This year marks a double simcha for American Jews. It is the 40th anniversary of the ordination of the first woman rabbi and the 90th anniversary of the first girl to become a bat mitzvah during a worship service.
I wonder whether Judith Kaplan -- who pioneered the bat mitzvah at her father Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan's synagogue in 1922, two years after women got the vote -- could have imagined that the President of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion would ordain Sally Priesand 50 years later?
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