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I need to start by saying I am not Jewish, and I am well aware that even well-meaning people often get things very, very wrong when they discuss a religion that is not their own. I can only say that my intent is to be respectful of a religious tradition that is both beautiful and astonishingly long-lasting. I hope I can do it justice.
Why Women Weren’t Rabbis
The foundational texts of Judaism are full of women. I don’t mean to say that women get equal billing. But in a world in which women have to be grateful if we are mentioned at all, the Hebrew Bible has a higher than usual proportion of named women. Many of these are familiar to a Christian and Muslim audience because there is significant overlap in our oldest scriptures. Stories of Eve, Sarah, Leah, Rebekah, and many others are taught in religious lessons all over the world. Historically, all of those women are difficult to deal with because the written records that survive are from many, many years after these women lived.
By the time we have contemporary written records, Judaism was like many other great religions in that authority was mostly reserved for men. Jewish communities were led by rabbis who were ordained in a formal ceremony that started when Moses laid his hands on Joshua’s head and gave him authority to lead the people. Ancient ordinations were intended to keep that unbroken line of authority alive (Numbers 27:5-23).
But this form of ordination was broken with the scattering of the Jewish people in the first few centuries of the common era. In more modern times, the ordination if a rabbi is done after the completion of serious study and after an examination on a question of Jewish law. The exam is meant to prove that you know the scriptures and the law well enough judge on questions of Jewish law and to lead a religious community.
For many centuries, no woman was ever ordained because no girls ever received the necessary schooling. You can’t pass an exam that no one prepares you for. The 19ᵗʰ century saw an enormous rise in the idea of formal women’s education, and Jewish women were no exception. By the early 20th century, there were girls and women who studied the Torah and the Talmud alongside their male counterparts.
Being allowed to take the classes is one thing. Being allowed to take the exam is something else. Being allowed to pass the exam is still another hurdle. Finding someone willing to employ you afterwards might be even harder. Women in many fields found that successfully jumping through one hoop, only meant they could more clearly see the next hoop that still needed jumping through. There was no great clamoring in the Jewish community for female rabbis, and there were none.
Regina Jonas, a Rabbi in Training
This was the situation when Regina Jonas was born on August 3, 1902, in Berlin. She was raised as a devout Jew, and her dearest dream was to be a rabbi. I am sorry to say that I do not know how she came to this dream, but it certainly wasn’t by watching a female role model. Nevertheless, this was what she wanted to do.
From 1924 to 1930, she attended the Academy for the Science of Judaism and received the same education that men who were preparing for ordination received. She was not the only woman there. There were twenty-six others in her class (Sarah, 91).
It is significant here that Regina was not a member of Reform Judaism. At the time, this was a fairly new division within Judaism, and they believed in relaxing traditional Jewish law on some issues. It might have been easier to be ordained in a Reform synagogue, but Regina did not believe in relaxing Jewish law. She was a strict adherent of the law. Being ordained as an Orthodox rabbi was probably not going to happen, but she thought she might in Liberal Judaism. As befits the name, Liberal Jews were more progressive and flexible than the Orthodox, but they still believed in upholding Jewish law.
Regina’s goal was to prove that a woman rabbi was not in contradiction of Jewish law. The law did not need reform or relaxing because it already allowed for women as rabbis. Her thesis at the end of her schooling was entitled “Can Women Serve as Rabbis?”
Remember, the point here is to prove that you can judge well on a point of Jewish law, and this was the point she chose to argue.
Her thesis points out that nowhere in all the Jewish literature, including the Torah and the Talmud, was there any rule against women becoming rabbis (Silverman, 88). It simply wasn’t mentioned. No female rabbi authored any of that text or was quoted in it.
A traditional explanation was that rabbi was a public role, and it was men who led public lives. Women were intended to have private lives, taking care of home and family.
Regina answers this objection on several fronts. First, she points to scriptural women who clearly did lead public lives, leading and caring for their people. The seven Talmudic women elevated as prophetesses are Sarah, Miriam, Deborah, Hannah, Abigail, Hulda, and Esther. If any of these women were ordained to their roles, I am unaware of it, but they did fulfill some of the functions of a rabbi.
Regina also points out that in the modern world, women do lead public lives. Women of her time period were earning degrees, pursuing careers, and organizing politically. Both men and women were accustomed to seeing women in the public sphere. The world had changed.
The role of rabbi had also changed. Regina examines a rabbi’s duties in detail and shows that modern rabbis were expected to do things they had not been before, such as teach children, provide spiritual counseling about matters such as birth control and social welfare. These were tasks that women were eminently suitable for. There was even an argument to be made that they could do those tasks better than men. (I am not saying I agree with that argument, but it has been made.)
