Lila Kagedan is a Canadian-born Jewish rabbi who in 2016 became the first female rabbi hired by an Orthodox synagogue. This occurred when Mount Freedom Jewish Center in New Jersey, which is Open Orthodox, hired Kagedan to join their "spiritual leadership team." She is currently the rabbi at Walnut Street Synagogue in Massachusetts.
Kagedan trained and received ordination in the summer of 2015 from Yeshivat Maharat, the Orthodox women's religious training program founded by Rabbi Avi Weiss in Bronx, New York. Unlike other Maharat graduates, who assumed titles such as rabba or maharat, Kagedan was the first to take the title "rabbi", because she said she felt that it was the most natural following her ordination.
Career
Kagedan is a medical ethicist and serves as an instructor of bioethics at Touro College. She is also a Hadassah Brandeis Institute-Gender, Culture, Religion and Law research associate, and either serves or has served as a chaplain in various hospitals in the Boston and New York City areas. In 2011, Kagedan founded the Sulam School in Brookline, Massachusetts, a K-5 program that offers immersive Judaic studies in a pluralistic environment. In 2016 Mount Freedom Jewish Center in New Jersey, which is Open Orthodox, stated that they had hired Kagedan to join their "spiritual leadership team." After she began that job, it was announced that she had been appointed at the modern OrthodoxShira Hadasha synagogue in Melbourne, Australia as a Rabbi in Residence; this made her its first female rabbi. She was to serve for five weeks beginning in May 2016. As of 2017 she is serving, under the title Rabbi, at the Walnut Street Synagogue in Massachusetts, having been hired by them in 2016. She is the first female Orthodox Jewish rabbi at a U.S. congregation.
Controversy
In the fall of 2015, the Rabbinical Council of America, representing over a thousand Orthodox rabbis across the United States, formally adopted a policy prohibiting the ordination or hiring of women rabbis by synagogues that operate within the boundaries of their figurative jurisdiction, regardless of title. Similarly, also in the fall of that year, the Agudath Israel of America denounced moves to ordain women, and went even further, declaring Yeshivat Maharat, Open Orthodoxy, Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, and other affiliated entities to be similar to other dissident movements throughout Jewish history in having rejected basic tenets of Judaism. Right-wing Orthodox news outlets reported Kagedan's hiring by an Orthodox synagogue with derision, putting terms like "clergy" and "ordination" in quotes. Asked why she chooses to identify with Orthodoxy when a number of other Jewish denominations readily accept female clergy, Kagedan responded that she was raised in Orthodoxy and remains committed to its tenets.
