Finally -- Women's Voices Ring Out on Eldridge Street

A year ago, singer Elizabeth Schwartz was booked with her klezmer band, Hot Pstromi, for a gig at the Eldridge Street Synagogue on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Then organizers realized that she wasn't allowed to sing.

The synagogue observes kol ishah, a practice which, among some groups of ultra-Orthodox Jews, prohibits men from listening to women sing, for fear it might lead to inappropriate behavior.

The show went on without her. But Hanna Griff, the Eldridge Street Project's program director, was determined to find a way to bend the rules. She decided that Rosh Hodesh, the festival of the new moon, was the perfect Occasion to give women the opportunity they deserved.

So on April 6, 2003, for the first...