Rabbi Charley Baginsky - 25/09/2026

A few days ago I opened a newspaper and saw a photograph of myself that had been altered. My neckline had been raised. More of my chest had been covered.

It was a small thing, compared with the stories behind this week’s Government focus on misogyny and violence against women and girls. But it caught me because it felt so familiar, somebody else deciding what a woman’s body should look like in public. The figures are harder to look away from. In England and Wales, one in eight women experienced domestic abuse, sexual assault or stalking in a single year.

Jewish women are part of those statistics. Jewish Women’s Aid supports hundreds of women and girls each year. And for Jewish women in public life, misogyny and antisemitism can arrive together; abuse about our bodies, our authority, our Jewishness. I knew that long before I had language for it. As a young woman, where to stand on the train, whether the hand was accidental, whether to turn round, whether to ignore the comment, whether walking home alone was sensible.

Then I became a rabbi and discovered another set of calculations - too loud, too emotional, too ambitious, too visible and always, somewhere, the fact of being a woman before the fact of being a rabbi. Now I am the mother of teenagers, and I wonder how much has really changed, for our daughters, and in what our sons are learning to notice, challenge and change.

This evening as night falls the Jewish festival of Sukkot begins. For a week, Jews leave the security of our houses and sit in a structure that is deliberately flimsy. A sukkah is a peculiar kind of protection. It has walls, but not very good ones. The roof is made of branches and must remain open enough to the world around it. You are sheltered but never sealed away.
And perhaps that matters here. Because too often the response to danger is to restrict the person at risk.

Cover more. Don’t walk there. Don’t travel alone. Don’t draw attention. Make yourself smaller. Jewish tradition gives us another image. Build protection, yes, but not at the cost of the life being lived inside it.

That feels like the challenge for women right now. To build something safer for our daughters without narrowing their lives. And to raise our sons understanding that safety is not something women should have to manufacture for themselves.Instead of the creation of a world in which women are edited into acceptability, a world in which we get to remain fully ourselves.