Regina Jonas

Regina Jonas was born in Berlin in 1902 to a poor Orthodox family, and trained at the city's Higher Institute for Jewish Studies, a leading center of liberal Jewish scholarship, where she completed the full rabbinical curriculum expected of any male candidate for ordination. Her final examination thesis, submitted in 1930 and titled Can a Woman Be a Rabbi?, worked through the relevant Talmudic and later halachic sources and concluded, against the assumption of every rabbinical authority before her, that nothing in Jewish law actually barred a woman from serving as rabbi, only custom and precedent did.

The Institute itself, despite accepting her thesis, would not take the further step of ordaining her, and Jonas worked for several years as a Jewish studies teacher and religious instructor while the question of her formal status remained unresolved. In 1935, as Nazi persecution of German Jews was already well advanced, the liberal rabbi Max Dienemann privately ordained her, making her the first woman in the recorded history of Judaism to hold rabbinical ordination. She went on to preach, teach and offer pastoral care across Berlin's Jewish community, including hospitals, old age homes and social welfare institutions, functioning fully as a rabbi even though most of the community's official bodies never fully recognized her title.

Jonas was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto in November 1942, where, remarkably, she continued functioning as a rabbi under conditions of extreme deprivation, giving lectures and offering pastoral counseling to fellow prisoners, work later corroborated in the postwar testimony of other Theresienstadt survivors including Viktor Frankl, who recalled her lectures there. In October 1944 she was transported to Auschwitz, where she was murdered, most likely on or shortly after arrival; no precise date of death is recorded.

For decades after the war Regina Jonas was almost entirely forgotten, absent from standard histories of the rabbinate and of Jewish responses to the Holocaust alike, until a researcher working in an archive in former East Berlin in the early 1990s discovered a small collection of her surviving papers, including photographs, her ordination certificate and her original 1930 thesis, that had been preserved uncatalogued for nearly fifty years. That rediscovery has since made her a widely cited figure in the history of women's ordination across Jewish denominations, and modern liberal, Reform and Reconstructionist movements that ordain women rabbis now generally recognize her, rather than any later twentieth century ordinee, as the first woman to hold the title.