“A woman who came through the window because she wasn’t let through the door!”
Regina Jonas, who was the first woman in the world to receive a rabbinical diploma in 1935, is a role model for all female rabbis today, because she overcame the resistance of her time and asserted herself with courage and will in a patriarchal system. Regina was born on August 3, 1902 in Berlin and grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family. In the synagogues, the women sit separately from the men, and they are also denied the opportunity to pray. After the First World War, however, Jewish women became more self-confident. The Jewish Women’s League grows to tens of thousands of members. Finally, in 1926, they were granted the right to vote in their municipalities.
She began her studies in 1930, but while her male fellow students were able to work as rabbis immediately after completing their training, she had to wait years for her ordination. Even later, she did not get a permanent job, but traveled from community to community, which increasingly shrank and got into trouble in the 1930s. After the war, it was largely forgotten. Her former classmates could hardly remember her and even denied that she had received a proper ordination.
Unfortunately, little has changed in this misogynistic situation over the past 100 years. It was not until 2010 that Alina Treiger became the first woman to be ordained a rabbi. Today, there are only a handful of female rabbis in Germany. While the liberal communities are actually open to this, this is still unthinkable in Orthodox Judaism.
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Born in East Berlin, Ulrike Offenberg holds a doctorate in history and researched the traces of Regina Jonas in Theresienstadt as well as the last two years of her work before her murder in Auschwitz. Ulrike Offenberg received her ordination at the renowned Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. She began her education in Berlin and Potsdam at the Abraham Geiger College. Today she is one of ten German rabbis and works part-time in the liberal community in Hamelin. In addition, she works as a freelancer and teaches Torah and barmitzvah, for example. In addition, Dr. Ulrike Offenberg holds a teaching position at the University of Duisburg-Essen. He is also involved in interreligious dialogue between Christians, Muslims and Jews.
