4 - Regina Jonas: from candidate to rabbinerin
from II - Vision
Summary
Regina Jonas, the first woman rabbi in Jewish history, was ordained in the German liberal tradition in 1935 in Offenbach, Germany, under the Nazi regime. She had studied at the Academy for the Science of Judaism in Berlin, and went on to serve her people as a rabbi from 1936 until her deportation to Theresienstadt in November 1942. She served there until her October 12, 1944 deportation to Auschwitz, where she served until her death a little over a month later.
Jonas described what drove her to become a woman rabbi in a response to a survey published in 1938 in the C. V. Zeitung, a weekly published by the Central Association of Germans of Jewish Faith. Answering the question “What do you have to say on the theme of woman?” she wrote to the journalist Mala Laaser:
If I must say what drove me as a woman to become a rabbi, two elements come to mind: My belief in the godly calling and my love for people. God has placed abilities and callings in our hearts without regard to gender. Thus each of us has the duty, whether man or woman, to realize those gifts God has given. If you look at things this way, one takes woman and man for what they are: human beings.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Edith Stein and Regina JonasReligious Visionaries in the Time of the Death Camps, pp. 83 - 112Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2013