Published: 27 August 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
LEA MÜHLSTEIN: My work has taught me the power of naming gender injustice and of doing it especially in organisations that see themselves as egalitarian
I HATE HAVING to introduce myself with my pronouns. I have no problem with people wanting to be able to choose their own pronouns, but when asked who I am, there are other aspects of my identity that matter more to me: I am a rabbi, thinker, liturgist, social activist and politician. In the first few years of my rabbinate, this is probably where my list of identity markers would have stopped.
While the ordination of women is no longer something rare, becoming a rabbi was barely imaginable in the community in which I was raised. Four rabbis were present at my Bat Mitzvah in June 1997 in the small Liberal Jewish community, Beth Shalom, in Munich, Germany, and not a woman was among them – what is more, none of us noticed.
Jewish women had been at the forefront of many European women’s movements in the late 19th and 20th century and the first woman rabbi, Regina Jonas, was ordained in Germany in 1935 (and killed in Auschwitz in 1944) but, as the French sociologist Beatrice De Gasquet observed, the Holocaust was a major break:
“Unlike the United States, where feminism and a ‘return to one’s roots’ went hand in hand, in Europe religious revitalisation was accompanied by conservative discourses on gender, for the collapse of liberal German Judaism led to the expansion of Orthodox Judaism.”
When I grew up in the 1980s, women were represented in leadership positions in Munich’s Jewish community and posters of the early Zionist pioneers prominently displayed in the Jewish community centre showed young men and women working side-by-side as equals.
And yet, religious leadership in Central Europe, even in Progressive congregations, remained until recently the exclusive domain of men.
During the first years of my rabbinate, I often avoided getting involved with women’s topics. I didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a woman rabbi. This worked well for our rabbinic team as I am fortunate to be working alongside a wonderful male colleague who is much better than me in what became the female areas of the rabbinate - services for children and pastoral work.
