As a student at Hebrew Union College in the late 1970s, not long after the Reform seminary had begun admitting women, Janesville-native Dena Feingold heard vague reports about a woman in Germany who’d been ordained at some point in history.
This past July, Rabbi Feingold, spiritual leader of Beth Hillel Temple in Kenosha, went to Germany and the Czech Republic.
There, she was a member of the first congregation ever to recite the “El Malei Rachamim” for Regina Jonas, the world’s first ordained female rabbi.
The service was led by Rabbis Amy Eilberg, Sally Preisand, Sandy Sasso and Rabba Sara Hurwitz — each the first to be ordained in their denominations in the United States — and was the centerpiece of a mission to Germany and the Czech Republic to dedicate a memorial plaque for Jonas at Terezin’s columbarium.
The mission was also, implicitly, a way of helping restore Jonas’ rightful place in Jewish history, something she was denied for most of the 70 years since her death in Auschwitz.
Jonas served the German Jewish community as a rabbi from her 1935 ordination until her death. Prior to being deported to Terezin in 1942, she deposited her papers, letters, two photos of herself and her ordination certificate into the Berlin Jewish Archive.
After World War II, it was transferred to an obscure archive in East Berlin, where it remained until the city was reunified. Only after the archive was returned to the Jewish community did Jonas’ story come to light.
Since then, extensive documentation of her having worked closely in Terezin with Rabbi Leo Baeck and Dr. Viktor Frankl has come to light, despite the fact that neither of them spoke or wrote about her.
“It’s very strange,” Feingold said of Jonas’ absence from Baeck’s and Frankl’s post-Holocaust accounts of their years in Terezin. “There are a lot of theories about why that was, and there were people who went to school with me in Cincinnati who had teachers who said they knew her.
“Sally Preisand said that a couple of her professors told her they knew Regina Jonas, but that was about it. They provided no information about her life or her work, so it’s kind of curious.”
The mission was organized by Rabbi Gary Zola, one of Feingold’s HUC classmates. He is executive director of the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives and professor of the American Jewish Experience.
Zola was appointed in 2011 to the United States Commission to Preserve America’s Heritage Abroad by President Barack Obama. The commission’s charge is to foster the preservation and protection of cemeteries, monuments and historic buildings associated with the foreign heritage of the U.S.
Each commission member is responsible for coming with a project, Feingold said.
“He had been at Terezin where Regina Jonas had spent her last two years teaching and ministering to people, and was at the columbarium where there are markers for some of the people who were there, and he thought there should be one for her,” she said.
The marker was made and installed, Feingold said. Zola then decided that if there were to be a dedication ceremony, he would have women rabbis come with him.
He contacted the Women’s Jewish Archives in Boston and obtained the names of the first 100 female rabbis in the United States, a list that includes Feingold.
“So there were 40 people on the bus,” she said, “and of the 40, 10 were female rabbis.”
Jonas and the other women weren’t the only “first” for Feingold. Largely because of the Shoah, she had never had a strong desire to travel to Germany.
“I didn’t know what to expect,” she said. “My husband (and daughter) had been there and a couple in our congregation has a son who has become a Conservative rabbi and he came and did a program for us (after returning from a trip) and talked about how Germany had evolved.”
Feingold said she and her roommate on the trip were both initially consumed with thoughts of what had happened during the Nazi era.
“You look at an old building and think about what the people who looked out of those windows saw and witnessed, and the train tracks where people were forced on trains to get out of Germany, and park benches where Jews weren’t allowed to sit. And you look at the people and think ‘Where were you?’” she said.
“And you realized that the only people who would have been adults during that time are frail elderly, and the people you see on the streets were either children then or not even born.”
Experiencing a modern, living Jewish community in Germany was part of Feingold’s process of reframing her images of the country.
Hartmut Bomhoff took time from his regular work as public relations director of the first rabbinic training school to open in Continental Europe since before World War II to serve as delegation tour guide.
The group also met with Volker Beck, a member of Parliament, and Sybilla Bendig, a representative of the Foreign Office.
“You come to the realization that great and real change has taken place in Germany in these past 70 years,” Feingold said. “They talked about how it’s a very important value of the German government that the Jews (there) are not immigrants, they’ve been there since the third century.”
“The Gaza protests had just started that past week,” Feingold said, “and Bendig told us that she and other people in her circle were shocked to hear blatant anti-Semitic chants shouted at these rallies.”
Bomhoff told the group that every German public school student goes to the Holocaust museum and the Jewish museum. All are taught about the Holocaust and Germany’s role in it — unless parents explicitly request that their children not participate. For 50 percent of Muslim children in German schools, he said, that is the case.
“But the average German child, this is absolutely 100 percent that they go. Their parents want them to go through that,” Feingold said, “and they’ve taken responsibility for their past in a way that many other countries, from what I understand, have not.”
Amy Waldman is a Milwaukee-based freelance writer and coordinator of the ACCESS Program for Displaced Homemakers at Milwaukee Area Technical College.
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