Yes, Virginia, There Are Jews in Taiwan (But, Alas, Not Many of Them!)

Since I made a decision to pursue English language teaching in Taiwan, a number of my friends have asked about the existence and extent of Jewish life there. Luckily, a friend was kind enough yesterday to supply this article from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency regarding the Jewish community of Taiwan:

http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/news/article/20070930taiwanjews.html

From what I gather, the community in Taipei is small but still managing to hold on. I also gather, however, that the congregation is Orthodox--the article refers specfically to eight men, not eight people, choosing to daven (pray) despite the absence of a minyan (the required prayer quorum--ten men in the most traditional circles, ten adult Jews elsewhere).

I am unsure how much use I will make of this community in Taipei. On the one hand, it is comforting to know there will be someplace to go for the High Holidays (assuming I make it through a full year contract) and Passover. On the other, I am aggressively uncomfortable praying in a community that is not fully egalitarian. Granted, the same might be said of the average Conservative synagogue, given that the Conservative Movement has yet to accept patrilineality or to create a truly egalitarian divorce procedure (funny, isn't it, how the things that take place in public--communal worship and b'nei mitzvot, are fully egalitarian, but things that take place in the rabbi's study still are not). But at least the Conservative congregation I belong to in New York does not feel un-egalitarian, since it has no mechitzah (barrier separating men and women in worship).

I read a piece recently about what is called, tongue-in-cheek, a trichetzah--a mechitzah that separates worshippers into three groupings: men, women, and mixed. This arrangement, found in some "Traditional" congregations in the United States as well as in some areas where Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews have to find some means of achieving peace within one congregations, is supposed to solve the inequality created by a mechitzah. I actually find the trichitzah more offensive, because it solves the problems Orthodox people have coming into such a community while not taking equally seriously the feelings of egalitarian-minded Jews. In a trichitzah set-up, all of the important parts of the service, particularly the Torah reading, still happen on the men's side. So a trichitzah can't satisfy my unwillingness to worship in an environment where women cannot read publicly from the Torah, have aliyot (the ritual honor of being called up to recite a blessing over the Torah), or otherwise stand on the bima (the raised platform from which the Torah is read). In other words, the trichitzah fails to recognize that, for everyone to the left of Modern Orthodoxy, egalitarianism is not simply a preference for husbands and wives to sit together, but a serious ethical and moral issue.

Well...enough of me on my soapbox. I need to do some reading.