Women Rabbis: Exploration and Celebration

In 1972, twenty-six-year-old Sally Jane Priesand from Cleveland, Ohio became the first in a line of women rabbis to receive ordination from the faculty of a rabbinical seminary. She was not first woman to study: nearly one hundred years earlier, Julia Ettinger had studied with Hebrew Union College’s founder and first president, Isaac Mayer Wise. And HUC had formally agreed to ordain women fifty years before Priesand’s ordination. But unprecedented transformations quickly swept over American J…