Marking 25 years since Wisconsin’s first woman rabbi
Dena Feingold was a freshman at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1973. Just the year before, Sally Priesand had been ordained by the Reform movement as the first woman rabbi in the U.S.; and her example was inspiring to Feingold.
“Because there was somebody out there doing it, it made it possible for me to think about doing it,” Feingold told The Chronicle in a telephone interview.
However, “I had the naïve idea that by the time I was ordained, I would not be a pioneer,” Feingold said. “I was very wrong about that.”
Indeed, she was. Upon graduating and ordination in 1982, Feingold joined Milwaukee’s Congregation Shalom as assistant rabbi and thereby became the first woman rabbi working in the state of Wisconsin — in fact, she said, the only full-time employed woman rabbi “in the entire upper Midwest.”
And for 17 years — until 1999 — “I was alone” in this state, she said.
But Feingold is alone no longer. Now that she has reached her 25th anniversary in the rabbinate — for which she received an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion this past June — seven women rabbis are employed in various capacities in Wisconsin’s Jewish community.
The Chronicle interviewed five of them to mark the milestone occasion of 25 years since the first woman rabbi was hired full-time in Wisconsin:
• Feingold, who has been the spiritual leader of Beth Hillel Temple in Kenosha since 1985.
• Rabbi Andrea Steinberger, who has served the Hillel Foundation University of Wisconsin in Madison since 1999.
• Rabbi Shari Shamah, former associate rabbi at Shalom who came to Milwaukee in 2000 and now works part time for the Harry & Rose Samson Family JCC and the Milwaukee Jewish Day School.
• Rabbi Shaina Bacharach, spiritual leader of Congregation Cnesses Israel in Green Bay since 2003 and the only female Conservative rabbi in the state.
• Rabbi Roxanne J. S. Shapiro, who moved to the Milwaukee area in 2003 and has been director of life-long learning at Congregation Shalom since 2004.
The others, whom The Chronicle wasn’t able to interview by press time, are:
• Rabbi Laurie Zimmerman, spiritual leader of Congregation Shaarei Shamayim in Madison since 2003, where she works a three-quarter time schedule, and is the only Reconstructionist woman rabbi currently employed in the state. (Her partner, Rabbi Renee Bauer, lives in Madison, but serves Congregation Mayim Rabim in Minneapolis.)
• Rabbi Bonnie Margulis, who lives in Madison, is the wife of Rabbi Jonathan Biatch of Temple Beth El, and works for the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice where she runs the Clergy for Choice Network.
Native daughter
Feingold is the only Wisconsin-native woman rabbi working in the state. Born and raised in Janesville, Feingold is one of four siblings, one of whom is Sen. Russ Feingold (D).
She hadn’t thought about a rabbinical career until she learned about Priesand; and the idea grew on her as she pursued her major in communications and public speaking while taking courses in Judaic studies, which she considered her “most interesting” classes.
Upon joining Shalom, Feingold felt particular responsibility to live up to the role of pioneer.
“I spent a lot of time doing speaking engagements,” she said. “I felt obligated to accept almost any. I was laying the groundwork, setting the example.
“I needed to show people that there were female rabbis who were competent, who had grounding in tradition, who could do what male rabbis could do.”
At those speaking engagements, people often came up to her and said, “You’re my first” woman rabbi, she said. “Now that rarely happens,” Feingold said, “which in my view is a very positive development. Not being alone is tremendous.”
After three years at Shalom, Feingold decided she wanted her own congregation. But she had also met Milwaukee attorney Brad Backer, who became her husband, and so she decided she wanted a post as close to Milwaukee as possible.
By good fortune, the position at Beth Hillel in Kenosha opened; and it turned out she was the only person the search committee interviewed for the job.
Through the years, Feingold said she had encountered “not very much resistance.” In Milwaukee, “I was very much welcomed and people were excited I was there.” In Kenosha, “my understanding was that there were a couple who thought my coming was not a good thing for Beth Hillel. When I got here, that quickly dissipated.”
The occasion of her honorary degree led Feingold to do some reflecting on “the tremendous gains women have made in Jewish life in the last 25 years and beyond.”
“I’m so pleased,” she said. “I think Judaism in general has really benefited from the addition of women’s leadership and voices in every aspect of Jewish life — leadership, scholarship, creation of new rituals and programming.”
Moreover, the addition of women has helped “humanize the rabbinate,” she said. “People tend to see rabbis in more human terms than they did when we were growing up. I hear often that to people the rabbi was like a god, unapproachable, someone to be scared of.”
