Ahavat Limud and the overlooked broken glass ceiling

June 15, 2024

here are three things I try to do every day (besides sleep, eat, drink, and breathe): pray, express love to my family, and learn something new. All three of these bring me joy, and gratitude, and deepen my capacity for introspection. Learning something new also humbles me. Every time I gain knowledge or perspective, it reminds me of how much I do not know. My constant curiosity sometimes exhausts others and has occasionally gotten me into trouble, like Alice in Wonderland. This week, however, my learning has led me down the most wonderful rabbit hole, and I’ll take you part of the way with me.

In celebration of Shavuot, I was studying with Rabbi Shulman and my community at Congregation Beth El. Among the many new things I learned, one particular text we studied was written by a woman named Regina Jonas.

Regina Jonas was born on August 3, 1902, in Berlin, Germany, into a humble Jewish family. Her father, Wolf Jonas, was a peddler, and her mother, Sara, worked as a seamstress. Despite their modest means, they placed a high value on education and religion. Regina displayed an early passion for Jewish studies and a determination to become a rabbi, a role traditionally reserved for men. She pursued her education at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, the Berlin Institute for the Science of Judaism, where she faced significant resistance due to her gender but persevered, eventually becoming the first woman ordained as a rabbi in 1935.

How is it possible that I knew nothing about the first woman ever to be ordained as a rabbi? I had never read her teachings, nor had I even heard of her.

Part of the reason I never learned about her is detailed in her New York Times obituary, which was included in a larger collection of articles about remarkable people whose deaths had gone unreported.

“In 1930, Jonas completed a thesis at the seminary that directly posed the question, ‘Can women serve as rabbis?’ Drawing on sources from Jewish law, or Halacha, she argued that the answer was yes — that only custom and tradition had limited smicha to men.

But bad luck then dealt her ambitions a cruel blow: The rabbi she studied under, who gave her thesis a grade of ‘good,’ died suddenly before he could ordain her. Although Jonas had other prominent supporters, including Rabbi Leo Baeck, who later led a Nazi-era organization for German Jews, none would ordain her. Finally, on Dec. 27, 1935, the liberal rabbi Max Dienemann of Offenbach agreed to do it. He wrote, ‘She has passed the exam I have given her in religious legal topics,’ adding, ‘I testify to her that she is capable to answer questions of religious law (the Halacha), and that she is suitable to serve as a rabbi.’

That statement shattered an almost 2,000-year-old glass ceiling. It was ‘an earthshaking event,’ one observer said. Even Baeck ultimately signed the German translation of her ordination letter.

Jonas began to teach in Berlin, but because no synagogue would employ her, she joined the Jewish Community of Berlin to minister to Jews in hospitals and old-age homes. She also found work in a women’s prison. Jonas sought not to reform or revolutionize Judaism, but rather to promote Jewish traditions and counter assimilationist trends that she felt were threatening the religion’s survival.

‘She made a radical point to be the first woman rabbi, but for conservative reasons,’ Elisa Klapheck, a rabbi who wrote ‘Fräulein Rabbiner Jonas: The Story of the First Woman Rabbi’ (2004), said in an interview.

But not all were thrilled; some found Jonas too strident or eccentric. And some male rabbis opposed granting her the pulpit in synagogues.

While Jonas’s career was ascending, albeit in fits and starts, conditions for Jews in Germany were going downhill fast. The Nuremberg Laws, excluding Jews from German society, were passed the same year that Jonas received her ordination. As other rabbis fled, Jonas gained prominence, traveling to communities whose rabbis had left.

Jonas, too, was urged to leave Germany. But she said she could not abandon people who were suffering or leave her mother, with whom she lived. In the spring of 1939, she wrote in a rabbinical commentary in a Jewish newspaper that the Nazi persecution was a ‘trial by fire, testing the strength of our love for children, gratitude, the mutual support of family and friends in these alien conditions.’

In early November 1942, Jonas and her mother were deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. In her deportation file, she identified herself as a ‘rabbinerin,’ or female rabbi. The file also contained her thesis.

The documents made their way to an archive of German Jews, where they sat untouched for almost 50 years behind the Iron Curtain, until unearthed by a German religion scholar, Katharina von Kellenbach, after the Berlin Wall fell.”

Theresienstadt was designed to be a model concentration camp to fool the outside world about how they were treating Jews. There, Jonas worked for Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who later found worldwide fame with his autobiographical book “Man’s Search for Meaning.” At the camp, Jonas greeted new arrivals by train, orienting them and trying to dissuade thoughts of suicide. Her rabbinical sermons urged prisoners to find meaning in their lives, even under dire circumstances. One moved Frankl so deeply that he recalled it nearly 50 years later when contacted by von Kellenbach.

“What I find most extraordinary about her,” von Kellenbach said in an interview, “is that she decided to deny the Nazis the power to define Jewish life.”

Rabbi Regina Jonas was murdered in Auschwitz in 1942 at the age of 44.

When I first began to learn about Rabbi Jonas, I felt cheated. How was it possible that I, someone who cares so much about Jewish life and the empowerment of women, didn’t know about her? As I learned about her and her teachings, I realized my education hadn’t included Rabbi Jonas because I needed her wisdom right now. While it might have meant something to me before, her inspiring words, spoken and written in Theresienstadt, have touched my soul in ways that only the first female rabbi could.

Here is what she said: “Our Jewish people was planted by G-d into history as a blessed nation. ‘Blessed by G-d’ means to offer blessings, lovingkindness, and loyalty, regardless of place and situation. Humility before G-d, and selfless love for His creatures, sustain the world. It is Israel’s task to build these pillars of the world — man and woman, woman and man alike have taken this upon themselves in Jewish loyalty. Our work in Theresienstadt, serious and full of trials as it is, also serves this end: to be G-d’s servants and as such to move from earthly spheres to eternal ones. May all our work be a blessing for Israel’s future (and the future of humanity) … Upright ‘Jewish men’ and ‘brave, noble women’ were always the sustainers of our people. May we be found worthy by G-d to be numbered in the circle of these women and men … The reward of a mitzvah is the recognition of the great deed by G-d.”

Rabbi Jonas found and created inspiration and hope in the darkest moments of humanity during the Shoah. If she could do that then, I guess we must too.

Thank you, Rabbi Shulman, for introducing Rabbi Jonas and me. Her tenacity to break the glass ceiling of the rabbinate is only the beginning of what I have to learn from her.

In the week ahead, may we be reminded that our work together can be a blessing for all of humanity.

Shavua Tov,

Betzy Lynch, CEO