Jewish religious law has historically excluded women's voices from prayer services in the synagogue, based on the Talmudic injunction, "kol b'ishah ervah" ("a woman's voice is erotic by nature"). In part because of such legal restrictions, formal liturgical education and performance became gendered in Jewish communities, including those of the Middle East. In the case of Sephardic Jewry in the Ottoman empire, for example, male children generally attended Talmud Torah religious schools to learn Hebrew scripture and liturgical leadership, while girls learned Ladino songs orally from their mothers and grandmothers. Until recently, ethnomusicological scholarship has likewise separated such gendered music-making into two distinct categories: male music as Hebrew-liturgical-literate and female music as Ladino-folk-oral. This paper will join a growing body of literature challenging the strict gender dichotomy in past scholarship on Jewish religious music-making, drawing upon fieldwork conducted in Istanbul in 2005-06 and the potentiality of new ethnographic sources, such as oral history, to complicate our musical and historical understandings. Specifically, the testimony of a musically adept Jewish woman growing up in 1930s Istanbul, Janti Behar, confirms the participation of Jewish girls and women in musical life on the street, in homes and from tree perches, exposed to and learning the ambient Turkish art music forms underpinning Hebrew-language religious music sung in synagogues. Further, early 20th century memoirs provide detail about diverse live 'alaturka' (Turkish style) music-making and lessons in Jewish homes, activities that girls, mothers and other female relatives joined in. It is through clear evidence of Jewish participation, both male and female, in so-called 'non-Jewish' music that breaks down the Hebrew/male vs. Ladino/female dichotomy, suggesting a more generative distinction between Hebrew-language and Turkish-language art music. With this alternative distinction in mind, we can understand how Janti Behar acquired the broader musical forms of which Hebrew religious music was a part, enabling a measure of in-synagogue performance as a girl, as well as an opportunity to make a record of Turkish art music. This paper will analyze Janti Behar's musical life outside of the conventional gendering of Jewish religious music, contextualizing it in her Istanbul neighborhood and home-life of the mid-20th century, and articulating the musical distinctions between a girlhood and womanhood lived within communal restraints and a changing Turkish society.