A Zoom Event for the Community - All are welcome

June 3, 1972 was a momentous day in Jewish history.  In Cincinnati, Ohio,  at the Plum Street Temple, one of the Reform Movement’s premier congregations, Sally Priesand was ordained as the first American woman rabbi.  Rabbi Priesand received her smicha from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.  She was the first woman ordained by a rabbinic seminary.  Rabbi Regina Jonas, the first woman rabbi, was privately ordained in 1935, and died in Auschwitz in 1944. 

Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasson was ordained by the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 1974, and in 1985, Rabbi Amy Eilberg was the first woman rabbi ordained by the Conservative movement.  There have been a sprinkling of Orthodox women ordained as well, either privately or through Yeshivat Maharat, but these women are not universally accepted as clergy in the Orthodox world.  Women have also been ordained by the Academy for Jewish Religion, and Hebrew College.

Women clergy of course includes women cantors.  Cantor Barbara Ostfeld was the first ordainee of HUC-JIR, in 1975, and the Conservative movement followed suit in 1987(Cantor Erica Lipitz and Cantor Marla Rosenfeld Barugel.)  Cantor Sharon Hordes became the first woman cantor ordained by Reconstructing Judaism in 2002.

For a small state, New Hampshire has a large community of women clergy.  As we celebrate 52 years of women in the pulpit, please join us on Monday, June 3, at 7 pm, for a statewide zoom program: Honoring Women Clergy in NH.  The evening will be presentations from many of NH’s women clergy, and will be moderated by JFNH’s Allyson Guertin.

You can register at the link below.  https://templeisraelnh.shulcloud.com/event/honoring-jewish-women-clergy-in-nh.html