Few would give a second thought these days to the fact that both chairs of the Reform movement’s rabbinic assembly are women or that one of the joint chief executives of Progressive Judaism (the union in the making between Reform and Liberals) is a female rabbi. Women have served as rabbis in the UK for almost half a century.
But the road to the rabbinate was anything but smooth for the first, Rabbi Jackie Tabick, who recently took a step back from communal life when she retired as convenor of the Reform Beit Din at the age of 75.
While younger colleagues have hailed her as the example who inspired them to follow, she is something of a reticent trailblazer. “I am amazed at the number who have now come out and said ‘You’re the reason why I became a rabbi’ or ‘When I became a rabbi, I realised I didn’t have to fight all the battles because you had done it’,” she says.
“It took me a long, long time to realise I had this odd situation of being the first woman rabbi that I had to live up to.”
Although there were hurdles to surmount along the way, she was guided by the feeling that “if you fight battles openly, you get greater resistance. I am not somebody who takes up cudgels, except on other people’s behalf. I always felt I want to be recognised for my own qualities, as a rabbi, not as a woman rabbi.”
When confronted by opposition, “I will smile and carry on and eventually, hopefully people will accept — and that’s what happened.”
She suspects that her choice of vocation was influenced by her father’s death when she was just eight, leaving her with “a desire to understand a bit more about life and death. When your father dies when you are a little child, it marks you.”
Rabbi Jackie Tabick with her dollshouse (Photo: Gary Manhine)
She was born in Dublin and when she was young, the family moved to south Manchester and then Ilford. Orthodox-affiliated originally, the family switched to South-West Essex Reform (SWERS). When her brother was bar mitzvah in Dublin, her wheelchair-bound father had not been “allowed to go to the synagogue because he would have had to go in a car or be pushed in a wheelchair. There was no eruv. Which made me very angry when I grew up and realised they just should have suggested to my parents that the bar mitzvah was on Monday or Thursday.”
Another reason for her mother’s change of allegiance was that whereas the Progressive rabbi in Dublin had regularly visited her father, “the Orthodox rabbi never came near us”.
At SWERS, her mother joined the shul choir and since she could not leave her daughter at home, the young Jackie came along to services too. Starting cheder at ten, she progressed to the youth section of the World Union of Progressive Judaism, nesting-ground of many of the UK’s Reform rabbis.
At WUPJ conference in Holland, she recalls that one of the speakers was the renowned talmudist and impeccably Orthodox Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz.
“I remember we were inundated by wasps. And he said, ‘What are you afraid of?’ He held out his hand and these wasps came and settled on his hand. He whispered to them, they flew away. He was a great man.”
After reading history at UCL, specialising in the medieval period — “I am very good on monastic orders” — and gaining a teaching diploma, she opted to apply to the Progressive rabbinic academy, Leo Baeck College (then based at West London Synagogue). “I know that my application letter went from desk to desk to desk, backwards and forwards and nobody did anything with it,” she says.
Eventually, the college’s secretary advised her to write to West London’s rabbi Hugo Gryn and within days, she was invited to interview.
She was not the first woman to apply, she recalls. One candidate was told to go away and improve her Hebrew first but never returned, the other got married before she started the course.
The all-male interview panel “weren’t convinced a woman could read Hebrew” and gave her a passage of Mishnah. In her spare time she had taken an O-level in biblical Hebrew, studying with one of the foremost Progressive rabbis, Dov Marmur, so she had no trouble reading and translating the extract — “they couldn’t fault me on that”.
When asked at the interview if she planned to become a rabbi, she could not say for sure as she had previously been toying with the idea of becoming a teacher or social worker. As a result, she was denied a study grant. It was only when an outraged male student later protested to the college that none of the rest of her cohort had been asked to make a similar commitment, that she received a grant for the second year.
She was helped by Rabbi Gryn, who gave her a part-time job at West London. But she was still “very poor”, lodging in a room in a flat owned by a member of the synagogue with a single-ring camping-stove, on which she would often cook meals for fellow-students.
“I remember my shoes started to give out and I stuffed them with newspaper — and making sure my weekly shopping didn’t add up to more than a pound. I lived on baked beans, eggs, toast, tomatoes and bananas.”
