Professor: Let’s hear it for progress! 100 years ago, it would have been unimaginable for women to be rabbis!

Me: Regina Jonas submitted her thesis arguing for women’s ordination in 1930, 90 years ago, and was ordained in 1937.

One more time for the people in the back: because women and marginalized people are repeatedly erased from history, it is often the case that someone has fought to become the first, had to prove their right to even attempt to enter certain spaces or take on certain roles, had to figure out what that would look like or what accommodations might need to be made, when in fact there have been numerous other “firsts” before them who fought the same battles and were erased after their deaths (sometimes even during their own lifetimes).

Decades before Sally Priesand became the first woman rabbi ordained in America, Regina Jonas was ordained in wartime Berlin and continued her ministry in a concentration camp until her death. None of her male colleagues who survived spoke about her publicly or made it any easier for the next woman to follow in her footsteps. And 40 years before Jonas, Ray Frank was giving High Holiday sermons (as long as she was careful not to seek ordination or support women’s suffrage). A couple of decades before that, Hannah Rachel Verbermacher, the Maid of Ludomir, taught a community of students for decades and brought them from Europe to the Holy Land, acting as their rabbi, whether or not she was officially ordained. And there are probably dozens more cases whose records are lost to us, at least for now.

Which is all to say that I’m wary of calling anyone the first X, both because they’re probably not the first, and because it’s often a way of making them the only: “We have one now, we don’t need two.” We need to be sharing (and recovering!) more of their stories, but those stories can be — must be — interesting regardless of whether someone was THE first, one of the first, or simply one of many.