September 14: The First Woman Sermonizer

On this date in 1890, the eve of Rosh Hashone, Rachel (“Ray”) Frank became the first Jewish woman to preach formally from a pulpit in the United States. She was a talented, well-known teacher and newspaper correspondent who came to Spokane, Washington on a journalism mission. Finding no synagogue, and a community split between Orthodox and Reform elements, Frank expressed her dismay — she had long campaigned for Jewish religious unity — and community leaders responded by offering to arrange Rosh Hashone services if she would give a sermon. A special edition of the Spokane Falls Gazette, announcing that “a young lady” would preach to Spokane’s Jews that evening at the Opera House, drew both Christians and Jews to the event. Frank spoke so effectively on “The Obligations of a Jew as Jew and Citizen” that a non-Jewish man in the audience offered to donate land for the construction of a synagogue. “The Girl Rabbi of the Golden West,” as she became known, spent much of the 1890s lecturing to Jewish organizations and synagogues up and down the west coast, gaining enough celebrity that the topic of ordaining women became widely discussed for the first time. Surprisingly, however, Frank was quite conservative about women’s rights: She opposed the women’s suffrage movement and quit her public life as a speaker and writer after marrying in 1901. Her husband published a memoir about her several years after her death in 1948.

“Drop all dissension about whether you should take off your hats during the service and other unimportant ceremonials, and join hands in one glorious cause.” —Ray Frank