The Anaconda Standard

First Woman Rabbi.

From the New York Sun.

The Jews of Chicago are making history. For the first time in the chronicles of Judaism a woman has acted as a rabbi, Mrs. Hannah G. Solomon, who was prominently before the congress of Jewish women, recently held in this city, is the woman. The incident took place in the only Jewish temple where such a thing could happen now, the Sinai temple in Indiana avenue, Chicago: the temple which under Dr. Hirsch, has led the way in the liberal Jewish movement.

The house was filled, not with the young people who might perhaps be supposed to be in sympathy with the innovation, but with elderly people, who perhaps never dreamed that their creed could get so far from the traditions as to tolerate a woman as a teacher. It was a new page in Hebrew history: a page as remarkable as that which chronicled the progress of religions at the world's fair, when a Catholic bishop prayed before a council of Jewish women.

President Fisher, the head of the congregation, and Professor Kohn of Northwestern University, sat beside Mrs. Solomon when she appeared in the Sinai pulpit. There was not a vacant seat in the house and there was not a disparaging comment on the new rabbi. President Fisher introduced the "daughter of the congregation," and said he was pleased that Sinai and its Judaism had advanced to the point where a "daughter" might stand in the place of a rabbi. He claimed it to be a triumph for Jewish womanhood. Mrs. Solomon read from manuscript, taking the work of the recent council of Jewish women as her theme. She was epigrammatic and logical.

"The woman question is settled as far as this country is concerned," she said. "It is all over. There are a great many men who do not think it is over, but there are also a great many men who do not think the civil war is over. They have a right to both views. There is no law against ignorance of any kind. The man who sneers at woman's work and woman's higher mission sneers at most everything else in life.

"It was necessary for Judaism that women organize and save the traditions of Judaism. The women confessed that they were ignorant of the traditions, and, the mothers being ignorant, there was but little hope that the coming generations would know of them except as memories. The ceremonial beauties were becoming a closed book. It is our plan to open it and save the beauties.

"It has come to pass that the world is asking whether any religion is worth saving. There are many who have lived aright without religion, but there are few who can live aright without its influence. It is the Jewish mothers who are going to save the traditions of the ages, the prophets and the philosophers of Judaism. Women are more emotional than men and religion is the science of rational emotionalism.

"Jewish women have organized for progress. They want to change the education of the three R's to the three H's—head, hand and heart. The woman of to-day cannot afford to live as her grandmother did.

"The ready-made woman has gone into the past with the self-made man, taking with her the old subject for collegiate debate: Resolved, That matrimony unfits a man for business or a woman for advancement. The hysterical woman has passed away. You will find her sleeping on a couch 100 years old and noting only each passing hour as adding one to the daily calendar. The woman who thinks and, thinking, acts, has come upon the stage to take her place.

"The thoughtful woman would not try to suppress gambling. She would first invent something to take its place. Provide amusement better than gambling, and there would be no gambling problem. It is a poor teacher who destroys and brings nothing to take the place of the thing destroyed. Society can cure most of the evils of the world by ceasing to attack them and providing other things which shall make the evils stale and flat in comparison."