But things have changed. When her children were younger and she was on the bimah, she said, “My kids escaped my husband and ran up to me. You see that happen to men rabbis now; you didn’t then.”
And Feingold doubts the claim some observers have made that the rise of women in synagogue leadership and involvement has driven away men.
“In my own congregation, in leadership and teaching, I see men and women in equal roles,” she said. “It might be slightly weighted more toward women in volunteerism, but it’s nothing real dramatic.”
‘Like owning a store together’
Steinberger was the second woman rabbi to come to work in Wisconsin. She is a native of Cincinnati, where she was raised in a Reform synagogue and was very active in youth activities. “I took advantage of nearly every opportunity available to me in the Reform movement for youth.”
She majored in psychology at Northwestern University, but also “took every Jewish studies and Hebrew course available” and taught Sunday School at a local synagogue.
It became clear to her and others that she had “surrounded myself” with Jewish things, and that her life work would be in the Jewish community. She also took women’s studies classes at Northwestern, learning about women who had pioneering careers in medicine, science and other fields, which also inspired her.
So, “I decided to become a rabbi and see if it was something fit for me. It did. It’s been a great choice,” she said.
After her ordination at the Hebrew Union College in 1997, Steinberger worked as assistant rabbi in a congregation in Columbus, Ohio. She was the first woman rabbi ever in that city.
That also was the year she married Greg Steinberger, whom she had met while she was teaching Sunday school in Evanston at the synagogue where he, a recent college grad, was working as youth group advisor.
In 1999, the Hillel Foundation University of Wisconsin-Madison hired both of them, him as director, her as rabbi. “We realized we would both need to find viable jobs in Madison to consider it a place to go,” she said. “In any couple with partners working, I think that scenario comes into play.”
Being a Hillel rabbi differs greatly from being a congregational rabbi, and Steinberger said it took her a few years to get used to it.
For one, even though individual Hillel rabbis are usually trained in one Jewish religious movement, “they have chosen to work with all Jews and strengthen all the movements on the campus,” she said.
“That makes Hillel rabbis often have more in common with one another than with other rabbis in their particular movements.”
For another, Hillel rabbis “work more often behind the scenes,” developing student leaders, teaching them to lead services, give sermons and the like. This is particularly difficult because, “no rabbi has been trained to take a back seat. I think it takes a few years and some self-confidence about the work to know how and when to speak and what to say to help students grow.”
Moreover, men and women may have separate issues in that role, Steinberger said. “I think that when a male rabbi walks in the door, he may be seen as an authority more quickly than a woman.”
And when a woman is the rabbi “it is obvious she is not from the Orthodox tradition,” so it becomes a challenge to deal with Orthodox students, to “be a teacher and facilitator to them in a way that is meaningful for them.”
It may seem that working with a spouse adds another layer of issues to the job. But Steinberger said that she and her husband have “distinct careers” in the same place.
“I’m working with students who are asking questions about Judaism,” she said. “He is working with other staff, individual student leaders, and doing fundraising for Hillel…. Throughout the day, we often don’t see each other unless we’re attending the same meeting.”
Nevertheless, “We take our work home a lot. We know we’re acting partners in making sure Hillel is thriving. We often ask each other for advice on how to solve some of the challenges we face. It’s like owning a store together.”
‘You can look for
balance’
“If you had asked me in 2000 if I ever envisioned doing something other than congregational work or taking time off, I would have thought you were crazy,” said Rabbi Shari Shamah.
Yet Shamah has decided to do exactly that. After serving as assistant and then associate rabbi at Shalom, she left this year to spend more time with her kids — a daughter, 3, and a son, 9 months — and to work in the community part-time.
Now the Ethical Start coordinator for the Gan Ami pre-school at the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center, she will be teaching one Jewish studies class this fall at MJDS.
She acknowledged that she is making a trade-off. “I loved everything I did at Shalom. I loved being a congregational rabbi. I miss being on the bimah,” she said. And once her children are older, she “absolutely” will look into the possibility of a new pulpit, she said.
Nevertheless, she said, “I can’t tell you how much it means to be able to spend Shabbat with my kids and my husband,” oncologist Corey Shamah.
Moreover, “I am excited to be a rabbi in a different capacity,” she said. “I get to work with different communities that I haven’t done so much with before, and I get to work with children, which I love.”
And this flexibility of work is “something I credit the advent of women rabbis bringing,” she said, “the understanding that you can work part-time, that you can have a rabbinate outside a congregation, and you can look for balance between having a career and having a family.”
Moreover, “women rabbis brought that to male rabbis as well,” she said. She says she has heard that among Reform movement rabbis “more men are taking paternity leave, taking time to be with their families, taking a Shabbat off to be with their families.”
