JERUSALEM — To be officially ordained as an Orthodox rabbi in Israel, you have to pass a grueling series of exams.
And you have to be a man.
Now, after a years-long court battle, Israel has finally allowed women to take the official rabbinic exams.
Israel's Orthodox religious authorities still refuse to officially ordain women as rabbis, and most Orthodox communities themselves are resistant to women carrying that formal title.
But opening up the rabbinic tests to women could qualify them for other leadership roles, like public servant jobs in Israel running state-funded religious services.
Advocates consider it a milestone in an ongoing revolution for Orthodox Judaism, expanding women's roles as scholarly experts in Jewish religious law.
"Women need to be part of the world of Torah," said Dr. Ruth Agiv, a 44-year-old dentist, who was among a pioneering group of three Orthodox women who took the first of a series of rabbinic tests in April. "We should not need to be outside. It belongs to us."
A slow evolution for Orthodox Jewish women
The three women emerged from a nearly six-hour rabbinic exam — testing their knowledge of the Jewish religious laws of mourning — at Israel's Ministry of Religious Affairs in Jerusalem.
They were greeted by their religious teachers, also women, with singing and bouquets of flowers.
"In Israel, we broke the glass ceiling of learning," said Rabbanit Batya Krauss, one of their teachers.
She goes by the term rabbanit, a female variation of the Hebrew word "rabbi." Krauss teaches at Matan, an institute of Jewish religious scholarship for Orthodox women in Israel.
For generations, advanced religious studies were the domain of men.
"When a woman wanted to learn in the olden days, she had to hide," Krauss said, referencing Yentl, the 1983 Barbra Streisand film about a young woman who disguises herself as a man to study the Talmud.
That has shifted in the last few decades, with the emergence of several institutes offering advanced studies in Jewish religious texts to women.
"Orthodoxy changes slowly, and the world is changing very, very, very fast," Krauss said.
While liberal streams of Judaism in the U.S. and Israel have ordained women rabbis for decades, most Orthodox communities have remained resistant.
An eight-year legal battle
To become an officially-recognized rabbi in Israel, men must complete a rigorous course of study and pass state-administered exams.
Women were not allowed to take the test until the Jewish advocacy group ITIM (which means "Passages" in Hebrew) began lobbying on their behalf.
Rabbi Seth Farber, the American-born leader of ITIM, tried to negotiate with Israel's religious officials. Six years ago, Farber met with the director general of Israel's Ministry of Religious Affairs.
"He said, more or less, 'Over my dead body will women ever study texts like this. These texts were not meant for women,'" Farber said.
Farber's group filed a lawsuit which ended up in the Israeli Supreme Court. The court ultimately ruled in favor of the women, ordering the state to open the exams to them.
The Rabbinate's delay tactic
In a statement late last year, Israel's chief rabbis expressed "deep regret" over the Supreme Court's "interference in topics carrying implications in Jewish religious law" including rabbinic ordination and spiritual leadership.
"The Chief Rabbinate Council of Israel views its core mission as safeguarding the Jewish character of the State of Israel and preserving the traditions passed down through generations," the chief rabbis said.
After the court ruling, the rabbinic authorities refused to administer the exams to anyone, men or women, for more than half a year.
"The rabbinate said we'd rather not give exams to men than give exams to anybody," Farber said.
Farber's group went to court again, and the court ordered Israel's religious authorities to administer the exams. In April, the first group of women finally entered the exam room.
The court ordered Israel's religious authorities to pay ITIM the equivalent of about $5,000 to cover court fees, Farber says.
Israel's religious authorities are delaying again
The Israeli Chief Rabbinate was supposed to administer a second test to men and women in July, but it has delayed the test by several months, without explaining why.
Farber says that raises questions about the rabbinical authorities' willingness to implement the Supreme Court's ruling to offer the exams to women.
"The momentum toward recognizing women's Torah scholarship is irreversible," Farber said. "The question now is whether the Rabbinate will choose to lead that process responsibly or continue resisting a reality that Israeli society and the courts have already acknowledged."
"Times have changed"
Rabbi Farber, who is Orthodox himself, is a direct descendant of Rabbi Moses Sofer, commonly known as the Chatam Sofer, a prominent 19th-century rabbi famously known as the founding father of ultra-Orthodoxy—a movement rooted in opposing any modernization of Judaism.
"I'm sure he's not looking down from his seat in the heavenly kingdom and feeling comfortable about what his great-great-great-grandson has done in one sense," Farber said. "But maybe he is, because times have changed...I think women will be ordained rabbis. I don't know if it will happen in my lifetime, but I think it will happen."
Recognized for their scholarship
For the women who sat for the exam, their milestone is less about a formal title of rabbi, and more about knowledge and authority.
Dr. Ruth Agiv wants to be recognized as a learned authority in Jewish law, to offer women the same kind of religious guidance they might otherwise seek from a man.
"I am also at the beginning of the path. This was the first test," she said. "I still have a lot, a lot, a lot to learn."
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