PARIS— Amid the many restrictions that pandemic lockdowns imposed on faith communities, 29-year-old Iris Ferreira emerged with a victory: In July, she became the first female rabbi ordained in France.

Today there are only four other female rabbis in the country, which has the world’s third-largest Jewish population after the U.S. and Israel. But like most Reform rabbis serving in France, all were ordained abroad. Ferreira would have been, too, since she studied for ordination in London, but the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the plan.

“It was an event that was really strong in terms of emotions and in everything that was happening and also in the impact that it has for the future,” Ferreira told ReligionUnplugged.com of her in-person ordination. “It created momentum to see that a certain journey ends and a whole new future opens with quiet infinite possibilities.”

While France’s “libéral” (Reform) movement accepts female rabbis as well as LGBTQ and interfaith members, it comprises only a minority of French Jews. A growing number of Jewish women in France are seeking to reform long-standing Jewish traditions, often going against the dominant Orthodox majority. In France, Orthodox Judaism has tightly controlled French Jewish life through the Israelite Central Consistory of France, a body created by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1808.

Given the struggles of maintaining Jewish identity in a historically Catholic but largely secular country — along with persistent anti-Semitic attacks and a high rate of “aliyah,” immigration to Israel — many believe the future of Judaism in France’s depends on encouraging both men and women to be faith leaders.

Ferreira spent her adolescence in Toulouse and studied medicine before realizing her strong connection to the Torah and learning Hebrew. She discovered France’s Reform Jewish community through Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur, the country’s third female rabbi, who has gained international acclaim for her books and appeared on the cover of French Elle. Ferreira will now serve as the rabbi in Strasbourg, a city on the French-German border with a rich Jewish history. She’s interested in the educational side of being a rabbi.

“I wanted a job that could reconcile both a study of the texts and an intellectual abstraction of Judaism with its liturgy and the community aspect,” Ferreira said.

Ferreira said her parents had a strong Jewish cultural identity but weren’t observant. During the German occupation, some 76,000 French Jews were deported according to the French government; the vast majority were killed. Many survivors were reticent about their Judaism after the war.

The history of Jewish women in France

Laura Hobson Faure, a professor of modern history who holds the chair of modern Jewish history at the University of Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne, said it’s important to first raise the question of why there aren’t more rabbis in France — regardless of gender.

“In the post-Holocaust period, in a very secular society that views religion with almost a Voltairean ridicule at times, it is extremely hard to find individuals who want to become a rabbi,” Hobson Faure said. “In addition to that, there are standards in the French rabbinical tradition of not only becoming an ordained rabbi but also obtaining a high-level university degree.” 

Hobson Faure also pointed to a long history of women in Jewish life in France. Reform Judaism, which originated in 19th-century Germany, influenced that era’s French Consistorial Consistory. This included constructing synagogues with balconies so women could be present in the male-dominated spaces. 

“They encouraged women to attend services because they wanted them to learn about Judaism so they could transmit it to the next generation,” she said. “However, there was no notion of equality between women and men, nor was there an expectation that women would play an active role in the actual prayer or ritual.” 

France experienced an influx of Jews from the 1940s through the 1960s from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia following those countries’ independence movements. These North African Jews continued traditional Jewish practice in their new country. The bat mitzvah, the coming-of-age ceremony for girls, was as central to French Judaism as the bar mitzvah, the ceremony for boys. But at many synagogues of the Consistory, girls are not permitted to read aloud from the Torah. That is reserved for their male peers.

“In that context, any sort of reform that would give more space to women in ritual is absolutely controversial,” Hobson Faure said.

This dynamic contrasts with that of the U.S., where Reform Judaism is the growing majority — according to the Pew Research Institute — and where there are now more than 1,000 female rabbis across traditions since the first was ordained in 1972. Meanwhile, Israel has about 100 female rabbis.

Bringing rabbinical studies to France

Pauline Bebe became France’s first female rabbi in 1990. Bebe said it was challenging to prove herself and conform to a certain model for being a female rabbi given there were so few around the world. She became more accepted after creating the Liberal Jewish Community in Paris in 1995 with the goal of building an egalitarian and inclusive congregation, she said. CJL — the abbreviation for the community’s French name — has a congregation in the city’s 11th district and is part of the World Union for Progressive Judaism. 

“We have people coming from very different backgrounds — professional backgrounds and places in society and also from different origins,” Bebe said. “It has also become a place of interreligious dialogue and a place of learning.”