Nevertheless, “I still firmly believe that a woman rabbi, and any woman for that matter, can work full-time and be a mom. It is possible to do both and be happy, and I respect those who also make those choices.”
A native of Buffalo Grove, Ill., Shamah told The Chronicle in July 2000 that while she had been active in youth groups and had attended a post-bat mitzvah Hebrew high school program, it was her experience working at Olin-Sang-Ruby Union Institute camp in Oconomowoc that inspired her to become a rabbi.
‘Not just the
women’s rabbi’
As she approaches her fifth High Holidays season at Cnesses Israel, Rabbi Shaina Bacharach is looking back at her rabbinate in Wisconsin. “It has gone wonderfully. I have had a great time being here. I love Green Bay and Wisconsin.”
And it wasn’t until The Chronicle called her about this article that she realized this year was a special milestone regarding women rabbis.
“It seems so normal here now, but I guess it wasn’t always that way,” she said.
Bacharach, 56, differs from all the other Wisconsin women rabbis not only in being a member of the Conservative movement and a graduate of the Jewish Theological Seminary; but also in having come to the rabbinate later in life.
As she explained to The Chronicle when she first came to Green Bay (see Sept. 26, 2003, issue), she wanted to be a rabbi during her childhood; but at that time in Clarksdale, Miss., the idea was unthinkable. It was, in fact, hard enough for her just to have a bat mitzvah ceremony.
She majored in journalism at the University of Oklahoma and lived thereafter in Oklahoma City. She got married, had twin daughters, divorced, got a degree in nursing and drifted away from Judaism for a while.
A free trip to Israel in 1985 revived her interest in Judaism, and she ultimately graduated and received ordination from JTS in 1999. She met and married her second husband, Robert Dick, while a rabbinical student.
She first served a small synagogue in Waco, Texas, and said that initially when she and her husband walked into the shul, some congregants came up, shook her husband’s hand and said to him, “Hello, rabbi.”
That never happened in Green Bay, Bacharach said. “There are a couple of people that took some adjustment to a female leader [but] I wouldn’t even call that a real issue.”
In fact, there is “a strong female presence here,” Bacharach said. “We have more women on our board than men.”
Unlike Feingold, Bacharach is concerned about the perception that as women take more leadership roles in the synagogue, men might decide to “take the back seat and let the women handle it.”
“That is something we have to work on,” she said. “We do have to work on the perception that I’m your rabbi, not just the women’s rabbi.”
“The good news is that women are accepted as rabbis,” Bacharach said. “The next step is we want everyone’s involvement. We do have to work harder at that, I think.”
‘See as individuals’
Rabbi Roxanne J. S. Shapiro is the third woman rabbi to work for Congregation Shalom, which has been the only Milwaukee-area synagogue to employ women rabbis to date.
She was raised in Springfield, Ill., where her family belonged to the town’s Reform and Conservative congregations; and she received her early Jewish education at the combined religious school of the two synagogues.
In high school, she became very involved in the North American Federation of Temple Youth, rising to North American president of the organization by the time she was a freshman at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y.
She had originally thought about law school and a career in politics, and she majored in political science at Union College. But in college, she realized that she wanted to teach Judaism.
After staying at Union one more year to obtain a master’s in education, she entered HUC. After ordination in 1999, she worked as national director of admissions and recruitment for HUC for four years.
During that time, she met her husband, Ben Shapiro, son of Rabbi Ronald Shapiro of Shalom. And as he wanted to live in the Milwaukee area, she moved with him in 2003. After a year of teaching at Milwaukee Jewish Day School, she joined the staff of Shalom.
Shapiro said she has seen women rabbis become no longer exotic. Starting in about 1993, rabbinical classes at HUC have been 50-50 men and women, she said.
However, in the last few years, somewhat more women than men have been entering, but the student population has a fascinating age distribution. Women form a larger percentage of the “second career students,” the people in their 40s or 50s who decided to make the rabbinate their new profession, Shapiro said.
She said her own “take” is that “I am a rabbi who happens to be female. My style of rabbinate is not necessarily female.”
Shapiro also said that at the beginning of women’s entry into the rabbinate, “it used to be said that women were more compassionate.
I thought that was hurtful for men.” She is happy to see that such stereotypes “have broken down” and that having both genders in the rabbinate has “allowed congregations to see rabbis as individuals with different characteristics.”
Nevertheless, “I do think about issues as a woman being a rabbi,” she said. “I do recognize the paths made by the women who served before me…. I think it’s been wonderful.”
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