Published: 18 February 2022
Last updated: 26 February 2024
CLIVE LAWTON: So far, neither Orthodoxy nor Progressive Judaism has got it right
WHEN DOES THIS story start? Not the one about oranges on seder plates –we’ll come back to that later, but the one about the place of women in Jewish life.
I could go back to the patriarchs and matriarchs where the women often secured key developments. Or the truly mysterious moment when Zipporah saves Moses her husband’s life by circumcising their son. Or Esther, or Salome, or Bruriah, or Rashi’s daughters – but I won’t. I’m going to start this story for our purposes in 1935.
That was the year that Regina Jonas became the first woman rabbi ever - in Berlin. She passed the necessary exams in 1930 but it was only five years later that a Liberal Rabbi decided to examine her (again!) and award her semikha, rabbinic status.
Even then though, she could not find a pulpit and she spent her remaining years working as a chaplain or in unofficial roles. When she was deported to Teresin, she wrote and delivered more than 20 sermons and performed a quasi–rabbinic role.
Sadly though and like so many others, she was killed in Auschwitz in 1944 at the age of 42. But in subsequent years none of the 520 who lectured in Teresin, including those with whom she worked, mentioned her name.
It was only in the 1980s that one of her students mentioned her and in the 90s that her writings, including her rabbinic thesis, ‘Can Women become Rabbis according to Halakha?’ were finally published.
Why do I tell you all of this?
It’s because my theme in this series on splits that deeply challenge the Jewish People today relates to the role of women.
As is so often the case in Jewish matters, the community and its leaders sit uncomfortably on the great split that opened up in the 19th century ushered in by the Enlightenment. Are the Jews a classical or a modern people? Put differently, is modernity or are classical frames the form that fits Jewish ways most suitably?
