27 Facts About Sally Priesand

Sally Jane Priesand was born on June 27,1946 and is America's first female rabbi ordained by a rabbinical seminary, and the second formally ordained female rabbi in Jewish history, after Regina Jonas.

Sally Priesand is featured in numerous books including Rabbis: The Many Faces of Judaism and Fifty Jewish Women who Changed the World.

Sally Jane Priesand was born June 27,1946, in Cleveland, Ohio into a Jewish family.

Sally Priesand's parents, Irving Theodore, an engineer, and Rose Elizabeth Priesand were not religiously observant but they were active in Jewish organizations.

Sally Priesand's mother served as president of the sisterhood of their temple, while her father was president of a B'nai B'rith lodge.

The family first attended a non-egalitarian Conservative synagogue, and later attended Beth Israel-West Temple, a Reform congregation on Cleveland's West Side, where Sally Priesand began to display a commitment to Judaism and Jewish life as a teenager.

Sally Priesand did not become Bat Mitzvah but was confirmed and continued her religious school education through the twelfth grade.

Sally Priesand graduated with a Bachelor of Hebrew Letters and a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from HUC-JIR and the University of Cincinnati in 1968.

Sally Priesand was ordained on June 3,1972, by Glueck's successor as HUC-JIR's president Rabbi Alfred Gottschalk at the Plum Street Temple in Cincinnati, making her the first woman to be ordained as a rabbi in the United States and believed to be only the second woman ever to be formally ordained in the history of Judaism.

Sally Priesand was offered a position at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York City, where she served for seven years under Rabbi Edward Klein, first as Assistant Rabbi and then as Associate Rabbi, leaving the congregation in 1979, when she realised that she would not succeed Klein as senior rabbi.

Sally Priesand appeared in a 2005 documentary, titled And the Gates Opened: Women in the Rabbinate, which features stories of and interviews with her, rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso, and rabbi Amy Eilberg.

In 1987, Sally Priesand was diagnosed with breast cancer, which struck again eight years later, and in 2003, she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer.

Sally Priesand was able to continue working during her treatments for breast cancer, but the thyroid cancer treatments forced her to take a three-month leave of absence.

Sally Priesand's illness affected her rabbinate, making her "more sensitive and aware of the needs of others who were dealing with health crises", she said.

Sally Priesand has served on the board of every major institution of Reform Judaism, including the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Union for Reform Judaism and the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

Sally Priesand is a member of Jewish Women International, Hadassah, the National Council of Jewish Women, the National Organization for Women and the National Breast Cancer Coalition.

Sally Priesand retired from Monmouth Reform Temple on June 30,2006, after 25 years of service to that congregation.

Sally Priesand had her first solo exhibition in the Backman Gallery at HUC-JIR in New York in 2002, in honor of the thirtieth anniversary of her ordination, and exhibits annually in the Monmouth Festival of the Arts.

On December 6,2010, at Temple Reyim in Newton, Massachusetts, Sally Priesand and the other three first American ordained women rabbis of four denominations of American Judaism met for the first time in an event called "First Lights", videotaped by the Los Angeles-based Story Archive of Women Rabbis, a project which videotapes interviews with women rabbis from all streams of Judaism and archives their stories online.

Sally Priesand was honored in several events on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of her ordination in 2012.

In 2014 Sally Priesand was one of those who attended the ceremony when a memorial plaque to Regina Jonas, the first woman to be ordained as a rabbi, was unveiled at Theresienstadt in the Czech Republic, where Regina Jonas had been deported to and worked in for two years.

The other exhibit, called "Sally Priesand Paves the Way", featured "documents relating to Rabbi Sally J Priesand's journey to becoming the first woman rabbi ordained in North America", and memorabilia and personal artifacts donated by Priesand.

Sally Priesand is the author of Judaism and the New Woman, and a contributor to Women Rabbis: Exploration and Celebration, and to A Treasury of Favorite Sermons by Leading American Rabbis.

Sally Priesand wrote the foreword to the book The Sacred Calling: Four Decades of Women in the Rabbinate, published in 2016, which contains one piece called "Letters from Hebrew Union College to Sally J Priesand" and another called "The Ordination of Sally J Priesand, A Historic Interview".

In 1973, Sally Priesand was awarded an honorary doctor of humane letters degree from Florida International University.

In 1997, Sally Priesand received an honorary doctor of divinity degree from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

In 2023, Sally Priesand became the first female rabbi to have her portrait featured in an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.