(RNS) — In a historic breakthrough, three women were allowed to sit for the Israeli rabbinate’s competency exams earlier this week.
The tests, which drill on a variety of topics in Halacha — traditional Jewish law — were previously only available to men seeking rabbinic ordination. But Israel’s Supreme Court ruled last year that the rabbinate must open up exams to women.
The exam didn’t go off without complications. The women were brought to a separate venue far from the male test takers and waited nearly five hours on Monday (April 27) until an emergency court order forced the rabbinate to administer the exam.
“We were really exhausted, angry and hurt,” Yaara Vidman Samuel, one of the women who sat for the test, told RNS. “The feeling was that we were being looked down upon as human beings, mostly for the sake of politics.”
Passing the tests will not grant the women the title of rabbi; Israel’s strictly Orthodox-controlled rabbinate does not ordain or acknowledge women as rabbis. But it was a win that comes with benefits beyond just symbolism.
While female rabbis have long been commonplace in the Reform and Conservative Jewish movements in North America and elsewhere, that’s not the case in Orthodox Judaism, and non-Orthodox movements ar …