She works with priests, imams and other religious leaders to promote this communication in a country where Jews and Muslims in particular have had a tense relationship. Bebe also uses her position to help the most vulnerable — those suffering from HIV/AIDS, people addicted to drugs and parents who’ve lost children. During the pandemic, she filmed services in the synagogue and maintained funeral traditions despite restrictions. 

“People needed the link to community,” Bebe said. “They also needed to be reminded what was essential because to say that eating is essential was not enough. I think you needed to feel connected — in spite of the isolation.”

In 2019, Bebe formed the Rabbinical School of Paris, the country’s first Reform rabbinical school. Previously, all of France’s Reform rabbis were trained abroad, mostly in the United Kingdom, the U.S. and Israel. Even without having to leave one’s country, becoming a rabbi is a large undertaking that requires about five years of training.

Challenges for female rabbis

Rabbinical training was especially difficult for 55-year-old Rabbi Daniela Touati, who was undergoing breast cancer treatment when she was ordained. Touati, a former human resources consultant, was born in Romania to Holocaust survivors and grew up in Israel and France. Judaism became more central to her life after she met her husband and had children. She became the president of the Liberal Jewish Union of Lyon, where she lived. Inspired partially by Bebe, she attended Leo Baeck College in London.

 “I spend my time studying as many things as possible to be able to transmit and reflect on issues, whether it's the environment, whether it's feminism, whether it's children and the education of children,” Touati said. 

Touati only served for a few weeks as the sole rabbi of Lyon’s Keren Or Synagogue before lockdown began in March 2020. Despite the difficulties of maintaining a spiritual community online, more people than usual connected to virtual services; many used the Friday Sabbath to mark time and maintain a sense of normalcy. Touati prefers a more progressive style to attract more people without strong religious connections.

“We can say things, and we aren’t judged for our ideas, our beliefs,” she said.

Lyon, France’s third largest city, is significantly smaller than Paris. The majority of Lyon’s Jews are Orthodox. Touati said she’s struggled building relationships with Consistory rabbis there. She remembers sending letters to all the Lyon region’s rabbis after her ordination, and not one responded.

"First of all, they don't recognize that I am a woman rabbi,” she said. “After that, there's the fact that it’s Reform Judaism, which for them is heresy.”

Many female rabbis expressed a complicated relationship with the Consistory, which doesn’t accept many of Reform Judaism’s progressive shifts. The sticking point is that women rabbis aren’t allowed according to the Consistory’s teaching of “halakha,” Jewish religious law.

David Revcolevschi, the former treasurer and now board member of the Consistoire of Paris, said the French Orthodox movement is 20-30 years behind the U.S. in terms of women’s involvement. Revcolevschi, like many Orthodox Jews, believes in the distinct roles for men and women in Judaism that don’t permit women to take on the duties of a rabbi, but he also said that focusing just on this position ignores the many other ways women can participant in their faith and be leaders in their religious communities. He highlighted a trend since the 1990s of more women holding secular elected positions within regional Consistory bodies and teaching in Jewish schools. The father of four girls, Revcolevschi hopes to see more women in these roles soon.

“The key point is to focus on, first of all, giving better access for women to Jewish education,” he said.  “Also — and I must say we don’t do this enough in French synagogues — pay more attention to the inclusion of women in French servitude.”

Orthodox Jewish women get creative

One Orthodox woman addressing these issues is Liliane Vana, who since 2012 has created a space for men and women to study through LectureSefer, a place for all to be called up to the Torah and participate in prayers but with a “mechitzah,” a partition to preserve modesty by dividing congregants by gender. Vana holds a doctorate in religion and is a Talmudist, philologist and associate professor at the Free University of Brussels.

“It was the euphoria that really awakened the conscience of men and women who said, ‘So we thought this was forbidden, but then women, what else can they do? We want to study what the Torah says, what the halakhah says about this issue,’” Vana said.

She didn’t publicize the first event, but 90 people showed up, inspiring her to create a group exploring the commandments dedicated to men and women. She received pushback — including from the chief rabbi of Paris — but LectureSefer has grown to explore other parts of the Talmud, the source of Jewish religious law.

Vana also organizes bat mitzvahs for girls that are more similar to bar mitzvahs, including reading from the Torah. She said she has seen more families thinking about their daughters’ education and has encouraged couples to sign prenuptial agreements. These are important in Orthodoxy because to end a marriage, a wife needs the husband to sign a “get,” a document to grant a divorce.

“There is a change, but it’s a change that’s long,” Vana said. “It’s not fast, and it’s not visible to everyone.” 

