Regina

There is only one photograph of Regina Jonas, the first female rabbi of the world. She lived in Berlin of the 1930s, and her greatest dream was to become a rabbi. But a woman could not be a rabbi according to the laws of Jewish religion. Regina chooses a calling she must struggle to attain within her own religious community and moreover in a historical period where one is lucky not to be branded as a Jew. In 1935, she manages to find a liberal rabbi who will ordain her. She hopes that henceforth she will have a place in the synagogues. But she doesn't. It is perhaps fate's irony that she officially receives her synagogue commissions when most of her rabbi colleagues are emigrating or being arrested, one after the other. At age 37, she met the love of her life, Rabbi Josef Norden. Both of them were deported to Theresienstadt concentration camp. Only their love letters survived the Holocaust.