Regina’s conclusion is that a woman rabbi is both within the traditional law and necessary in the modern world.
I am not clear from my sources whether Regina’s thesis also included another argument, but there was another one that had an impact: Regina was born in 1902. She was 12 when Germany entered World War I and 16 when it ended. Millions of men just barely older than her died in the war or were permanently disabled. This is usually framed in terms of marriage statistics, and it is certainly true that the young Regina does not seem to have pursued marriage as one of her life choices. But it was also true in the workplace. Women were needed in traditionally masculine roles because there weren’t enough men to fill them. This was as true for spiritual leaders as it was for any other career. Likewise, women needed those roles because without husbands available in sufficient quantities, the traditional female roles were impossible for a great many women.
All of this sounds reasonable to me, but reason is never enough to overturn centuries of tradition, and that’s what Regina found too. She had plenty of male support in principle, but in practice, she struggled to find a male rabbi who would agree to ordain her (Sarah, 94).
That is why she was not ordained until five years after her graduation.
Regina Jonas, Rabbi
In 1935, rabbi Max Dienemann did ordain her in a private ceremony (Silverman, 86). She was now qualified.
The Jewish press took note of these astonishing developments, and she was asked to explain it many times. Regina was not particularly interested in being the first woman rabbi, but only in being a rabbi. She told one newspaper editor that she wasn’t sending in a contribution about taking the profession of rabbi because the profession “actually it took me and not the other way round” (Silverman, 107).
She told a Swiss women’s newspaper that “For me it was never about being the first. I wish I had been the hundred thousandth!” (Popkin). She also said, “I came to my profession from a religious conviction that God does not oppress any human being, that therefore the man does not rule the woman or occupy a spiritual position of supremacy over her; I came to it from a view of the final and complete spiritual equality between the sexes, which were created by a just and merciful God” (Silverman, 107).
In any case, she was ordained, and the next step was to find a Jewish community that would accept her as their rabbi. That was not trivial either.
Being Jewish in Germany in the 1930s
By 1935, we can no longer ignore what was going on in the rest of Germany. If you’ve noticed that so far this episode has been heavy on Regina’s ideas and light on personal details about her life, there’s a sad reason for that.
Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. As yet, no one imagined how bad things would get, but plenty of people were worried. A German Jew named Albert Einstein was guest lecturing in the United States when Hitler came to power. Einstein decided not to go home. Later the same year, the family of Anne Frank emigrated to the Netherlands, hoping they’d be safe there.
Regina does not ever appear to have considered leaving. She followed the words of Rabbi Hillel, who lived in the first century BCE. He wrote “Do not separate yourself from the community” (Silverman, 138).
It was Regina’s view that a rabbi’s place was with her people, serving them as best she could through any trial.
So she stayed, and she served, and the bitter twisted truth was that her opportunities to do so only increased as the more prominent and noticeable male rabbis were arrested or killed or killed or forced to flee. Many people who might have balked at the strangeness of a woman rabbi were willing to have her as rabbi when she was the only remaining choice (Sarah, 96).
Another rabbi who stayed as long as he could was Joseph Norden, and there are surviving letters from him to her, including one in which he says he wishes he could marry her. Whether she wished she could marry him, I have not been able to determine. He was arrested and sent to Theresienstadt (Axelrod, 29).
Rabbi Regina in the Concentration Camp
Regina was deported to Theresienstadt herself on November 6, 1942. Before she left Berlin, she was forced to make a list of all her belongings and turn them over to the authorities (Silverman, 146).
Theresienstadt was unique among the camps of the Holocaust. It was not a death camp, in the sense that it had no gas chambers and its ostensible purpose was not to kill people. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t kill people.
The camp the Nazis called Theresienstadt was located in the Czech town of Terezin. It was promoted as spa and retirement home. Elderly Jews from Czechoslovakia, Germany, and Austria were told that it was a safe place to spend the remainder of their lives in comfort. Many of them came willingly, but the promised comfort was an illusion, and they were not allowed to leave.
Theresienstadt was also used as a transit ghetto. It may not have been a death camp per se, but for many people it was only a stop en route to other camps, which were death camps.
And finally, Theresienstadt was used to deceive the international community into believing that there was nothing so very wrong with concentration camps. Before the famous Red Cross inspection, thousands of prisoners were shipped out to prove that it wasn’t overcrowded, everything was cleaned to prove it was sanitary, and cultural activities were planned to prove that everyone was happy and well provided for.
The reality behind the deception was very different. In the early days the nearest train depot was over a mile from the gates. The elderly who came here for their comfortable retirement were forced to walk that distance, carrying everything they owned. On arrival, those belongings were confiscated anyway. The housing facilities were inadequate for the population. People slept in barracks with dozens to a room. The food was minimal, as was the water, the sanitation, and the medical supplies.
