I had always thought, as did most American Jews, that Sally Preisand of Reform Judaism was the first woman formally ordained in the early 1970s.
I was astonished to learn, in the 1990s, that the first woman rabbi was actually Regina Jonas, an Orthodox woman who was ordained by Liberal (Reform) Judaism in Nazi Germany in the mid-1930s.
After an extremely dramatic and fascinating life, Rabbi Jonas vanished from history after her death at Auschwitz in 1944. Records of her life and achievements gathered dust in an East German archive, until her files were discovered after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany.
Concealed in those dusty files was a story that would make a good film. Jonas was born and brought up as an Orthodox Jew in a dangerous, poverty-stricken Berlin slum. As a child, she was so determined to become a rabbi that none of her classmates thought of laughing at her.
She struggled resolutely through Berlin's Reform rabbinical seminary, supporting herself by teaching endless Hebrew and religion classes to restless schoolchildren and finally triumphed when she received Reform ordination and a rabbinic pastor job with the Berlin Jewish community in her early thirties.
Her triumph was short-lived. She assumed a back-breaking workload, caring for hundreds of German Jews whose rabbis had been forced to flee abroad or been sent to Nazi prisons. Jonas felt unable to leave Germany because she could not abandon her widowed elderly mother or her desparate congregants.
And then -- as if her life were not complicated enough --- Jonas, a pretty and very intense woman in her late thirties, who had hitherto avoided involvements with men, believing that a woman rabbi should remain single to demonstrate the seriousness of her commitment --- Jonas fell passionately and happily in love with a much older male Reform rabbi, a widower who had been called out of retirement to serve as the last pre-WWII rabbi of Hamburg.
During the last chapters of her biography, I was alternated between admiration at her wonderful care of her distraught congregants, gladness that she found a supportive and admiring fiance, and a deep sadness knowing that I would lose this remarkable woman to the concentration camps. But the story had yet another twist.
Deported to Theresienstadt, Jonas joined a group of people working for psychologist Viktor Frankl, who assigned her the toughest rabbinical job of her life: greeting newly arrived Jews, helping them get oriented, and keeping their morale up.
By the time Jonas and her mother were deported to Auschwitz and their deaths in 1944, Regina Jonas had packed more adventure --- and certainly done more good in the world --- into 42 years of life than most of us experience in eighty years.
And Jonas is not presented as a plaster saint. She had a strong sense of humor; a bit of a temper; was deeply spiritual but could be quite aggressive; and based on her rise from slum child to middle class rabbi, she possessed a kindness and ability to empathize with people from all walks of life.
I started crying at the end of the book. I felt as if I'd lost a friend. As the lay leader of a Jewish Renewal women's havurah (prayer and study group), I did a report on the book for my group and they loved the book. It's good reading not only for women interested in spirituality, but also for anyone male or female who admires a hero in any field.
I gave this four stars instead of five only because the author could have provided a little more background on Germany, the Nazi era, the camps Jonas was sent to, etc. As a German Jew, I think this era of German history is so familiar to her, that she may not have been aware that many English-speaking readers born long after WWII have little specific knowledge of that era.
