This Week

Rabbi Marla Hornsten

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Cover Story

Rabbi Amy Ruth Bolton

Rabbi Tamara Kolton

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Rabbi Miriam Terris

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L E A El E S

hree years ago, a building-
wide announcement of "The
rabbi's on maternity leave,"
made visitors to Hillel Day
School of Metropolitan
Detroit stop in their tracks and rethink
what they'd just heard.
While the guests were caught unaware,
the Farmington Hills school's students
went about their normal business.
"The kids at Hillel have grown up with
me in their lives," says Rabbi Michele
Faudem, the school's rabbi-in-residence
and subject of the announcement.
"There are still people who are sur-
prised to find out I'm a rabbi, but they're
tIN mostly adults," says Rabbi Faudem, who
6/7 was the first Conservative woman rabbi
2002
to work in our community in 1992.

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SHELLI LIEBMAN DORFMAN StaffWriter

KRISTA HUSA Staff Photographer

"It's always startling the first time someone sees a
woman functioning in a rabbinic capacity," says
Rabbi Marla Feldman, one of eight women clergy in
the Detroit area, including seven rabbis and one
cantor.
"The concept of a woman rabbi is still new
enough that there are people still having their first
experience — at a funeral or a bat mitzvah or a wed-
ding. But it's a very short step to get past that first
experience and see it as a more natural thing," says
Rabbi Feldman, who is both assistant director for
domestic concerns of the Jewish Community
Council of Metropolitan Detroit and executive
director of Michigan Board of Rabbis.
It's been a long and winding path from the 1935
ordination of the first woman rabbi, Rabbi Regina
Jonas in Offenbach, Germany, to the time when
Detroit Jewry's first woman clergy arrived.
The years in between saw Rabbi Sally Priesand

ordained at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute
of Religion as the first American woman rabbi in
1972 and Cantor Barbara Ostfeld, the first _
American woman cantor, invested (ordained) at the
HUC-JIR School of Sacred Music in 1975.
Detroit's Jewish community had its first woman
rabbi in 1992, when Reform Rabbi Amy Bigman
joined Te m
I ple Emanu-El. Cantor Gail
Hirschenfang, who served at Temple Beth El, was
the first woman cantor here in 1989.
With local women clergy now holding positions
in areas including chaplaincy and education and in
organizational and congregational posts, the sight of
a woman rabbi or cantor in Detroit is increasingly
less a novelty.

Why The Clergy?

Detroit's women clergy, affiliated with the