox communal taboos. 

When Shapiro’s article was published in 2001, it appeared alongside an article opposing the partnership model. While written by an Orthodox rabbi, Yehuda Henkin, it rests not on any essential halakhic opposition but rather on an unabashedly sociological argument: “[W]omen’s aliyot remain outside the consensus, and a congregation that institutes them is not Orthodox in name and will not long remain Orthodox in practice. In my judgment, this is an accurate statement now and for the foreseeable future, and I see no point in arguing about it” (Trachtman 2010).

Rabbinic scholar Rabbi Dr. Daniel Sperber responded with a more elaborate halakhic justification for the partnership model; as a result, he became the spiritual adviser for many partnership communities around the world—and was publicly shamed by some Orthodox rabbis for daring to support women’s inclusion (Sperber 2002). Sperber contended that some rabbis were against women’s participation not because of halakhah per se, “but rather a sense of ingrained conservatism, naturally suspicious of change…. It upsets the received religious order,….the prevailing attitude in the Orthodox community that refuses to tolerate innovative practices simply because they fail to conform to social convention.” He concluded that “in those communities where it is agreed that change within the normative halakhic framework should take place and that the absence of such change will be a source of pain and suffering to an important segment of the community, the principle of kevod ha-beriyot [human dignity] overcomes the stated principle of kevod ha-tsibur [congregational dignity" (Sztokman 2011; 21).

Orthodox feminist professor of Jewish philosophy Tamar Ross has expanded on Rabbi Sperber’s approach, arguing that women’s inclusion is not only permissible, it is the embodiment of Torah values. “Our understanding of the meaning of these texts is inevitably affected by the context in which they are read, so that greater attention to the newfound moral sensibilities with regard to women need not be regarded with suspicion; to the contrary, it bears promise of enriching our understanding of Torah” (Trachtman 2010, 23).

Although many Orthodox rabbis have opposed the partnership model over the years—deriding it as against halakhah because it is “radical feminism,” calling it “an innovation too far,” or describing it as “Reform in the name of halakhah”—most partnership minyanim have continued undeterred (Trachtman 2010). In some smaller communities, however, the partnership minyan has had to close due to rabbinic and communal pressure.  

The complicated response to the partnership minyan can be seen in the experiences of Michal and Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal. In 2008, Michal, then a doctoral student in religion at Yale University, and her husband Elitzur, then a doctoral student in linguistics at Harvard University, were influential in starting a partnership synagogue in New Haven, Connecticut. The opposition was quick to come. Elitzur faced the threat of excommunication by local rabbis, which meant that for a time he was not allowed to be called up to the Torah in some other local synagogues. Approaching one of the rabbis who called for his excommunication, he called for an open discussion, which led to a public discussion about halakhah. The opposition eventually waned and the New Haven partnership synagogue strengthened and grew. The couple traveled around the United States as halakhic advisors for partnership minyanim and co-published a pamphlet, “A Guide to the Halakhic Minyanim,” in Hebrew and English, the first halakhic guidebook for partnership synagogues. After they completed their doctorates, they moved to Israel and became active in a partnership minyan there. 

Interestingly, the minyanim are not evenly dispersed but rather clustered in certain regions. Many exist in places like New York and Jerusalem, and yet they are completely absent elsewhere, even in places with large Jewish populations, such as Florida. Many college campuses are home to partnership minyanim.

Recently, a new grass-roots movement has developed of “Independent Minyanim” that do not officially belong to any of the traditional movements. An online, informal list of independent minyanim includes egalitarian-oriented groups both with and without a partition and some counting women for a quorum. This is the first time Orthodox and non-Orthodox synagogues are grouped together under one umbrella—that is, the Partnership Minyanim, which for the most part consider themselves Orthodox, are clustered with other congregations as part of a movement to redefine denominational boundaries and identify a grass-roots communal drive for halakhically based, gender-sensitive, free-thinking communities that are not bound by top-down conventions or customs that seem archaic and unnecessary. This trend could signal the creation of a new movement that exists in the seams between Orthodoxy and Conservative Judaism, a movement on the margins that is changing the way Jewish communities define themselves

According to William Kaplowitz, who researched the sprawl of partnership minyanim for his master’s thesis, the partnership minyan is a culture that is transferred from place to place one person at a time as a result of individuals’ powerful need to have this cultural option where they live. In other words, the model is a reflection of committed individuals’—both women and men—vital role in establishing, sustaining, and transporting the culture (Kaplowitz 2008).

Interviews with over fifty men who participate in partnership minyanim reveal that men are often the movers and shakers behind the establishment of these synagogues—sometimes for feminist motives, but often out of other personal motives and desires to see change in Orthodox norms and practices not only for women but for the socialization into masculinity (Sztokman 2011).

Over the years, many people have written about the powerful impact of their participation in these minyanim, whether they join out of feminist ideology, other motives, or by accident. British Orthodox feminist Sally Berkovic writes that “Partnership minyanim allow young girls to see a different kind of modelling about Jewish ritual life and their right to claim public space” (2019). An Israeli woman described accidentally coming to a place where she heard a woman lead services for the first time, and “shaking with excitement” (Chomsky 2014).