Women's Rabbinic Network is an American national organization for female Reformrabbis.[1][2] It was founded in 1975 by female rabbinic students.[3] Rabbi Deborah Prinz was its first overall coordinator and Rabbi Myra Soifer was the first editor of its newsletter.[4]
In 2010 Ellen Weinberg Dreyfus, a founder and former president of the Women's Rabbinic Network, was selected as
one of the top 50 rabbis in America by Newsweek and the Sisterhood blog of The Jewish Daily Forward.[5]
In 2012 Rabbi Mary L. Zamore, then the executive director of the Women's Rabbinic Network, wrote to Rabbi David Ellenson, the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion’s then president, requesting that he address the discrepancy of male candidates' ordination certificates identifying them by the Reform movement’s traditional "morenu harav," or "our teacher the rabbi," while female candidates' certificates only used the term "rav u’morah," or "rabbi and teacher." After four years of deliberation, HUC-JIR decided to give women a choice of wording on their ordination certificates beginning in 2016, including the option to have the same wording as men.[6]
The piece "From Periphery to Center: A History of the Women's Rabbinic Network", by Rabbi Carole B. Balin, appears in the book The Sacred Calling: Four Decades of Women in the Rabbinate, published in 2016.[7][8][9]
Category: Women rabbis
