Try as she might, Jackie Tabick cannot pinpoint the exact date on which she became Britain’s first woman rabbi — though she knows it was 50 years ago.
Julia Neuberger, who joined her as the second woman to hold the title of rabbi in the UK, and later became a Dame and a baroness, calls herself “an accidental rabbi”. Laura Janner-Klausner, who was ordained in 1999, studied theology before entering the rabbinate and, ironically, was the great-niece of the former Orthodox chief rabbi, Sir Israel Brodie; while Eleanor Davis, who graduated in 2024, is another woman who “had no intention of becoming a rabbi”, but now happily serves at Finchley Reform Synagogue.
All four women and many more are joining Leo Baeck College’s celebration of this half-century milestone in Anglo-Jewry; more than 70 women have now graduated from the college, and are so embedded in the community that it is hard to believe that the idea of a woman rabbi was ever thought to be unusual, unacceptable or shocking. Wider society has changed radically in the last 50 years, but there are still some surprises in speaking to the women, whose career paths have taken them in some dramatic directions.
Trailblazer Jackie Tabick paints an at times depressing picture of sexism and misogyny, both from the Orthodox world in her youth, and later from some of the lecturers at Leo Baeck in 1975, asking questions of her that her fellow male students were never asked.
On the other hand, she says, when she was a devoted member of the World Union of Progressive Judaism Youth, there were towering Orthodox scholars such as Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz who came to speak at one of their conferences — and it was the hugely admired former Orthodox rabbi, Louis Jacobs, who encouraged Tabick in her studies and granted her and her cohort semicha (ordination) at his New London Synagogue.
Tabick, née Acker, was born in Dublin. Her father, who had multiple sclerosis and was wheelchair-bound, died when she was just eight years old.
“We were members of the Orthodox synagogue, but when my brother had his barmitzvah, someone asked if my father could come [on Shabbat] to synagogue. It was a very stupid question, because, of course, the answer was no. Later on, when I began to learn about halacha, I was furious, and wondered why it wasn’t suggested that my brother could be barmitzvah on a Monday or Thursday, and then my father could have gone”. Instead, the barmitzvah took place without her father, and Tabick says her parents were devastated.
After her father’s death Tabick, the youngest of her parents’ three children, moved with her mother, first to Manchester and then to London. In London, there was an uncle whose wife had converted to Judaism in Dublin through the Liberal synagogue, and the couple were members of South West Essex Reform Synagogue, or SWERS. Tabick’s mother, who had a beautiful singing voice, joined SWERS and then its choir.“I started going to cheder. I remember that I was put in a class of six-year-olds because I couldn’t read Hebrew, but I learned in a few weeks.”
Tabick, who also sang in the SWERS choir, became a devoted member of the congregation. She was fortunate to be there at the same time as the “inspirational” Rabbi Dow Marmur, one of the giants of Reform Judaism. He coached her privately so that she was able to take a GCSE in Hebrew, unusual for the time, not least because she was the only Jewish girl in her school year.
But becoming a rabbi was not yet on the cards. She studied history at University College, London, specialising in the mediaeval church, and thought she would become a teacher.
Nevertheless, she was still passionate about studying Judaism, and so applied to Leo Baeck. At the same time she wrote to the legendary West London Reform Synagogue rabbi, Hugo Gryn. “After I wrote to Hugo my application was considered, until that point it wasn’t. I was interviewed and I was asked if I wanted to become a rabbi. I said I didn’t know. My fellow male students were, of course, not asked that question. I was asked if I could read Hebrew — my fellow male students were not asked that question. I had to prove that.”
She was accepted as a Leo Baeck student, but initially did not receive a grant “and was very, very poor”. Rabbi Gryn organised a job for her at West London. “Leo Baeck students used to be sent to Reform and Liberal communities all over the country but I stayed only in West London. They didn’t send me to other communities because they were frightened of what the reaction might be”.
What actually “tipped me over”, she says, was a casual remark from Rabbi Louis Jacobs, one of her lecturers. In between picking books off his shelves he suddenly turned to Tabick and said: “You know, there’s nothing wrong with being a woman rabbi.”
So 1975 became a momentous year for Jackie Tabick. She and her husband Larry, who qualified as a rabbi himself after her, married on Lag b’Omer and have just celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. Of their three children, one is a Masorti rabbi and another is a teacher of Talmud in New York.
Though she is nominally retired, Tabick remains convenor of the Progressive Bet Din in Europe and still takes occasional services. She spent much of her long and distinguished career at West London, and reports early misogyny there. One congregant even complained that her singing voice was not lower. She sums up her watershed achievement calmly: “I always wanted to be accepted as a rabbi who happened to be a woman, rather than as a woman who happened to be a rabbi”.
Baroness Rabbi Dame Julia Neuberger
Two years after Jackie Tabick graduated from Leo Baeck, Julia Neuberger became the second British woman rabbi — and the first to have her own congregation, South London Liberal. Born Julia Schwab to an academic German Jewish family, and growing up at West London Reform, she had no intention of becoming a rabbi.
Instead, she was focused on archaeology. “My father’s closest friend was Richard Barnett, who was Keeper of Western Asian Antiquities at the British Museum. Hard to believe this now, but when I was a child I used to go to the museum and play on the Assyrian lions”. Aged eight or nine, she was fascinated by the lions and Babylonian board games.
After taking Hebrew O level, she went to Cambridge to read Assyriology. Cambridge required her to do a second language, so she picked Hebrew “as a soft option”. Just before she was due to begin her degree, Neuberger had planned to go to Iraq to a dig run by the British School of Archaeology.
