An American Family Wedding

Since last writing for “Sheila’s Slot” I have been away in America and Canada; an eleven day voyage of nostalgia and family reunions. Our first stop was Minneapolis where a cousin was getting married. We have kept in touch with most of the family there, many of whom we have visited, or they have stayed for holidays with us. The wedding was OTT, as only American events can be. We stayed at a hotel with the other out of town guests and a hospitality room was put at our disposal from Friday to Sunday. There were drinks, snacks, home made cookies and cakes enough to feed an army.

Saturday evening a pre-nuptial dinner catered for close family and out of town guests so that only one hundred and fifty guests were present as opposed to the five hundred at the wedding. A film was shown for about forty minutes highlighting the couple growing up (an appropriate time for forty winks – after all we were jet-lagged). This was followed by endless speeches from family and friends accompanied by a great deal of emotional crying and all ending with “we love you”. As a break from these activities a family group formed a ‘VonTrapp’ type group and sang of the couple and how they loved each other and us all, of course. Pass the Kleenex. After four or five hours the evening was over and we woke up and went back to the hotel.

The wedding ceremony was held in the second largest synagogue in town which was absolutely magnificent. The entrance hall was as big as our building with a beautiful museum, a Judaica shop fitted out like a miniature Harrods, and a small chapel (itself larger than our synagogue hall). The Ketuba is specially designed and individually hand painted depicting meaningful scenes and was framed and displayed on the Bimah, which fortunately was bigger than the stage of the London Palladium, providing enough room for a cantor, sundry rabbis, the bride & groom, the four parents, all the grandparents, two best men, four bridesmaids and their escorts, the flower girl and boy and maids of honour; all of whom walked up the aisle two at a time, walking slowly in time to the stereophonic music.

The chuppah is especially hand made and embroidered with the names of the family and their particular forte. For example, Manfred (the bride’s grandfather) ‘Religion’; Hannah (bride’s grandmother) ‘Hospitality’. I can’t remember what the word for the bride’s father was, probably ‘Money’. The chuppah was displayed afterwards at the wedding party. The dinner was curiously irreligious with brief Grace Before Meals, but none after the meal and no speeches at all. Not even a Mazel Tov to the couple, and this was a Conservative wedding, which I previously understood was similar to the British Reform. In fact, it made our shul appear religiously fanatic! The party finished at 2pm.

Next morning before departure a brunch was served for about one hundred and fifty people. You must appreciate that diet coke and fat free foods are of prime importance in the USA.

One especially good thought is that due to the incompatibility of US & UK television formats we were not able to view the resultant video in which most of the guests were asked to contribute some loving remarks about the couple and the proceedings. As mentioned, there were around five hundred guests. “Gone With The Wind” eat your heart out!

Regina Jonas became the first woman to be ordained as a rabbi. She was murdered in the Holocaust.

Regina Jonas was born into a strictly religious household in Berlin. Like many women at that time, she intended to make a career as a teacher but after graduating from the local Jewish Girls High School she became disillusioned with the idea of becoming a teacher and instead, she enrolled at the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies and took seminary courses for liberal rabbis and educators for 12 semesters. While not the only woman attending the university, Regina sent ripples through the institution with her stated goal of becoming a rabbi.

To this end, Jonas wrote a thesis. Her topic was "Can a Woman Be a Rabbi According to Halachic Sources?" Her conclusion, based on Biblical, Talmudic, and rabbinical sources, was that she should be ordained. The Talmud professor responsible for ordinations, Eduard Baneth, accepted Jonas' thesis; however, his sudden death squashed any hope Jonas may have had in receiving an official ordination. Jonas then applied to Rabbi Leo Baeck, spiritual leader of German Jewry, who had taught her at the seminary. Baeck, while acknowledging Jonas as a "thinking and agile preacher", refused to make her title official, because the ordination of a female rabbi would have caused massive intra-Jewish communal problems with the Orthodox rabbinate in Germany.