Others are looking outside the Consistory system, like 25-year-old Myriam Ackermann-Sommer, who may become France’s first female Orthodox rabbi. Along with her husband, Émile, they started Ayeka, an association promoting the democratization of Jewish study. Ackermann-Sommer has forged her own path, partially because she grew up in a multifaith family, eating kosher meat but also going to mosques and exploring Buddhism. She was drawn to Orthodox Judaism through an uncle who took her to his synagogue and to Israel.

“It began as like a mystical experience of ‘Oh, these are really my roots,’” she said.

As a teenager, Ackermann-Sommer set herself on a path to learn Hebrew and develop a religious foundation. However, she realized the “beth midrash” — a hall dedicated to Torah study — only welcomed her husband.

“The women don't develop the desire to show up because it's not a welcoming space,” she said.

Feeling motivated to promote a more open, modern Orthodoxy, Ackermann-Sommer and her husband began studying at New York’s Yeshivat Chovevei Torah. While they had to seek education abroad, Ackermann-Sommer believes women’s ordination within French Orthodoxy could happen in the future.

In March, she co-founded Kol-Elles, France’s first “kollel” — an advanced center for Torah studies — accessible to women. She hopes to revive the tradition of Jewish intellectualism in France that influenced the global diaspora. While Ackermann-Sommer has found herself in the spotlight — receiving much French media coverage and facing pushback from certain religious authorities — she describes herself as shy. In the past, articles about her have elicited comments about whether she was showing too much skin or whether her lipstick was too bright.

“I'm not ready for that kind of backlash,” she said. “I don't know if I want to be the rabbi that's on the cover of Elle.”

Asked about the influence she wants to have, she brought up the shelves in a beth midrash full of books by men and said she imagines adding her perspective to that canon. And how does her faith intersect with feminism? Ackermann-Sommer, who just had a daughter, related them through parenting. 

“Parts of the Jewish Orthodox world define Jewish women’s life from early on through clothing and modesty and things like that,” she said. “I'm uncomfortable with it. So I'm wondering, to what extent can we change the culture?”

Contributions of Reform Jewish women

Reform women are also shifting French Judaism by taking up non rabbinical positions traditionally exclusive to men. Sofia Falkovitch is Europe’s first female Jewish “hazzan,” or cantor, a trained singer leading songs and prayers.

Born in Moscow, Falkovitch grew up attending theater productions her father produced and learning to sing with her grandmother. While she was shaped by her heritage and stories of her family’s brutal hardships in the “shtetl,” a small Jewish town formerly found in Eastern Europe, Falkovitch hadn’t considered a career as a hazzan. But she became inspired by the music she felt such a deep connection to.

“It starts with a nigun (Jewish religious song) that my grandmother’s father sang to her when she was a little baby,” she said. “Music, when you feel it in your body, when you remember it, when it’s something that stays with you — it’s often because a real person passed it onto you.”

Falkovitch, a mezzo-soprano, combines her opera training with ancient religious melodies and Yiddish folk music. She regularly performs at Copernic, France’s oldest Reform synagogue, where her husband, Jonas Jacquelin, is a rabbi. 

While Falkovitch respects the responsibility of her pioneering status, she doesn’t want to be defined by gender. Above all, she believes in the power of music to move religious and secular audiences. Fluent in seven languages, she travels the world promoting interfaith dialogue through art, performing at churches and concert halls. 

“These are melodies that have survived for so many generations,” she said, adding, “And if you're taken in by this, you will not think, ‘Is this a woman?’”

In fact, many of France’s female rabbis hope there’ll be less focus on their gender as more women join their ranks. Currently, six of the eight students at the Rabbinic School of Paris are women. One of them is Manon Brissaud-Frenk, who previously studied architecture, finance and psychology and worked in politics.

Growing up, the 32-year-old, who currently runs a communications agency, never envisioned that a woman could be a rabbi. Now, Brissaud-Frenk is the founder of Daughters of Rashi, an organization promoting female representation in Judaism that is named after the famed rabbi of the Middle Ages who lived in France.

Brissaud-Frenk didn’t expect rabbinical studies to result in so much introspection — not only reading texts but thinking about how they can be applied to one’s life and community — but hopes to help adults come back to their roots and pass on this heritage to the next generation. 

“I consider myself a committed citizen and obviously a committed Jewish citizen,” she said. “What is important for me, much more than the title, is to have the knowledge of a rabbi to be able to defend our culture, no matter what job I actually do and how it goes.”

Hannah Steinkopf-Frank is a Paris, France-based freelance journalist and photographer. Her writing on Judaism, gender, culture and other topics has appeared in the New York Times, JSTOR Daily, Atlas Obscura, Vice, Teen Vogue and other publications.