Regina Jonas
I was found with the story of Regina Jonas. My first feature film was premiered at the Jewish Film Festival in Amsterdam, with opening remarks by Rabbi Eliza Klapechek. Later, she came up to me and asked if I wanted to make a film about the world’s first woman rabbi. I didn’t think the topic interested me. I only remembered Regina Jonas’s name and had no idea when and where she’d lived. Years later, out of curiosity, I checked up on who she actually was. That’s when I learned that she lived in the Germany of the 1930s, in Berlin, and her greatest dream was to become a rabbi. She felt that she was born to be a rabbi. This was what she had to do. She knew it from the time she was a little girl. But a woman could not be a rabbi according to the laws of Jewish religion.