Rabbis, Female

In the last three decades, hundreds of women have chosen to become rabbis. This growth parallels and follows the demand for change in women's roles in public ritual life and family laws and is due to the profound impact of feminism, especially in North America. In English-speaking countries, women call themselves rabbis, but in countries such as Germany, the woman rabbi is referred to as rabbina and in Israel often as rabba. The Orthodox ABR (all but rabbis in name) refer to themselves as maharat, a newly coined term. Women rabbis’ contribution has broadened the concept of Judaism and the image of women in general by providing female models of leadership.

In 1890, Ray Frank, the “Girl Rabbi of the Golden West,” who was born in San Francisco in 1861, arranged services for the community in Spokane, Washington, on Yom Kippur of 1890. Since there was no rabbi, Frank was invited to preach. She studied at the Hebrew Union College, receiving a Bachelor of Hebrew Letters. In the 1920s, there were several women who entered seminaries with the intention of becoming rabbis, but all were refused ordination, including Helen Levinthal (1910–89), who became the first woman to complete the rabbinical course at Rabbi Isaac Meyer Wise's Jewish Institute of Religion in 1939.

The first known woman rabbi ordained privately in 1935 was Regina Jonas of Germany, who died in Auschwitz. In 1972, the first woman to be ordained by a theological seminary in the United States was Sally Preisand of the Reform Movement. In 1968, women were accepted into the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, and Sandy Eisenberg Sasso was its first woman rabbi to be ordained in 1974. Amy Eilberg was already studying at Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTSA) when women's ordination was approved and in 1985 became the first woman ordained as a rabbi by the Conservative Movement. The Orthodox movement in the United States does not ordain women, but in 2009, Sara Hurwitz received the title maharat (leader in halachic, spiritual and pastoral counseling, and in teaching Torah) after completing a rabbi's full curriculum of study.