Rediscovering the First Woman Rabbi

Ordained in 1935, Regina Jonas died at Auschwitz. Now, she’s being honored.

By Laura Geller for Tablet Magazine

Judaism acknowledges the day of one’s death and not one’s birthday. It makes a certain kind of sense: You can only really measure the impact of a person’s life after it is over. But what if we don’t know the date of a yahrzeit? That is what happened to the first woman rabbi, Regina Jonas, who was deported from Terezin on October 12, 1944, and arrived at Auschwitz on October 14. It was Shabbat, Shabbat Bereshit, which this year falls on Oct. 18. After that there is no record of her.

It is time to honor her memory. That’s why a growing number of rabbis and Jewish leaders have designated this Shabbat, Oct. 18, as her yahrzeit and will say kaddish for her.

Born in Berlin in 1902 into a poor Orthodox Jewish family, Jonas was influenced by her rabbi, Dr. Max Weil, who, though Orthodox, allowed girls to become bat mitzvah. At his urging, Jonas continued her studies at the liberal Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin from 1924 to 1930. All the other women in her classes were there to become teachers; Jonas, like the men she studied with, wanted to become a rabbi. Her primary supporter was Rabbi Eduard Baneth, who was determined to ordain her, but died just before she finished her training. Though her thesis—“Can a Woman Be a Rabbi According to Halachic Sources?”—received praise from her teachers, none of them agreed to ordain her, including Rabbi Leo Baeck, the leader of the Jews in Germany, who wasn’t willing to jeopardize the unity of the Jewish community as the Nazi threat was intensifying.

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The Convict Synagogue at the End of the World

Australia’s oldest temple was built by Jewish penal colony prisoners in 1845

By Mark I. Pinsky for Tablet Magazine

As Jews around the world gathered earlier this fall to observe the High Holidays, few houses of worship rivaled the exotic history of the Hobart Synagogue in Tasmania, the remote island state off Australia’s southern coast. Here, no tickets were required for seats. Just 25 people attended lay-led Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services in a sanctuary that seats 150. This faithful—if disputatious—remnant clings tenaciously to Judaism at the farthest fringes of the diaspora.

“There’s a determination among a number of us, a dozen or so only, to make sure that there is a continuing congregational life,” Tony O’Brien, on of the synagogue’s lay leaders, told me last summer. One congregational history, he noted, was titled Survival Against All Odds. “What animates us is a determination that Judaism will survive ‘against all odds’ as a living community in this island at the end of the earth, as some have called it.”

The oldest surviving synagogue in Australia was built by Jews who were former convicts in the bleak, infamous penal colony. There was special seating—numbered benches—in the sanctuary for those co-religionists who were still in bondage, some in chains. Being excused from work on Saturdays and given a home-cooked meal helped encourage piety and filled the pews in the 19th century.

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Rachel Shabi’s Mizrahi post-Zionism: a Critique

By Lyn Julius for fathomjournal.org

Historian Rachel Shabi and a group of other post-Zionists have tried to use historical prejudice against Mizrahim—i.e., Jews of North African and Middle Eastern origin—to undermine Zionism. In her view, Mizrahi Jews are really “Jewish Arabs” who ought to make common cause with Palestinians against the state of Israel. Although ethnic prejudice and discriminatory policies have certainly existed in Israel, Shabi exaggerates them wildly, fails to understand then in their historical context, and idealizes Jewish-Muslim coexistence in the Arab world beyond all recognition. She also, writes Lyn Julius, ignores the fact that this prejudice is largely a thing of the past:

Although it was . . . a struggling developing country, Israel took in the stateless, the destitute, the sick, and the elderly—because they were Jews. . . . . Today Mizrahim are generals, doctors, property developers, bank managers, and have held every government post except prime minister. Most importantly—a hugely significant fact that Shabi simply glosses over—intermarriage [with Ashkenazi Jews] is running at 25 per cent, and the mixed Israeli family is fast becoming the norm. Soon there will be no such thing as Mizrahi or Ashkenazi in the Israeli melting pot.

Shabi’s nostalgia trip to a world before Zionism leads her up a blind alley. She confuses the interpersonal with the political: good neighborliness with the (unequal) power relationship between Jews and Arabs. An overlap of culture and language with Arabs over 14 centuries did not protect Mizrahim from pogroms, dispossession, and expulsion, to the point where fewer than 5,000 Jews live in Arab countries today, out of a 1948 population of one million. This is a lesson lost on some who eagerly espouse Arab-Israeli coexistence projects.


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A modest proposal for women’s conversion

By Michal Tikochinsky for The Times of Israel




The arrest of an American rabbi on suspicion of filming women in various stages of undress at a ritual bath has raised calls to banish men from this unique women’s space. While routine immersions of women in a mikveh for purposes of ritual purity are overseen by women, when a woman immerses as part of her conversion, the ratification of a Beit Din (religious court) is necessary. While I am not an expert on how such procedures are conducted in the United States, I do know how they are conducted in Israel, and it is high time for a change.

As described on the ITIM website, when a woman immerses as part of a conversion ceremony, she immerses once in the regular manner, observed by a woman. She then comes out of the water, puts on a long, dark, wide robe that allows water to permeate but still ensures that she is modestly dressed, and re-enters the water. Three male religious court judges (dayanim), who constitute a Beit Din for the purposes of immersion, then enter the room and ask her questions about Judaism while she stands in the water. After she has answered their questions, these men, who are usually not the same rabbis who served on the religious court that tested her for the purpose of conversion, ask her to recite the first line of Shema Yisrael and to repeat the acceptance of the yoke of mitzvot that she recited in the presence of the conversion court. They then watch as she immerses a second time, after which they announce her new Hebrew name and welcome her to the Jewish people.

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