Nation's First Female Rabbi Retiring

Nearly 1,000 Women Have Followed In Sally Priesand's Footsteps

(AP)  Sally J. Priesand, the first U.S. woman rabbi, arrived at Jewish seminary nearly 40 years ago determined to fulfill her dream to become a teacher of her faith. Many people thought she came for a different reason.

"I think at first they thought I came to marry a rabbi rather than be one," Priesand said, chuckling as she sat in her synagogue office, a space decorated with awards she's received since her 1972 ordination from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. "So they didn't take me all that seriously."

Now as she prepares to retire more than three decades later, Priesand is widely seen as a role model who's helped change contemporary Judaism.

Since she was ordained in the Reform movement, nearly 1,000 women have become rabbis. The Reconstructionist movement ordained its first female rabbi in 1974, and the Conservative movement followed in 1985. The Orthodox movement does not have female rabbis.

Priesand, 59, downplays her accomplishment, saying that she didn't intend to be a pioneer. She credits Nelson Glueck, the late president of the Reform seminary with championing her cause and ironing out problems in the "background" so she could concentrate on her studies.

"In some cases, it was very difficult for professors who were accustomed to teaching only men ... to suddenly have a woman in the class and often they would start, 'Gentlemen, and lady,"' Priesand said.

During the 1920s, the Reform movement ruled that there was nothing in Jewish law forbidding women from becoming rabbis, but that it represented such a break from Jewish custom, people might not be ready for it, according to Rabbi David Ellenson, the current president of the Reform seminary, which has U.S. campuses in Cincinnati, New York and Los Angeles.

"Sally Priesand was a genuine innovator in American Jewish life and in Jewish history," said Ellenson, whose school graduated 23 women in a combined class of 42 at three seminaries this spring. "Her decision to study for the rabbinate paved the way for the inclusion of half the Jewish population."

Glueck arranged for Priesand to tour the country the year before her graduation, speaking at congregations and at Jewish organizations so that people could get used to the idea of a woman on the "bima," the altar in a synagogue.