Eilberg, Amy (1954—)

American who became the first woman to be ordained a rabbi within the Conservative branch of Judaism. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on October 12, 1954; daughter of Joshua Eilberg and Gladys Eilberg; graduated summa cum laude from Brandeis; M.A. in Talmud from the Jewish Theological Seminary, 1978; graduate degree in social work, Smith College, 1984; married Howard Schwartz.

Completed Talmudic studies (1978) but had to wait until 1985 before Conservative rabbis finally voted to allow women to be ordained, thus confirming her as the first female Conservative rabbi in history.

Amy Eilberg was born in 1954 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and her strong family background prepared her for the struggles she would face as a religious pioneer. Her mother Gladys Eilberg , a social worker, described the family as being "Jewish culturally and philosophically down to our gut in every way." Her father Joshua Eilberg, a lawyer who served in the U.S. House of Representatives, spent countless hours involved in various Jewish causes, including support for Israel, the plight of Jews in the Soviet Union, and the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. From her mother, young Amy heard stories about the pogroms her family had endured in tsarist Russia earlier in the century, including a hallowed family story about her maternal grandmother talking cossacks out of killing her husband. Fortified by a strong sense of tradition, Amy Eilberg was already on a path of social activism by the time she was in her teens. As a leader in Conservative Judaism's United Synagogue Youth (USY), she traveled to the Soviet Union with a USY group that visited Jewish "refuseniks," men and women who had been denied exit visas for Israel.

When Eilberg began her studies at Brandeis University in 1972, she was determined to integrate her traditional Judaism with the contemporary egalitarian views that had become so central to young people's thinking in the United States during the 1960s. Jewish feminism, too, was growing rapidly as both an ideology and a movement during these years, and Eilberg and other young Jewish women at Brandeis were strongly influenced by its ideals and aspirations. During her first year there, she was active in transforming Conservative religious services to include full participation by women. Eilberg received her education at a time when women were seeking equality in the Jewish religious arena. In September 1971, a group of mostly Conservative Jewish women founded Ezrat Nashim. This organization hoped to achieve reform by acting as an internal critic of male-dominated religious traditions. As a vigorous "loyal opposition," some of these women participated in public events hitherto reserved for male rabbis alone, such as their dramatic appearance at the Conservative Rabbinal Assembly convention in March 1972.

Eilberg was deeply influenced by an event that took place in 1973 at the First National Jewish Women's Conference. On that occasion, pioneering Jewish feminist and theorist Rachel Adler publicly prayed with tallit (prayer shawl) and tefillin (phylacteries). Hallowed traditions—and some said halacha, the traditional Jewish legal system—had long held that women need not wear these during services. Adler's action challenged traditions that exempted women from these obligations, presumably due to a notion that by their very nature women were different from (and inferior to) men.

After hearing of Adler's deed, Eilberg decided that she too would wear the tallit and tefillin as a way of "rejecting the concept that simply by virtue of being a woman, I was exempt and therefore excluded from a certain set of central activities." From this point on, she marked herself as a religious activist by leading services and reading from the Torah. She also spent considerable time and energy teaching other young women to do these liturgical tasks.

Eilberg graduated from Brandeis summa cum laude. By the time she enrolled at New York's Jewish Theological Seminary in 1976, she had decided to become a rabbi even though the issue of the ordination of women had not yet been resolved within the leadership hierarchy of American Conservative Judaism. There were some encouraging signs for her in the mid-1970s. In June 1972, Sally Jane Priesand became the first female ordained rabbi in the United States. Whereas Priesand had become a rabbi within the traditions of Reform Judaism, the somewhat more traditional vision of Judaism found in the Reconstructionist wing of the faith was also willing to ordain women as rabbis during these years, and in 1974 Sandy Eisenberg Sasso was ordained as the first female Reconstructionist rabbi.

Throughout the 1970s, the issue of women's ordination flared as rabbis heatedly debated its pros and cons within America's Conservative Jewish community. Passionate feminists within Conservative circles made their case vociferously, refusing to take "no" for an answer. Using the national media skillfully, they were able to have their case presented in The New York Times and other national elite media, pointing out that women who felt frustrated in Conservative pararabbinic jobs had abandoned Conservative Judaism in order to become rabbis in Reform and Reconstructionist synagogues. Convinced that Conservative Judaism would accept women as rabbis and confident in her own strengths as a pioneer, Eilberg continued her studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where she completed a master's degree in Talmud in 1978. She spent the year after graduation teaching in Israel, then returned to the United States to work on another graduate degree, in social work, which she received from Smith College in 1984.

