Chana Safrai

Chana Safrai was born in 1946 in Jerusalem

Chana Safrai was born in Jerusalem in 1946 to Chaya and Shmuel Safrai, a historian at the Hebrew University. She grew up in an Orthodox family in the Etz Hayyim neighborhood and studied at the Horeb School. Her father encouraged her to study Jewish texts from a young age.

She studied classics and Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and taught there for several years. She later lived in the Netherlands, where she completed a doctorate on women in the Temple in Jerusalem. She served as a professor at Utrecht University.

Safrai headed the Judith Lieberman Institute, which opened the study of the Oral Torah to adult women. Back in Israel she taught at the Hebrew University and Hebrew Union College, and was a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute until 2006. She also served as acting principal of Pelech, a religious girls' high school in Jerusalem.

She was active in Ne'emanei Torah Va'Avodah and Kolech, writing weekly Torah commentaries with a focus on women. She worked in Jewish-Christian dialogue and sat on Protestant church bodies in Germany's Rhineland. With her father and brother Ze'ev, she wrote a commentary on the Mishnah.

In 2008 she received the Association for Civil Rights in Israel award. She never married. She died of cancer in February 2008 and was buried at Har HaMenuchot.