In the four years of the camp’s operation, 140,000 people passed through the gates. 34,000 of them died at Theresienstadt. Another 88,000 were transferred from Theresienstadt to other camps, and almost all of those died too. Add the numbers up, and it’s clear that upon entering the gates of Theresienstadt, you had only a small chance of ever walking free again (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum).
One thing they did have at this camp was a strong internal community trying their best to cope. One of the leaders here was Viktor Frankl, who later wrote the very famous book, Man’s Search for Meaning. He does not mention Regina in the book, but many years later he was asked about her, and yes, he remembered her. He said she was “a gifted preacher and speaker” and that she had a “personality with energy.” He could depend on her. He assigned her to a difficult role. She was to meet with the elderly as they arrived at the gates, believing they had reached a safe haven. It was her job to escort them to their sleeping quarters and help them through the bitter shock of adjusting their expectations to the hard reality (Silverman, 146).
We also know that Regina was active as a preacher within Theresienstadt. We do not know all she said, but the Theresienstadt records include lists of Spiritual and Leisure Activities. These people had few resources, but Regina’s knowledge and skill as a public speaker was still in her head, and it was treasured. She is listed as having given lectures with titles like: “Humor in the Talmud,” “From Egypt to Sinai,” “Jewish Religion and the Modern Jew,” “The Content and Meaning of Prayer, “Father and Mother Problems in the Bible,” “Woman in the Bible,” “Woman in the Talmud,” “The Position of Woman in Jewish History,” and many others (Silverman, 147).
We do have the notes in her handwriting made for one of these lectures. Part of it says:
“Our Jewish people has been defined in history by God as being blessed. To be ‘blessed’ by God means to bless, to do good, and be loyal to others wherever one goes and in every situation. Humility before God, selfless devoted love to his creatures, preserves the world. It is the task of all Israel to build these foundations for the world—man and woman, woman and man are obligated as Jews to carry out this duty in equal measure. This ideal is served by our grave work at Theresienstadt, which puts us to the test as servants of God, and as such we turn from the earthly to the celestial sphere… Upright…men and brave noble women were always the pillars of our people. May we be found worthy by God to be counted in the circle of these men and women” (Silverman, 148-149).
Regina was among the second to last group deported from Theresienstadt. On November 12, 1944, she was sent to Auschwitz. The records are unclear on the timing and details of what happened next (Sarah, 97), but they are crystal clear on the outcome. Regina Jonas did not survive. She died only a few months before the Soviet Red Army arrived to open the gates and set the prisoners free.
Regina, Forgotten and then Rediscovered
With the devastation of the German Jewish community, it is not surprising that Regina Jonas was forgotten. Very few of the people who knew her survived. Many people went right on believing that no woman had ever been ordained as a rabbi. Years later, many people credited Sarah Preisand as the first woman, and she was not ordained until 1972 (Sarah, 91).
It was only after the Berlin wall fell in 1989 that archives in East Germany were opened. In 1991 a Christian feminist theologian Katharina von Kellenbach opened a chest of papers on Jewish women’s history. Among other things, the chest held the papers that Regina had been forced to surrender on her deportation to Theresienstadt. It included her ordination certificate, her school transcripts, her thesis, newspaper articles she wrote and were written about her, and her contract as a rabbi with a Jewish community in Berlin (Silverman, 85; Sarah, 92).
It was Katharina von Kellenbach who tracked down the aging Viktor Frankl and asked if he remembered Regina Jonas. It was also Kellenbach who published her own work and brought Regina Jonas back to the world’s notice as the first woman rabbi, who served with honor and did credit to her office.
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Selected Sources
Axelrod, Toby. “My Year with Regina Jonas.” Bridges, vol. 14, no. 2, 2009, pp. 27–31, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40358427.
Popkin, Gabriel. “Overlooked No More: Regina Jonas, on Whose Shoulders ‘All Female Rabbis Stand’ (Published 2022).” New York Times, 19 Aug. 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/19/obituaries/regina-jonas-overlooked.html.
Sarah, Elizabeth. “THE DISCOVERY OF FRÄULEIN RABBINER REGINA JONAS: Making Sense of Our Inheritance.” European Judaism: A Journal for the New Europe, vol. 28, no. 2, 1995, pp. 91–98, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41444469.
Silverman, Emily Leah. Edith Stein and Regina Jonas: Religious Visionaries in the Time of the Death Camps. Routledge, 2013.
Susan, Pamela. Women Who Would Be Rabbis : A History of Women’s Ordination, 1889-1985. Éditeur: Boston, Beacon Press, 1999.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Theresienstadt.” Ushmm.Org, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2019, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/theresienstadt.