Try as they might to make the issue of female rabbis disappear from public view, the male leaders of Conservative Judaism could not wish it away. For more than a decade, from 1972 to 1985, a holding action took place that depended on "shifting alliances, studies undertaken, commissions formed, hearings held, motions tabled, and votes counted." Amy Eilberg and others like her, who wished to remain in the fold of Conservative Judaism but who also demanded their full rights as women in the religious community, finally prevailed. Although the deeply divided faculty of the Jewish Theological Seminary had suspended consideration of the issue in 1979, the issue did not disappear from view and by 1983 that institution's faculty counted a solid majority favoring the admission of women as candidates for ordination into its rabbinical school. With support from Chancellor Gerson Cohen, who had been in favor of female rabbis since the late 1970s, the seminary faculty voted affirmatively on this issue in October 1983, the vote being 34 to 8 with one abstention and about half a dozen absent, presumably to register their protest.

Despite the positive changes that were taking place at the Jewish Theological Seminary in the early 1980s, considerable resistance to the idea of female rabbis remained during this period among members of the all-male Rabbinical Assembly, the international governing body of Conservative rabbis. One tactic of the reform faction, to create "instant" Conservative female rabbis by allowing Reform female rabbis to transfer over to Conservative Judaism, failed to receive a passing vote in the Rabbinical Assembly conventions of 1983 and 1984, because a three-fourths majority was required to approve individual candidates for membership within that body. Opposition weakened significantly after the sea change that occurred at the Jewish Theological Seminary in the fall of 1983, and in early 1985 Amy Eilberg, who had never lost hope of serving as a Conservative rabbi, saw her dreams realized.

At its February 1985 convention, the Rabbinical Assembly voted on a measure to automatically admit all seminary graduates to membership in their body. Being in the form of a constitutional amendment that required only a two-thirds majority in order to pass, the measure was enacted by a vote of 636 to 267. At a time when there were already 71 female Reform rabbis, Conservative Judaism now could point to Amy Eilberg as its first woman rabbi. She was ordained in May 1985 after receiving her degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary, and in July of the same year Eilberg was officially designated a member of the Rabbinical Assembly. She was quickly joined in that organization by Beverly Magidson and Jan Kaufman , also pioneer female rabbis. Enjoying the strong support of her parents and her husband Rabbi Howard Schwartz during her years of preparation to enter the rabbinate, Amy Eilberg worked at several posts over the next decade including that of chaplain at the Methodist Hospital of Indiana in Indianapolis, as a community rabbi at the Jewish Welfare Federation, and at the Jewish Healing Center in San Francisco, California.

sources:

Cantor, Aviva. "Rabbi Eilberg," in Ms. Vol. 14, no. 6. December 1985, pp. 45–46.

Eilberg, Amy. "Rites of Passage in Judaism: A Comparative Study of Jewish and Eriksonian Theories of Human Development" (M.S. Thesis, Smith College School for Social Work, 1984).

"End of a Vigil," in Time. Vol. 125, no. 8. February 25, 1985, p. 61.

Estep, Kimberly K. "Amy Eilberg," in Frank Northen Magill, ed. Great Lives from History: American Women Series. Vol. 2. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 1995, pp. 569–572.

Golinkin, David. "The Movement for Equal Rights for Women in Judaism as Reflected in the Writings of Rabbi David Aronson," in American Jewish Archives. Vol. 47, no. 2. Fall–Winter, 1995, pp. 243–260.

Lerner, Anne Lapidus. "'Who Hast Not Made Me a Man': The Movement for Equal Rights for Women in American Jewry," in American Jewish Year Book. Vol. 77, 1977, pp. 3–38.

Nadell, Pamela S. "Rabbis," in Paula E. Hyman and Deborah Dash Moore, eds. Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia. Vol. 2. NY: Routledge, 1997, pp. 1115–1120.

Rudavsky, Tamar, ed. Gender and Judaism: The Transformation of Tradition. NY: New York University Press, 1995.

Schneider, Carl J., and Dorothy Schneider. In Their Own Right: The History of American Clergywomen. NY: Crossroad Publishers, 1997.

Schwartz, Shuly Rubin. "Conservative Judaism," in Paula E. Hyman and Deborah Dash Moore, eds., Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia. 2 vols. NY: Routledge, 1997, pp. 275–278.

Weinik, Susan Aimee. "Amy Eilberg will be Conservative Judaism's First Woman Rabbi," in People. Vol. 23. April 29, 1985, pp. 50–51.

John Haag , Assistant Professor of History, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia