Women rabbis and Torah scholars

Women rabbis are individual Jewish women who have studied Jewish Law and received rabbinical ordination. Women rabbis are prominent in Progressive Jewish denominations, however, the subject of women rabbis in Orthodox Judaism is more complex. Although a significant number of Orthodox women have been ordained as rabbis,^[1][2] many major Orthodox Jewish communities and institutions do not accept the change.^[3][4][5] In an alternative approach, other Orthodox Jewish institutions train women as Torah scholars for various Jewish religious leadership roles. These roles typically involve training women as religious authorities in Jewish Law but without formal rabbinic ordination, instead, alternate titles are used.^[6][7] Yet, despite this alteration in title, these women are often perceived as equivalent to ordained rabbis.^[8] Since the 1970s, over 1,200 Jewish women have been ordained as rabbis (see § Membership by denomination).

Notwithstanding early examples in Jewish tradition, for much of Jewish history, the roles of the rabbi (rav), preacher (darshan), and Torah scholar (talmid chacham) were almost exclusively limited to Jewish men. With few, rare historical exceptions, Jewish women were first offered the possibility for ordination beginning in the 1920s,^[9] but it was not until the 1970s when this became widely accepted.^[10] Early efforts to ordain women date to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. A small cohort of women are recorded as being candidates for ordination, however, eventually nearly all were denied ordination.^[11] During the 1930s, Regina Jonas of Germany became the first recorded instance of a Jewish woman in modern times receiving formal rabbinical ordination.^[12] Subsequent decades saw women-led campaigns within Reform Judaism for the recognition of women rabbis.^[13][14] These campaigns also coincided with the influence of second-wave feminism on Western society. And these efforts culminated in the 1972 ordination of Sally Priesand at Hebrew Union College, the flagship institution of Reform Judaism. Subsequently, women rabbis were ordained by all other branches of Progressive Judaism.^[15] The formal ordination of women rabbis in Orthodox Judaism began in the 2000s, however its acceptance within Orthodoxy is still a highly contested issue.^[16][17] Nonetheless, in the early 2020s, the State of Israel approved legislation to allow all Jewish women to qualify for the state rabbinic examinations, effectively giving Orthodox women a credential equivalent to those of male rabbis, however, the uses of this credential is limited to certain rabbinic roles.^[18]