Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and a Rediscovered Life

Jonas was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto in November 1942, where, remarkably, she continued functioning as a rabbi under conditions of extreme deprivation, giving lectures and offering pastoral counseling to fellow prisoners, work later corroborated in the postwar testimony of other Theresienstadt survivors including Viktor Frankl, who recalled her lectures there. In October 1944 she was transported to Auschwitz, where she was murdered, most likely on or shortly after arrival; no precise date of death is recorded.

For decades after the war Regina Jonas was almost entirely forgotten, absent from standard histories of the rabbinate and of Jewish responses to the Holocaust alike, until a researcher working in an archive in former East Berlin in the early 1990s discovered a small collection of her surviving papers, including photographs, her ordination certificate and her original 1930 thesis, that had been preserved uncatalogued for nearly fifty years. That rediscovery has since made her a widely cited figure in the history of women's ordination across Jewish denominations, and modern liberal, Reform and Reconstructionist movements that ordain women rabbis now generally recognize her, rather than any later twentieth century ordinee, as the first woman to hold the title.