Last Friday, while attending the Social Responsibility Shabbat at Central Reform Congregation, which celebrated the gains in equal rights for members of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender communities, I realized all but one of the Reform Jewish congregations in St. Louis have women senior rabbis.  While that fact might not seem remarkable now, consider that before 1971, there had never been a female Reform rabbi in the United States.  (A woman ordained in the Liberal movement in Germany in the 19th century was the only previous example.)  In 1971, Rabbi Sally S. Priesand became the first woman rabbi to be ordained at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) in Cincinnati.

Since Priesand cracked the rabbinic “glass ceiling”, scores of other women have become rabbis in the Reform, Reconstructionist and Conservative movements.  Here in St. Louis, Rabbi Susan Talve, spiritual leader of CRC, was the first woman congregational rabbi, having served previously at Congregation Shaare Emeth as an associate rabbi. Talve has amused her congregants by recalling that when she attended HUC-JIR most of the buildings did not have women’s restrooms.  It was just not on the Jewish “radar screen” that women would ever become ordained rabbis.

In addition to Talve at CRC, the other Reform congregation women rabbis are Brigitte Rosenberg at United Hebrew; Amy Feder at Temple Israel and most recently Elizabeth Hersh at Temple Emanuel. The only exception here is Congregation Shaare Emeth, where Rabbi Jim Bennett is spiritual leader.

Given the number of women rabbis nationwide in all but the Orthodox movement, it’s hard to believe that as recently as 1983, Rabbi Beverly Magidson, former associate director of Hillel at Washington University who was then serving as interim chaplain at the Jewish Hospital, was turned down in her bid to gain admission into the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly.

Magidson, then 31, was a native of Detroit. She was raised as a Conservative Jew, but was inspired by Priesand becoming the first woman rabbi in America and decided to follow her path.  Since the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary of America did not admit women rabbinical students in the 1970s, Magidson enrolled in the New York branch of the Reform movement’s HUC-JIR, and received her rabbinic ordination in 1979.

While Magidson was grateful to have become ordained in the Reform movement, she remained committed to a more traditional approach to Jewish observance.  Even before the Conservative movement allowed women rabbis, there was a long-standing policy that Reform rabbis who met certain criteria and who wanted to accept pulpits at Conservative synagogues could apply for reciprocal membership in the Conservative Rabbinical Assembly.

With the full backing of the late Rabbi Bernard Lipnick of B’nai Amoona and the late Rabbi James Diamond, then director of Hillel, along with Rabbi Michael Monson, head of the Jewish Association for College Youth in  New York, Magidson applied for membership in the Rabbinical Assembly.

As reported in a Page One article in the April 20,  1983 edition of the Jewish Light, Magidson’s application was rejected because it failed to receive the needed 76 percent “consensus,” falling short just one percentage point. While disappointed, she was immensely pleased, as were Rabbis Lipnick and Diamond, that she received such an overwhelming vote of 75 percent approval. Lipnick refused to call Magidson’s initial defeat a “rejection.” Instead, he termed it “a no acceptance a the moment,” adding that he was “overwhelmed by the high percentage of the vote.” Diamond added, “Although I was very disappointed, Beverly came closer than I ever imagined.”

Eventually, the Conservative movement began to admit women as rabbis, and Rabbi Magidson did attain her long-sought dream. A few months after the Dallas vote, she was named rabbi of Beth Shalom congregation in Clifton Park, N.Y. and became one of the first two women rabbis admitted to the Rabbinical Assembly.

Also of note is the fact that for the Conservative movement the admission of women to its cantorial school was in some ways even more controversial than the issues of ordaining rabbis. Biblical passages warning against the perils of women’s seductive voices were often cited in opposition.  Eventually that barrier finally fell, and there have been Conservative women cantors here in St. Louis, including Sharon Goldman Nathanson at B’nai Amoona and until recently, Joanna Selznick Dulkin at Shaare Zedek (now Kol Rinah).

Rabbi Avi Weiss, formerly of Traditional Congregation in St. Louis and now rabbi of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, N.Y., a large modern Orthodox congregation up East, initially conferred the title “Rabba” on Sara Hurwitz of Yeshivat Maharat,  a scholarly woman at his yeshivat.  He later backed away from conferring that title, but there are a growing number of Orthodox Jewish women who have sought ordination. A few of them have been ordained by some forward-thinking Orthodox rabbis, but the Rabbinical Council of America, the Orthodox movement’s national rabbinic body, has thus far not recognized such ordinations.  

Then again, who knows what the near future holds? As evidenced, the times they are a’changing.