First female rabbi in Las Vegas likes breaking new ground

Stacy J. Willis

Friday, Aug. 3, 2001 | 9:25 a.m.

The Jewish rituals will be the same, but the rabbi -- standing barely 5 feet tall and reaching out to a crowd of hundreds -- will be breaking new ground.

Las Vegas' first female rabbi will take the pulpit Friday night at Congregation Ner Tamid, the largest Reform synagogue in Southern Nevada.

"I like breaking ground. I'm very much into the adventure of it," Rabbi Jennifer Weiner said. "I love Las Vegas, and I feel very comfortable with this congregation."

Weiner was born in New York, raised in Atlanta and educated at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she was ordained five years ago. She is one of a slowly rising number of female rabbis nationwide, although the increase has not come without controversy.

Jewish women have gained the right to ordination in the Reconstructionist, Reform, and Conservative movements, but not in the Orthodox tradition.

"Traditionally, men and women have different roles, and women are believed to have the higher responsibility of taking care of the Jewish home, of taking care of the family, of perpetuating the Jewish people," Orthodox Rabbi Shea Harlig of Chabad of Southern Nevada, said.

"There isn't anything Biblically in Scripture that says they can't be rabbis, but the way we've had it is to relieve the woman of the obligation to teach so that she is free to care for the family," Harlig said. "Some people think we discriminate against women, but that's not it. It's different roles."

And although women may be ordained in other Jewish traditions, they are not always accepted at the helm of large synagogues. The Reform movement began ordaining women in 1972, and to date, its Hebrew Union College has ordained 262 women -- a small portion of its 2,328 total ordinations. By 1990 only 31 women rabbis held senior, or "solo," rabbi positions in the United States, and none of those were at a synagogue of more than 900 people.

The Conservative Jewish Theological Seminar ordained its first female rabbi in 1983.

Rabbi Sanford Akselrad, senior rabbi at Ner Tamid, said he believes his Reform congregation will welcome the city's first full-time, female rabbi.

"As a congregation, there is a comfort level with male or female rabbis," Akselrad said. "A rabbi is a rabbi."

Weiner will serve as assistant rabbi to Akselrad, who has been searching for more than a year for someone to help manage the congregation's growing population. There are about 75,000 Jewish residents in Las Vegas, and more than 650 families at Ner Tamid.

"We have experienced steady growth, and it was becoming too demanding for me," Akselrad, who has been a rabbi since 1984, said. "We needed someone to assist not only in programming but also to share pulpit duties."

Rabbi Weiner, a member of the Women's Rabbinical Network, says she never felt discouraged from pursuing rabbinical work because of her gender.

"I think the important thing is just being a good rabbi, whether you are male or female," she said.

"If you ask my friends, they would say they always knew I would be a rabbi, but I didn't know it until college," Weiner said. "But once I decided, I knew that being a rabbi was right for me. It just felt right."