Women Need to Sit in the Hallways at Shul

From the COLlive Inbox: "Picture a shul on Rosh Hashanah. The men are davening. The women are inside too, trying to catch Mussaf between babies and bathroom trips and finding someone’s missing machzor. And the kids? They’re everywhere."

By Anonymous

Picture a shul on Rosh Hashanah. The men are davening. The women are inside too, trying to catch Mussaf between babies and bathroom trips and finding someone’s missing machzor.

And the kids? They’re everywhere. Downstairs. Upstairs. Outside. Back inside. Running to the kiddush room. Looking for candy. Playing hide-and-seek. Walking through hallways that twist and turn into rooms and coatrooms and stairwells and corners nobody can see. It’s all part of the sweetness of shul.

And I don’t think we can afford to be casual about it anymore. And with Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkos coming; hours and hours and hours of shul time, I need to say something that perhaps should have been obvious all along: We need adults in the hallways.

Maybe women need to sit in the hallways at shul. Maybe communities need designated hallway monitors. Maybe shuls need to actually create child-safety plans instead of assuming that because there are 300 adults somewhere in the building, our children are being supervised. Because 300 adults in a building is not the same thing as one adult watching the hallway.

We understand this concept when the threat comes from the outside. We hire security guards. We lock doors. We install cameras. We worry about antisemitic violence. We teach our children not to run into parking lots. We make plans for emergencies. We know which doors should remain locked and who is allowed into the building. But security also means protecting children from what can happen inside our buildings.

And that kind of danger doesn’t necessarily look dangerous. People who abuse children are often people children know and trust. They can be relatives, family friends, older community members, and other familiar people. They can be teenagers and they can be peers. Most of the time, they don’t look like predators at all.

Sometimes danger looks completely normal. Which is precisely why our systems have to be better than our instincts. This isn’t about becoming paranoid. It’s about becoming awake.
Before Shul, Have the Conversation. Put body safety into the same category as every other safety conversation.

We can tell our children:
“Before we go to shul, let’s remember our safety rules. We don’t run into the parking lot because of cars. We don’t leave the building without Mommy/Ima or Tatty/Abba knowing. We don’t go somewhere private or hidden with another person without checking with a parent first. If someone offers you something and asks you to come somewhere with them, you come ask us first. Always.”

And then:
“If anybody ever asks you to keep something about touching, your body, or something that made you uncomfortable a secret from us, you can always tell us. Even if it’s a grown-up. Even if it’s a kid. Even if it’s someone you really like. Even if they told you you’d get in trouble.”

And perhaps most importantly:
“You will never, ever be in trouble for telling us.”

These shouldn’t be conversations we have once after hearing a horrifying story. They should be boring. Normal and repeated. Like looking both ways before crossing the street.

And Girls Sticking Together Isn’t a Safety Plan.
I hear this one a lot: The girls are together.

But children supervising children is not adult supervision. Neither is “there are always people around.” There are people around until there aren’t. There is a group until one child needs the bathroom. There are four girls until someone says, “Come, I want to show you something.” There are children playing together until two disappear around a corner.

And this isn’t only about girls. Boys need these conversations and protections too. We cannot put the responsibility for preventing sexual abuse onto children. We can teach them boundaries. We can give them language. We can tell them to stick together. The adults are responsible for creating the safe environment.

So maybe this Yom Tov, somebody misses a little davening. Maybe shuls make a rotation. Twenty minutes in the hallway. Twenty minutes near the bathrooms. Twenty minutes walking the stairs and checking the quieter spaces. The corners everyone misses.

Not because we suspect everyone, but because children deserve to be in spaces created with their safety in mind.

If your child ever tells you that somebody touched them, showed them something, asked them to do something, or behaved toward them in a way that felt wrong: Try to keep your body calm. Even if internally you are absolutely not calm. Don’t interrogate them.

Don’t ask the same question fifteen different ways because your own brain is desperately trying to understand what happened. Just listen and let them use their own words.

Tell them: “I believe you. I’m so glad you told me. You are not in trouble. This is not your fault.” Tell them you’re going to help keep them safe.

Then get professional guidance. Guidance for responding to a child’s admission specifically recommends remaining calm, taking the child seriously, avoiding leading or pressuring questions, and allowing trained professionals to conduct the detailed interviewing that may be necessary. Parents are supposed to be parents in that moment.

Contact an appropriate professional: your pediatrician, an organization specializing in this, a clinician trained specifically in child sexual abuse, child protective services or law enforcement when appropriate. Reporting requirements differ by jurisdiction and by a person’s role, so don’t rely on communal rumor to decide what the law requires.

Most importantly, protecting an adult’s reputation cannot be part of the calculation of whether we protect a child.

It is 2026. We have to be finished with the reflex that asks first: But who was it? What will happen to their family? Are we sure? Do we really want this getting out? Maybe there was a misunderstanding? Come on, it can’t be.

A child’s safety is not less sacred than an adult’s name. And believing a child enough to protect them and involve the appropriate professionals is not the same thing as conducting a public trial in the shul lobby.

We’re about to spend an extraordinary number of hours inside our shuls. We will ask Hashem for another year of life. We will ask Him to protect us.We will stand before the Aron Kodesh and say Avinu Malkeinu.

Our Father. Our King. Protect us, guard us. Have mercy on us. Maybe part of asking Hashem to protect our children is being willing to become part of the protection. Maybe teshuvah sometimes looks less mystical than we’d like.

Maybe sometimes it looks like a mother sitting on a folding chair in a hallway while everyone else is saying Tehillim. Maybe it looks like a father getting up in the middle of Mussaf to check where his kids actually are.

Maybe it looks like a shul board saying: Whose responsibility are the children in this building for the next four hours?

Maybe it looks like having one uncomfortable conversation at breakfast before leaving for shul.

We don’t need to make our children afraid of the world. I desperately don’t want that. I want our children running through shul hallways. I want them stealing candy and making up games and finding their friends and growing up remembering Yom Tov as noisy and fun and safe.

I just want us in the hallways with them. Watching, knowing, and protecting.

Because if we can put someone at the front door to protect our children from the dangers outside, we can put someone in the hallway to protect them from the dangers within them.

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