The once obscure life and career of Regina Jonas (1902-1944), the world’s first woman rabbi, was honored on Thursday (July 24) at an international gathering of rabbis and lay people at Terezin, the Nazi concentration camp that is better known by its German name (Theresienstadt), located near Prague in the Czech Republic.
Sally Priesand attracted well-deserved national attention in 1972 when she became the first female rabbi in North America, at the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati. But in 1935, when Jonas completed seminary studies in Germany, she was forced to receive private ordination because of gender bias among her school’s faculty.
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