COMMENTARY
The Would-Be Rabbis Women who opened doors for those who followed By Rabbi Andrea L. Weiss
‘LAWRENCE DAILY JOURNAL-WORLD,’ PUBLIC DOMAIN, VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
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his spring, as we prepare for Purim and Passover, we also celebrate the 50th anniversary of the ordination of Rabbi Sally Priesand, the first woman ordained by a rabbinical seminary. But had history unfolded a bit differently, we might be marking the 100th anniversary of women in the rabbinate. Like the biblical Esther and Miriam, the women who yearned to be rabbis decades before it was possible acted with courage as they opened the doors for Priesand and the many others who followed. In 1921, after three years of study at Hebrew Union College, Martha Neumark asked the administration for a High Holiday pulpit assignment. Her request instigated a lengthy debate about whether women could be ordained as rabbis. As historian Pamela Nadell recounts in Women Who Would Be Rabbis, HUC’s faculty and alumni eventually concluded that “women cannot justly be denied the privilege of ordination.” However, the Reform rabbinical seminary’s board of governors voted to maintain its policy and restrict ordination to men. While this debate played out at HUC in Cincinnati, the Jewish Institute of Religion opened in New York City in 1922. Irma Levy Lindheim and two other women enrolled in the inaugural class, but they were not admitted as rabbinical students. When Lindheim petitioned the faculty to become a rabbinical student, JIR changed its charter and committed—at least on paper—to
“train, in liberal spirit, men and women, for Jewish ministry, research and community service.” However, after completing much of the curriculum, personal circumstances led Lindheim to discontinue her studies before the final year. Her classmate Dora Askowith— who entered JIR in 1922 with a doctorate from Columbia University—spent several years taking classes alongside male rabbinical students. She was motivated to deepen her Judaic studies knowledge, not to “enter the ministry,” yet she hoped that her presence at JIR would, in her words quoted in Women Who Would Be Rabbis, “open the road for women who might be desirous of being ordained.” Although neither Lindheim nor Askowith took that path, both ascended to leadership positions in Hadassah: Askowith as an early member of Hadassah’s central decision-making body, and Lindheim as the third Hadassah national president (1926-1928). Lindheim followed Hadassah founder Henrietta Szold, who studied at the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary in the early 1900s, though Szold was required to confirm that she had no rabbinical aspirations when she enrolled. Helen Levinthal Lyons, president of her local Hadassah chapter in Westchester County, N.Y., merits distinction among the early 20th century Jewish women who sought access to a seminary education. In 1939, she became the first woman to MARCH/APRIL 2022
Premature Report A December 25, 1920 news item in the ‘Lawrence Daily JournalWorld’ announced that Martha Neumark would become the first female rabbi.
complete the rabbinical curriculum at JIR (which later merged with HUC). In spite of this accomplishment, she was denied the opportunity to extend her family’s rabbinic line to a 13th generation when JIR founder Rabbi Stephen S. Wise refused to ordain her. According to Nadell, he insisted that “while Helen did excellent work, the time was not ripe for the JIR to ordain a woman.”
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he time for the first female rabbi ripened in Germany in 1935, when Rabbi Max Dienemann privately awarded a rabbinic diploma to Rabbiner Doktor Regina Jonas. Jonas taught Torah and comforted people in Berlin as the Nazis rose to power and after she was deported to Terezin in 1942. She was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944. Not until 1972 would a rabbinical seminary formally ordain a woman. For her HUC-JIR rabbinical school thesis, Priesand researched the “Historic and Changing Role of the Jewish Woman.” Decades earlier, Lyons had written about “Women Suffrage from the Halachic Aspect.” Aspiring female rabbis often looked
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