For nearly five years, Jonas taught religious studies in a series of both public and Jewish schools, and also gave a series of 'unofficial' sermons. Her lectures on religious and historical topics for various Jewish institutions often included questions about the importance of women in Judaism. This eventually caught the attention of the Liberal Rabbi Max Dienemann, who was head of the Liberal Rabbis' Association in Offenbach am Main. Despite protest from both inside and outside the Liberal Rabbis' Association, on 27 December 1935, Regina Jonas received her semicha and was ordained.

Because of Nazi persecution, many rabbis emigrated leaving many small communities without rabbinical support. Jonas, possibly out of consideration for her elderly widowed mother, stayed in Nazi Germany. However, the Jewish situation under the Nazi regime quickly degraded. Even if there had been a synagogue willing to host her, the duress of Nazi persecution made it impossible for Jonas to hold services in a proper house of worship. Despite this, she continued her rabbinical work, as well as teaching and holding impromptu services.

On 5 November 1942, the Gestapo arrested her and she was deported to Theresienstadt. While interned, she continued her work as a rabbi. Regina Jonas worked in the Theresienstadt camp for two years and records of some 23 sermons written by Jonas survive. During her internment, Jonas was also a member of a group that organised concerts, lectures and other activities to distract internees from events around them.

Upon passing the June 1944 Red Cross inspection, a number of summer months passed at relative ease, until mid-October 1944 when almost all of the Jewish Council, including Jonas, were deported to Auschwitz where she was murdered either one day or two months later. She was 42 years old.

Of the 520 or so who lectured in Theresienstadt, including Leo Baeck, no one ever mentioned her name or work.

Following the ordination of Rabbi Sally Priesand in 1972, the American Israelite reported in July 1973 that the only other known Jewish woman to receive ordination was Regina Jonas of Berlin. Also mentioned was that Jonas's thesis was entitled "Can a Woman Become a Rabbi?".

Pnina Navè Levinson, a student of Jonas, mentions her story in a 1981 paper and subsequently, in a 1986 paper, Levinson notes that Jonas' story was never mentioned by notable individuals who were in Theresienstadt at the same time as Jonas. Regina Jonas is also discussed briefly in a 1984 paper by Robert Gordis who notes Jonas was an early example of the ordination of a woman as rabbi.

Regina Jonas's literary work was rediscovered in 1991 by Dr. Katharina von Kellenbach, a researcher and lecturer at St. Mary's College of Maryland, who had been born in Germany. In 1991 she traveled to Germany to research material for a paper on the attitude of the religious establishment (Protestant and Jewish) to women seeking ordination in 1930s Germany. She found an envelope containing the only two existing photos of Regina Jonas, as well as Jonas' rabbinical diploma, teaching certificate, seminary dissertation and other personal documents in an archive in East Berlin. It was newly available because of the fall of the Soviet Union and the opening of eastern Germany and other archives. It is largely due to von Kellenbach's discovery that Regina Jonas is now widely known.]

Though there had been some women before Jonas who made significant contributions to Jewish thought, Jonas remains the first woman in Jewish history to have become a rabbi.

A large portrait of Regina Jonas was in Hackescher Market in Berlin, as part of a citywide exhibition titled “Diversity Destroyed: Berlin

1933–1938–1945,” to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the National Socialists’ rise to power in 1933 and the 75th anniversary of the November pogrom, or Kristallnacht, in 1938.

2013 saw the premiere of the documentary Regina, a British, Hungarian, and German co-production. The film concerns Jonas's struggle to be ordained and her romance with Hamburg rabbi Josef Norden.

In 2014, a memorial plaque to Regina Jonas was unveiled at the former Nazi concentration camp Theresienstadt in the Czech Republic, where she had been deported and worked for two years. There is a short documentary about the trip when this plaque was unveiled, entitled ‘In The Footsteps of Regina Jonas’.

Regina Jonas in a photograph presumed to have been taken after 1939. Her stamp on the back of the photograph bears the compulsory name of "Sara," which all Jewish women had to bear after 1939 and reads "Rabbi Regina Sara Jonas." Courtesy of Stiftung "Neue Synagoge Berlin - Centrum Judaicum," Berlin