new york | Twenty years after the Conservative movement began ordaining women as rabbis, a large New Jersey congregation has chosen a woman to fill its top rabbinic post, a development movement leaders are hailing as “groundbreaking.”
The board of Congregation Beth El in South Orange voted this month to appoint Rabbi Francine Roston, 36, as the synagogue’s spiritual leader.
The shul boasts 575 families.
Once it becomes official — the contract has not yet been approved — Roston will be the first woman to serve as senior rabbi at a Conservative synagogue with more than 500 families.
“We see this as groundbreaking,” said Rabbi Perry Raphael Rank, president of the Rabbinical Assembly, the Conservative movement’s rabbinical arm.
“It’s groundbreaking from the perspective that we have been talking about a glass ceiling, and she has broken that glass ceiling and risen to a much larger congregation than women have risen to until this point.”
Roston, who since 1999 has been rabbi of Congregation Beth Tikvah in New Milford, N.J., will be replacing the synagogue’s longtime rabbi, Jehiel Orenstein, who held the pulpit for some 35 years.
Roston is married and has two children.
“Our feeling was, all things being equal, we would probably have hired a male rabbi — but all things weren’t equal,” said Aaron Nierenberg, co-chair of Beth El’s search committee.
“Rabbi Roston impressed us with her knowledge, sense of energy, sense of humor, warmth. Most specifically, she has a record of achievement. When she sets her mind to doing something, she makes it happen.”
Asked whether the committee views itself as having done something pioneering in hiring Roston, Nierenberg said, “We really don’t see it that way. We really don’t.”
Women now constitute roughly 11 percent of the nearly 1,600 members of the Rabbinical Assembly.