Fifty years ago, on June 3, 1972, as Sally J. Priesand became the first woman ordained a rabbi by a Jewish seminary, her 35 male classmates spontaneously rose to their feet to acknowledge her historic feat.
For nearly 2,000 years, the position of rabbi – which literally means “my master” or “my teacher” - was limited to men. The only exception during all those years had been Rabbi Regina Jonas, who was ordained in a private ceremony in Germany in 1935. Jonas perished at Auschwitz in 1944, and the details of her life were discovered in archives after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