“But in 1968-9 there were public hangings of Jews in Basra, so I was told by the British School that it was not sensible to go.” The following summer, Neuberger was hoping to go to a British School dig in Ankara, Turkey, but a scandal concerning the alleged theft by a British archaeologist of antiquities from a Turkish dig made it impossible for the dig to take place.
British, Jewish, and unlikely to get a job in Israel, Neuberger switched the second part of her degree from Assyriology with Hebrew to Hebrew with Assyriology. One of her tutors was Nicholas de Lange, later himself to become a rabbi, who suggested that she should aim for the rabbinate rather than the academic world. Though she demurred, she accepted his suggestion that she should attend Leo Baeck for one day a week in the fourth year of her degree. “So I did, and I met Louis Jacobs — and I was hooked.”
Though she was admitted to the college, Neuberger says now that the question was not whether she would be ordained but whether she would lead her own congregation. She had no intention of leading a congregation, but as a student was sent to help with High Holy Day services in Bristol. “I’d just got married and spent most of our honeymoon writing sermons.”
After other placements in Nottingham and South London Liberal — she fell in love with that congregation and after her 1977 ordination spent “a very happy 12 years” there.
She says now that it did feel as though she and Jackie Tabick were “paving the way for something. There were other women coming up behind us at Leo Baeck, Sybil Sheridan, Barbara Borts…some of my male colleagues at Leo Baeck were a bit sniffy, but the question remained as to how we were going to be treated [by the communities].”
There was “huge national press interest” in Tabick and Neuberger’s ordinations, not least because there were not yet women bishops in the Church of England. “I wasn’t expecting that”.
There was no role model for either woman as to how to present themselves to congregations. Tabick wears a structured head covering while noting that at West London she was “expected” to wear some sort of robe; Neuberger said she “decided to cover my head but not wear a kippah, and I still wear the sort of velvet beret I used to wear 50 years ago.” She has also always worn a tallit, and finds wearing a robe useful at funerals.
Rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner
Laura Janner-Klausner became a rabbi (in 1999) and has since become one of the most prominent voices in Progressive Judaism. She took time out from the congregational rabbinate after becoming the head of the Movement for Reform Judaism, but is now back serving as the minister for Bromley Reform Synagogue.
For Janner-Klausner the path to the rabbinate could not have been clearer: she rejected Orthodox practice aged 12 because of sexism in that community, and so began involving herself in the Reform movement. She remembers saying to her great-uncle, Chief Rabbi Israel Brodie, that she would like to become a rabbi, too, and receiving the reply: “That’s lovely, Laura.”
The “great watershed” for her was when her parents, the Labour MP Greville Janner (and later peer) and his wife Myra joined her at a Reform synagogue “and absolutely loved sitting together”.
She studied theology at Cambridge. “I knew I would focus on Judaism for the rest of my life and I didn’t want to come at it ignorant”.
By the time she was ordained in 1999 her mother had died, but her father was “so proud”; she says she said she learned from him about public speaking, fund-raising and leadership, all helpful requirements for the rabbinate — and for the management profile she eventually assumed as senior rabbi of the Reform movement. “He also taught me not to have deference for authority, people have to earn it. Titles don’t matter so much— how the person is, is what matters.”
Being a second generation woman rabbi, Janner-Klausner says, was much easier for her than for her trailblazing predecessors. “They had to dress much smarter, had to prove themselves, the way that I didn’t. And because I came with a hefty Talmud background, my rabbinic colleagues in the Orthodox community respected me… and I did not get sexism because the women before me did the job.”
What difference has it made to the community to have women rabbis? “It has made an enormous difference. Women have brought an emotional truth and a language of intellectual breadth and depth to the rabbinate that just one gender on their own can’t do. Just as if we had had only women rabbis, we would really miss out on having men in that role — each gender brings with it, its gifts. I think the women changed how congregations function, and I do feel very sad for a lot of Orthodox friends who don’t have the capacity to have women in their pulpits.”
As far as outward appearances go, Janner-Klausner wears a “non-gender binary” kippah which she makes herself and has stopped wearing robes “because I felt I didn’t need the extra layer of asserting my authority. I want people to respect me because of my personality, and not because of my title”.
Rabbi Eleanor Davis
One of the most recent women graduates is Rabbi Eleanor Davis, who graduated from Leo Baeck in 2024 and now works at Finchley Reform. As with several of her colleagues, she says she never intended to become a rabbi.
“I trained as a music teacher: I worked in admin in the theatre world and I was having quite a lovely life, actively involved in my synagogue [Edgware Reform].But I thought that becoming a rabbi was what really amazing people did… I was just an ordinary person. What I knew of Jackie Tabick, Julia Neuberger, Laura Janner-Klausner was that these were fantastic women, and so I was quite content to be inspired by them, while continuing to learn.”
The turning point for Davis came when she was made redundant, and met Rabbi Deborah Kahn-Harris who came to talk at Edgware. She asked who in her audience had thought about changing career. Davis thought: “Maybe I could give it a go.”
She was not keen on the idea of becoming a student again but when she discovered a bursary scheme at Leo Baeck, found that was “game-changing” in her path to the rabbinate. Though she appreciated the bursary, she admits “it’s not really very much — I couldn’t have done it without the help and support of my husband”.
Though Davis was left in no doubt that being a rabbi was “something women could do, and could do well”, she has nevertheless been subjected to endless questions which she is sure were not asked of her male colleagues.
Over her five years of study, Davis — the quintessential “Jew in the pew” — travelled to 22 different communities in Britain — “from Glasgow to Hull to Cornwall, and most places in between. It was the most phenomenal education. You can learn everything you like in the classroom, but when you complement that with learning about communities and the challenges that they face — you couldn’t create it, you could only be lucky to fall into it.”
