Regina Jonas: The First Woman Rabbi the World Forgot

The Rabbi Nobody Remembered

For nearly half a century, the world believed that the first woman ordained as a rabbi was Sally Priesand, ordained by Hebrew Union College in 1972. It was a beautiful story — a breakthrough in Jewish feminism, a crack in a patriarchal tradition thousands of years old.

But it was not the whole story. In 1991, a researcher discovered documents in a newly opened East German archive that changed everything: an ordination certificate, a thesis, sermon notes, photographs. They belonged to Regina Jonas — a woman who had been ordained as a rabbi in Berlin in 1935, had served Jewish communities through the darkest years of the twentieth century, and had been murdered at Auschwitz in 1944. The world’s first woman rabbi had been erased by the Holocaust — and then erased again by history.

Berlin and a Calling

Regina Jonas was born on August 3, 1902, in Berlin, into a modest Orthodox Jewish family. Her father died when she was young, and her mother raised Regina and her brother on a limited income. Despite the family’s financial struggles, Regina was an outstanding student with a deep love of Jewish texts and tradition.

From an early age, she knew she wanted to be a rabbi. This was, in 1920s Germany, essentially unthinkable. Women could study Jewish texts — some did, brilliantly — but ordination was another matter entirely. The rabbinate was exclusively male, and the idea of a woman standing on the bimah, delivering sermons, and making halakhic rulings was seen as either absurd or dangerous.

Jonas enrolled at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (Academy for the Science of Judaism) in Berlin — a liberal rabbinical seminary that accepted women as students. She excelled in her studies and wrote her thesis on the question that defined her life: “Can a Woman Hold Rabbinical Office?”

The Thesis

Jonas’s thesis was a meticulous examination of halakhic sources on women and religious leadership. She systematically addressed every traditional objection — modesty, voice, public role, precedent — and argued that nothing in Jewish law actually prohibits a woman from serving as a rabbi.

Her argument was careful, scholarly, and ultimately convincing to the liberal scholars who reviewed it. But when the time came for ordination, the Hochschule’s lead Talmud professor, Eduard Baneth, refused to sign her certificate. The reasons were never made entirely clear — some historians attribute it to personal conservatism, others to fear of controversy.

Baneth died in 1930 without ordaining Jonas. Her path to ordination was blocked at the institution where she had trained.

Ordination

For five years, Jonas waited and worked. Finally, in December 1935, Rabbi Max Dienemann of Offenbach — a respected liberal rabbi and head of the General Rabbinical Association of Germany — privately ordained her. The certificate reads: “Fräulein Regina Jonas, who lives in Berlin, has passed the prescribed academic examinations and has been ordained as a rabbi.”

It was a quiet moment — no grand ceremony, no press coverage. Germany in 1935 was already under Nazi rule, and the Jewish community had far more pressing concerns than the ordination of a woman. But the document was real, the ordination was valid, and Regina Jonas was a rabbi.

Ministry Under Darkness

As a rabbi in Nazi Germany, Jonas served in ways that few could have imagined. She delivered sermons in synagogues across Berlin. She provided pastoral care to a community living in escalating terror — visits to the sick, counseling for the desperate, comfort for those receiving deportation notices. She worked at Jewish social welfare institutions and taught at Jewish schools that were being increasingly restricted.

She preached hope and courage. Her sermon notes, recovered decades later, show a rabbi who addressed her community’s suffering directly — drawing on the prophets, on Psalms, on the Jewish tradition of finding meaning in the midst of catastrophe.

Theresienstadt and Auschwitz

In November 1942, Jonas was deported to the Theresienstadt (Terezín) concentration camp. Even there, she continued her rabbinical work — delivering lectures, providing counseling, and helping the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl with his efforts to support newly arrived prisoners psychologically.

On October 12, 1944, Regina Jonas was transported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz, where she was murdered. She was forty-two years old.

Rediscovery

Jonas’s story might have been lost forever. But in 1991, historian Katharina von Kellenbach discovered Jonas’s ordination certificate, thesis, and sermon notes in an archive in East Berlin that had become accessible after German reunification. The documents proved what no one had known: the first woman rabbi had been ordained thirty-seven years before Sally Priesand.

The discovery was a revelation — and a rebuke. It showed how thoroughly the Holocaust had destroyed not only lives but memory, and how easily history could erase those who did not survive to tell their own stories.

Legacy

Today, thousands of women serve as rabbis across the Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, and Renewal movements. Each of them stands on a foundation that Regina Jonas laid — quietly, courageously, in the darkest of times. She asked whether a woman could hold rabbinical office, answered yes, and proved it with her life. That the world forgot her for fifty years only makes the act of remembering more urgent.