Rabbi Sacks was ‘wonderful’ to me, recalls Britain’s first women rabbi

Britain’s first female has revealed that the then Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks was “wonderful” to her at a difficult time in her career.

Rabbi Jackie Tabick was at the spiritual helm of West London Synagogue folllowing the death of its popular leader, Rabbi Hugo Gryn, in 1996.

Rabbi Sacks’s absence from the funeral was to trigger one of the bitterest clashes between Orthodox and Reform within British Jewry pre-War.

But at an event this week held by London’s Leo Baeck College to mark the 50th anniversary of her ordination, Rabbi Tabick recalled the support she received from the head of the central Orthodox community.

“There was all this comeback from members of the community who were convinced that Rabbi Sacks would have come to the funeral if only it had been a male rabbi who had been taking the service,” she said. “As if!”

“I must tell you, Rabbi Sacks was wonderful to me personally. He phoned me, he invited me round for tea. He said someone’s got to look after the rabbi. And he did, personally - but not in public. But that was ok.”

The privacy at the time, she explained, was “because I was a Reform rabbi – nothing to do with being a woman, I’m sure. He was just being kind to me as a colleague who needed that support at that point.”

While Regina Jonas in pre-War Berlin is recognised as the first woman to be ordained as a rabbi modern times, Rabbi Sally Priestand blazed the trail in the USA with her graduation in 1972. Britain followed only three years later and in the half-century since Rabbi Tabick opened the door, more than 70 women have qualified as rabbis from Leo Baeck.

Other milestones have been reached. Rabbi Professor Deborah Kahn-Harris, who graduated from Leo Baeck in 1996, became the first woman anywhere in the Progressive world to head a rabbinic academy when she was appointed principal of the college in 2011, while Rabbi Tabick is believed to be the first female head of a Beth Din when becoming convenor of the Reform rabbinical court in the UK in 2012.

In a conversation and a film shown to a virtual audience, Rabbi Tabick and some of her colleagues who had since graduated from the colleague shared some of their experiences of the rabbinate.

Leo Baeck’s first woman rabbinic student had found it difficult when she first arrived, she recollected “because they weren’t quite sure what to do with a woman.” While studying, she was also working at West London Synagogue where because of her youthful demeanour “they thought I was a batmitzvah girl gone wrong… they got really uptight – what was this batmitzvah girl doing in charge of things?”

After her graduation, she remained at West London and given the job as education director though not, until later, as a rabbi. “I was told I really didn’t need the full salary because I had a husband who could look after me,” she recalled.

Marking half a century of women rabbis in the UK: (from left) Rabbis Debbie Young-Somers, Deborah Blausten, Deborah Kahn-Harris, Jackie Tabick, Rebecca Birk, Alexandra Wright and Helen Freeman[Missing Credit]

During the first couple of decades, going out into communities was “hard,” Rabbi Kahn-Harris reflected. “Not only were we dealing with communities where they had never had a woman student there before but there were also still communities where you couldn’t wear a tallit on the bimah or you could be on the bimah with a tallit but you couldn’t touch the Torah scroll.”

But over the years it became increasingly common to see a woman lead from the pulpit and younger graduates of Leo Baeck have been able to step into roles where a woman had been before.

Rabbi Debbie Young-Somers, one of the rabbinic team at Edgware and Hendon Reform Synagogue, who graduated from Leo Baeck in 2009, recalled, “I came in a little naively because I had grown up with women rabbis…believing the battle was fought and it was an even playing field.

“And there was a slow realisation over the first couple of years in the college that out in the communities around the country that maybe the playing field wasn’t quite as even as I had assumed. Although I think within a few years of my ordination, the tables were really turned very rapidly.”

While she and peers encountered examples of people saying they would rather have a male rabbi if they could, she said, “I feel I’m now in a role where I thought that would happen more than it does, and that’s really encouraging.”

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Rabbi Rebecca Birk of Finchley Progressive Synagogue, who was ordained in 2001, was the first woman rabbi at her congregations. But newer colleagues were no longer experiencing the kind of things that happened to her during her career - of “being told how to wear a kippah, of having inappropriate comments on what I was wearing”.

For Rabbi Wright, two turning-points came in the 1990s with the publication of the Liberal movement’s Siddur Lev Chadash, the first Progressive siddur to use gender-neutral language of God, though rabbis still had to coax some congregations who insisted God was “male in Jewish tradition”: and the arrival from the USA of Rabbi Marcia Plumb, who founded the Half-Empty Bookcase conference, that highlighted the need for female Torah perspectives.

“I remember Marcia and being in complete awe because she wore blue and purple colours,” she said. “There we were all in our black, pretending to be men. I saw this woman who was incredibly feminine and embodying her feminineness in a way that I had never seen before in our colleague.”

Co-Senior Rabbi of West London Synagogue, Helen Freeman, believed women had brought a different approach to spiritual leadership. “Women rabbis weren’t standing from above saying ‘you do this and you don’t do that’, they were in with the congregation, trying to enable everybody to grow Jewishly, to grow spiritually from where they were, alongside them – and I think that’s a different way of being a rabbi,” she said.

Rabbi Tabick - who looks forward to the day when people will no longer speak of a “woman rabbi” but simply “rabbi” – reflected that women brought their own particular experiences to the role. She, for example, introduced at West London, a service for those who had lost a baby or miscarried,

At the Beth Din, she said, she “changed way the court was run to make it much less of a nerve-wracking experience for the people who came before me. We had a full range of children’s toys in the waiting room – because I worked with children on my knee, taking services with little ones pulling at my skirt.”

Rabbi Tabick – who retired this month after approving Progressive conversions at her final session at the European Beit Din in Milan – also did away with a rule at the UK Reform Beit Din that a woman more than six months pregnant could not appear before it.

As a working rabbi, she recalled officiating herself at a wedding just two days before the birth of her second child.

For more: lbc.ac.uk/50-years-of-female-rabbis/