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Author: Stefanie Sinclair

Remembering and forgetting the first female rabbi: Regina Jonas (1902-44)

Updated Friday, 16 February 2024

This two-part podcast focuses on the fascinating story of Regina Jonas, the first ordained female rabbi in Jewish history. 

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Rabbi Regina Jonas (1902-1944) was ordained in Nazi Germany in 1935 and is now widely recognised as the first ordained female rabbi in Jewish history. However, for almost fifty years after she was killed in a concentration camp, she remained a largely forgotten figure. Jonas received hardly any public acknowledgement until the discovery of some of her letters, photos and papers, including her certificate of ordination, in a German archive in the early 1990s. Until then, it had been widely assumed that women had not been ordained as rabbis until much later, and that Sally Priesand, who was ordained in the USA in 1972, had been the first.

Jonas’ fascinating story highlights important issues in historiography, and the role of memory and identity in particular. These two podcasts explore why Regina Jonas was almost forgotten and how she has been remembered. In ‘Who was Regina Jonas?’, Stefanie Sinclair, Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at the Open University, travels to Berlin, where Jonas’ lived and worked, to find out more about her. In ‘Regina Jonas’ Legacy’  Stefanie talks to British rabbis Sybil Sheridan and Elli Tikvah Sarah about the significance of the first female rabbi.

This material is taken from the Open University course: ‘A332 Why is religion controversial?’


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