We covered Rabbi Angela Buchdahl’s visit to the Bay Area earlier this month. As the first Asian American rabbi, she holds a special place in U.S. Jewish history.
Of course we also carried news of Buchdahl when she became a cantor in 1999 and then after she became a rabbi in 2001, just as we reported the ordination of the first woman rabbi in the U.S., Sally Priesand, in 1972; the hiring of the first woman to head a U.S. congregation, Rabbi Michal Bernstein (now Michal Mendelsohn), at San Jose’s Temple Beth El Shalom in 1976; and research uncovering that the first woman rabbi, Regina Jonas, was ordained in Germany on the eve of the Holocaust.
Depending on how you look at it, there was another “first” woman rabbi: Rachel “Ray” Frank, known as the “girl rabbi.” This San Francisco native was one of the first American women to preach from the bimah at a synagogue. A dynamic and beloved speaker and writer, she took on just enough elements of the rabbinic role to be considered a rabbi by some, although she never officially helmed a synagogue.
She was born in 1861 and lived and worked mostly in Oakland, where she became a Sunday school principal and a writer known for her eloquence on Jewish issues. She became a sought-after speaker, even a celebrity, and was featured often in our paper. (“Miss Ray Frank is, we are sorry to report, confined to her home with quite a severe cold,” we wrote in May 1896.)
“Miss Ray Frank is pursuing her noble work in the cause of Judaism, and winning golden opinions in the Press, at home and abroad,” we wrote a year earlier, in 1895, in our East Bay column, titled “Our Oakland Neighbors.”
Again in 1896, we described a talk she gave at Stanford on “The Moral Law in Nature” as offered with “eloquent and noble words.”
“She spoke of the underlying principle which unifies animate and inanimate nature; man, beast, bird and tree. That unless one looked deeply into nature, one could not discern the all-pervading obedience to a universal, guiding will,” we wrote.
Her first preaching experience came, according to the American Jewish Historical Society, almost by accident, in 1890, when she was in Spokane Falls, Washington, during the High Holidays. There was no synagogue, so she stepped in to lead the community in prayer with “A Lay Sermon by a Young Lady.”
“My position this evening is a novel one,” she said. “From time immemorial the Jewish woman has remained in the background of history, quite content to let the fathers and brothers be the principals in a picture wherein she shone only by a reflected light. And it is well that it has been so; for while she has let the stronger ones do battle for her throughout centuries of darkness and opposition, she has gathered strength and courage to come forward in an age of progressive enlightenment…”
“To think that perhaps I am to-night the one Jewish woman in the world, mayhap the first since the time of the prophets to be called on to speak to such an audience as I now see before me, is indeed a great honor, an event in my life which I can never forget.”
In 1893, the Modesto Bee ran a fulsome description of her.
“Ray Frank is a young California Jewess who will soon have attained a distinction beyond that of any Hebrew woman since the days of Deborah, the prophetess. She is to be regularly ordained as a rabbi or preacher to a synagogue, an office in which she has never had a woman predecessor,” the newspaper reported.
“Miss Frank is already quite well enough prepared, from an ordinary point of view, to undertake the duties of the ministry and has had a flattering offer from some wealthy Jews in Chicago who desire to form a congregation with her as their rabbi, but she feels the need of further study before she is willing to be ordained.”
“She is an excellent Hebrew and German scholar and has from childhood felt a strong inclination for Hebrew history and philosophy. Her name is Rachel, but she is much better known by the more familiar Ray,” the article noted.
The Chicago plan never came to fruition, and most sources say she was not, in fact, ordained. In 1901, she married Simon Litman, who taught at UC Berkeley and later at the University of Illinois, and withdrew from preaching. As she continued to lecture and write, the question of just how rabbinic she was became a point of contention.
Frank was the subject of a snarky aside by our editor in 1895, who complained about a Dutch news report that said Frank had officiated at Emanu-El in San Francisco for the High Holidays.
“Considering that Miss Frank officiated last Kippur in Victoria, B. C., in an Orthodox congregation, that, nominally at least, is under the spiritual supervision of Dr. Adler, her presence in San Francisco on that day is rather remarkable,” wrote Rabbi Jacob Voorsanger.
“The Dutch editor’s amiable commentary that female Rabbis are better than male hypocrites is insufficient to justify his ignorance of American Jewish conditions. Miss Frank is no Rabbi, nor has she ever aspired to be, and any sneer at our accomplished young townswoman in that connection is as unjust as it is in execrable taste.”
(To be fair to the Dutch reporter, Emanu-El was already at that point the home of the world’s first known female cantor, Madam Julie Rosewald.)
It’s not clear whether Frank ever had thoughts of officially becoming a rabbi, not that a path for that existed at the time.
Nevertheless, a woman interpreting and discussing Judaism from the bimah, standing in front of a group of men in the synagogue, was unusual enough to be noteworthy in her day. Moreover, what makes someone a rabbi has long been under discussion. Even if Frank didn’t consider herself one, historians and contemporary successors may take a different view in the long run. Again, there is no evidence that she was ordained, but her fame seems to have made that fact irrelevant.
In 1930, we wrote that “among the distinguished savants who will be immortalized in the Cyclopedia Judaica will be Ray Frank Litman, who is widely known as a scholar and lecturer upon Jewish thought and literature. Mrs. Litman has the honor of being the first woman to become an ordained Rabbi and her brilliancy as a pulpit orator has placed her in the front ranks as an exponent of Biblical history and Talmudic lore.”
In a 1934 social column that described the comings and goings of the Jewish world, we mentioned that “Mrs. Litman was the first woman to receive a degree at the Hebrew Union College. Her brilliant sermons were widely discussed wherever she preached. She will be remembered as Miss Ray Frank of Oakland and San Francisco.”
So was she a rabbi or not? Maybe that’s not the right question.
Perhaps the real question is how we should celebrate women like her, who were famous for their intellect, zeal and love for Judaism at a time when women’s roles were limited and their ability to gain the title of rabbi was nearly impossible. One way to celebrate them is, of course, by telling their stories.