and, with a grant from the Sol Goldman Charitable trust, the bimah and vestibule were refurbished. Membership had increased to almost 200 families by 1995, and in 1996 Samuel H. Weintraub was hired as rabbi. Increasing involvement of women In 1961 the synagogue began granting women some pulpit honors, giving the Sisterhood President gelila, and in 1966 granting married couples hagbaha and gelila (the honors of lifting and re-wrapping the Torah after it has been read). In the 1970s, women became more involved in the synagogue's political and religious activities: in 1972, the first woman was elected to the board of trustees, and in 1975, the congregation began calling women to the Torah and counting women in the minyan, the latter just two years after the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Rabbinical Assembly voted nine to four in favor of this innovation. In 1980, Nancy Fink, a Brooklyn Law School professor, was elected as the congregation's first female president. Fink called a full membership meeting in 1982 to decide whether women could lead the services, blow the shofar (the rams-horn trumpet blown on the High Holidays), and whether daughters of kohanim (hereditary priests) could give the priestly blessing. Advised by Scheindlin, the congregation decided to make the services fully egalitarian, allowing women to perform all three functions. Baith Israel Anshei Emes' move to egalitarianism culminated in August 1988, when Debra Cantor was hired as its first female rabbi, making it the first synagogue in the Northeastern United States to be led by a woman. Cantor, who was 33 at the time, had been valedictorian of that year's graduating class at the Jewish Theological Seminary. The decision was not accepted by all congregants; the Conservative movement had ordained its first female rabbi, Amy Eilberg, only three years before, in 1985, and following Cantor's appointment a number of families left the synagogue to form B'nai Avraham, an Orthodox congregation in Brooklyn Heights. 21st century In 2002 Congregation Baith Israel Anshei Emes received a $1 million grant for building renovations from Lillian Goldman, just weeks before her death; she had previously donated $20 million for the reconstruction and expansion of Yale Law School's library, and $5 million to Manhattan's 92nd Street Y for a family center there. After raising over $2 million more, including a $54,000 grant from the Jewish Communal Fund, in 2003 the congregation began re-building the three