What tipped the balance career-wise was when she was researching a thesis on snake symbolism in biblical and rabbinic literature. “There was no Google so what do you do? You use a human Google.” One of the college’s lecturers was Rabbi Louis Jacobs and she recalls the scholar mounting a ladder in his study to pluck out suitable volumes for her when he suddenly turned to her and said, “You know there is no reason why you shouldn’t be a woman rabbi.”
Ordained in 1975, she was appointed as education director at West London, though not as a rabbi. A rabbinical post had to be approved by the membership and Rabbi Gryn initially did not dare put her to the vote, she says.
Rabbi Tabick's ordination in 1975
The United States, which is usually well ahead of the progressive game, had only ordained its first woman rabbi three years earlier. Tabick recollects visiting one Liberal congregation in London as a student rabbi where she was told the council had held a vote, five to three in favour, to allow her to touch the Sefer Torah.
At West London, she ran the cheder and took services — though not everyone agreed with her participation: “There was a guy in the synagogue, every time I appeared on the bimah, he took out a newspaper and read it.”
But she was not allowed to officiate on High Holy Days until one afternoon on Yom Kippur, when she was told that Rabbi Lionel Blue, who was due to lead the overflow service, was sick and she was asked to step in. “I know that he just faked it to make sure I was actually able to take part.”
Still, at the time in the main sanctuary, women remained confined to the upstairs gallery — until a protest one year, when a group of women descended en bloc and filled vacant seats below, forcing a change in policy.
It took some years for the synagogue to appoint her as a rabbi, though even then she still encountered congregants reluctant for a woman to do a funeral or wedding.
She enjoyed West London and working with Rabbi Gryn, until the final years after he became ill. He died in 1996. “I was left running the congregation by myself because the officers of the synagogue I suspect wanted me to fail, so they never let me have any help. One week I was involved with 11 funerals in January. That was the worst. By the end of the week, I couldn’t remember who at the beginning I had buried. It was terrible.”
Although she had a strong body of supporters who believed she should succeed Rabbi Gryn after more than 20 years there, the leadership thought otherwise and in 1998 chose Rabbi Mark Winer from the US instead. Few women were chief executives of major companies or High Court judges so “they thought you can’t have a woman in charge of a big congregation”, she reflects.
That period was “awful”, she remembers. “I was terribly upset. My blood pressure went through the roof apparently. The doctor said you’ve got to go on medicine. I said I was leaving West London next week. She said, ‘Fine, no worries, don’t go on the medicine, you’ll be all right.’”
When the synagogue put out a leaflet with a picture of her and Rabbi Winer smiling, the image had been photoshopped, she says.
She took a nine-month sabbatical, before the end of which she had already secured her next ministry as rabbi of South-West Surrey Reform Synagogue. It proved a happy tenure, as did her subsequent 11 years as convenor of the Beit Din, a post which recognised her as a senior figure in the Reform rabbinate. She also acquired a doctorate — on conversion.
She is not fully retired, as she will be heading off to Italy and Spain in the summer to oversee conversions for the European Progressive Beit Din. She also runs an online conversion course for the Liberal movement and leads the monthly West Central chavurah, which maintains the old Liberal tradition of meeting on a Shabbat afternoon rather than morning.
And she will have more time for family; she met her husband of 47 years, Rabbi Larry Tabick, a teacher and a writer on Kabbalah, at Leo Baeck College. “We decided early on we would never work in the same congregation because we know that congregants often play one rabbi off against another and that’s not good for a marriage,” she says.
They used to give their three children presents after the High Holy Days in gratitude for allowing their parents to devote so much time to their rabbinic duties.
One son, Roni, has gone into the family business: she and Larry visit their son’s synagogue, Stoke Newington, once a month, where she takes the children’s service. She predicts her younger son, Jeremy, who has just completed a doctorate in Talmud and works at the egalitarian yeshivah Hadar in New York, “will be a rabbi before long”.
She will also have more time for her artistic hobbies. In the Tabicks’ living room stands an impressively large doll’s house, which she built, complete with tableaux of 18th- century life inside, including a Shabbat table and tapestries of Chagall’s windows and the revelation at Sinai.
A room in the dollshouse (Photo: Gary Manhine)
As for the position of women rabbis in Progressive Judaism today, she says: “There are as many as male rabbis, in fact there might be more. So it’s seen as the norm. Now if a congregation tried to do what West London did to me, there would be ructions.”
