Regina Jonas was born in Berlin on 3 August 1902, the daughter of Wolf and Sara Jonas, in the crowded Scheunenviertel, a poor and densely Jewish quarter of the city. The family was Orthodox and observant. Her father died when she was still a child, leaving the household in financial strain. Like many girls of her class and time, she first prepared for a teaching career. In 1924 she received a license to teach in girls’ schools. That same year she made a choice that set her apart: she enrolled at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies, a liberal seminary that trained rabbis and teachers. She took the full course of rabbinical study, not only the track designed for women educators. She said she had wanted to be a rabbi since she was eleven.
At the seminary she was not the only woman, but she was unusual in stating her goal plainly. The rabbinate had never formally included women. Jonas answered that claim with scholarship rather than slogans. In 1930 she completed a thesis titled, in English, “Can a Woman Hold Rabbinical Office?” or “Can a Woman Be a Rabbi According to Halachic Sources?” She argued that Jewish law did not forbid women from serving as rabbis. She pointed to biblical and historical women who taught, judged, and interpreted law. What stood in the way, she wrote, was prejudice and habit more than statute. One of her teachers, Eduard Baneth, accepted the thesis. He died before he could administer the oral examination in Jewish law required of candidates for ordination. The institution then granted her only the title of Academic Teacher of Religion.
She did not accept that as the end of the matter. Leo Baeck, the leading figure of German Jewry and one of her teachers, praised her as a capable preacher but would not ordain her. He feared that a public female ordination would split the community at a moment when unity seemed essential. Other faculty members refused as well. Jonas continued to teach and to press her case.
On 27 December 1935, during Hanukkah, Rabbi Max Dienemann, executive director of the Liberal Rabbis’ Association, examined her in Offenbach. The examination lasted several hours. The next day he issued a Hebrew diploma of ordination. It stated that her heart was with God and Israel, that she had passed examination in matters of religious law, and that she was qualified to answer questions of law and to hold rabbinic office. Dienemann signed the Hebrew text. A German version was associated with Leo Baeck. The act was private and contested. Orthodox voices called it a distortion of Judaism. Even some liberals hesitated. Jonas became known as Fräulein Rabbiner Jonas, Miss Rabbi Jonas. She was the first woman in Jewish history to receive formal semicha.
Ordination did not give her a pulpit of her own in a major Berlin synagogue. She taught, visited the sick and the elderly, worked at the Jewish Hospital, and served homes for the aged and a school for the blind. After the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, many secular Jews returned to communal life. As male rabbis emigrated or were arrested, the need for pastoral work grew. Jonas preached in liberal congregations, traveled as a kind of itinerant rabbi under the Reichsvereinigung, and offered counsel in institutions that still functioned. She never married. She lived with her mother. She published articles and spoke on theology and Jewish thought. She also performed forced labor in a factory as restrictions tightened.
On 6 November 1942 she and her mother were deported to Theresienstadt, the ghetto-camp the Nazis presented as a model settlement. There she continued to work as a rabbi. She met new arrivals at the trains and tried to ease the shock of those who had just learned what the place was. She lectured on Bible, Talmud, and religious themes as part of the camp’s cultural programs. She worked with the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl in a unit concerned with mental hygiene, offering what help could be offered to people arriving in terror. Surviving notes list sermons and lectures she gave. The chief rabbi in the camp did not fully recognize her standing. She served anyway.
On 12 October 1944 she was deported to Auschwitz on one of the late transports. Some accounts say she was murdered on arrival; others give 12 December 1944. She was forty-two. Her mother was taken on the same path.
For decades she was almost forgotten. After the war, Jewish life in Germany was shattered. The women who later became the first female rabbis in America and elsewhere often did not know her name. Archives in East Berlin held her papers: photographs, her diploma, her thesis, teaching certificates. After the Berlin Wall fell, those documents became accessible. Elisa Klapheck wrote a biography and published Jonas’s halakhic treatise. Plaques, streets, conferences, and memorials followed. Sally Priesand, ordained in the United States in 1972, is often called the first woman rabbi in America; Jonas remains the first woman ordained as a rabbi at all.
Her argument still matters because it was legal and textual, not only moral. She did not wait for a new Judaism. She claimed that the sources already allowed what custom denied. She also lived in the office under conditions that stripped almost every ordinary support from Jewish life. She taught children, sat with the dying, preached to congregations that were shrinking by flight and arrest, and then did the same work behind the walls of Theresienstadt. That combination of scholarship and pastoral presence is the core of her story.
Jonas did not find a movement. She did not live to see women take pulpits across Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, and other streams. Her career lasted less than a decade after ordination, and most of it unfolded under persecution. What remains is a record of persistence: a poor Orthodox girl from Berlin who studied the law, wrote that the law did not bar her, waited five years after her thesis for a rabbi willing to examine her, accepted work that others left behind, and kept speaking as a rabbi until the transports took her to Auschwitz. The rediscovery of her papers did not invent her. It returned a name that history had nearly erased to the lineage of those who hold the title she first received.