Emily Faust Korzenik, who in midlife became part of the first generation of women ordained as rabbis in the United States and who, in 1985, presided over the first bar mitzvah in Krakow, Poland, in decades, an event that turned contentious, died on Dec. 15 at her home in Scarsdale, N.Y. She was 96.
Her death was confirmed by her daughter, Deborah Korzenik.
Ordained in 1981, just before her 52nd birthday and nine years after the first female rabbi to emerge from an American seminary, Rabbi Korzenik was at first part of a tiny sorority. For 25 years she presided over the Fellowship for Jewish Learning, a congregation in Stamford, Conn.
Her greatest test as a female religious leader came four years after her ordination, when she led a bar mitzvah ceremony at the Tempel Synagogue in Krakow, a city just 40 miles from Auschwitz.
Krakow’s Jewish community had been devastated by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Only a few hundred Jews, mostly elderly, remained in the city out of a prewar population of nearly 60,000. The bar mitzvah was the first in Krakow in more than 20 years, and it brought a renewed sense of life and hope to a moribund Jewish community.
It did not go smoothly. Nachum Elbaum, an Orthodox Jewish businessman from New York, had followed Rabbi Korzenik to Poland. Loudly declaring her unfit to officiate as a woman and as a non-Orthodox Jew, he tried to block her from performing the ceremony, grabbing her tallit (prayer shawl) in front of dozens of congregants and journalists.
Rabbi Korzenik carried on. As she said at the time in “Spark Among the Ashes: A Bar Mitzvah in Poland,” a film about the event released in 1986, “For some people here, yes, it is a problem” that a woman was officiating.
“And,” she added drily, “for some people in the United States also.”
The understatement was typical of a woman who “kept her cool,” Oren Rudavsky, the film’s director, recalled in an interview. “She was a very elegant woman. Very wise.”
Rabbi Korzenik had been recruited for the task by a neighbor in Connecticut who had just returned from Poland bearing an unusual request.
The neighbor had asked an elderly woman in Krakow what American Jews could do for the impoverished Jewish community there. The woman, Maria Jakubowicz, answered: Bring us a bar mitzvah. It would be a symbol of renewal in a country whose rabbinate had been decimated, and in a city in which only two synagogues remained, out of 300 before the war.
“Those that were not killed, are half-killed,” Ms. Jakubowicz said in “Spark Among the Ashes.”
Rabbi Korzenik had been working with a 13-year-old Stamford boy, Eric Strom, on his bar mitzvah preparations. His great-grandparents had come from Poland, and he and his parents were game to travel to Krakow.
The Rabbinical Council of America, an Orthodox group, got wind of the plans for the event and objected to a non-Orthodox rabbi performing the ceremony, let alone a woman. Mr. Elbaum was indignant.
“In my opinion,” he said in an interview in “Spark Among the Ashes,” “this is the opposite of being a rabbi, a woman to be a rabbi. She can’t be called a rabbi. The rules are, a woman can’t be a rabbi.”
Mr. Elbaum was present for the ceremony in Poland on Sept. 7, 1985. Some news coverage at the time referred to him as a rabbi, but The San Diego Union-Tribune quoted him as saying that he was “not a practicing rabbi.”
As Rabbi Korzenik reached for her tallit, borrowed from the community in Krakow, Mr. Elbaum “pulled it away from me,” she recalled in the film.
When he did the same thing to a second tallit, Rabbi Korzenik realized the absurdity of the situation. “I’m not going to have a tug of war with this man,” she recalled thinking. “And I just loosened my grip.”
In a front-page article about the event in The New York Times, the reporter Michael T. Kaufman wrote that when Rabbi Korzenik began to speak, Mr. Elbaum “said several times, ‘But the ladies cannot speak in synagogue.’”
Eric Strom began quietly reading his part, and the congregants were on Rabbi Korzenik’s side. They wanted her to continue, and she did.
Emily Faust was born in Manhattan on July 3, 1929, the younger of two children of Eugenie (Ginsberger) Faust, a teacher and the president of her synagogue’s sisterhood, and Edward Faust, a businessman in the hair care industry.
She graduated from Horace Mann School for Girls in 1946 and from Vassar College in 1949 with a degree in economics. She later obtained a master’s degree in social studies from Sarah Lawrence College and a teaching certificate.
She taught history at the Fieldston School in the Bronx and part-time at Scarsdale High School. She also served in leadership roles at her family’s synagogue.
In a 1993 interview with The Times, she said that when her teaching position in Scarsdale was eliminated, she saw the moment as a potential midlife turning point, thinking “Is this what I want to do with the rest of my life? It was a time and an opportunity to stretch myself. I was aware that the first woman rabbi existed, and it was within the realm of possibility.”
In 1976, Rabbi Korzenik became the first woman admitted to the Academy for Jewish Religion, a small seminary in Yonkers, N.Y. While still in rabbinical school, she was hired as a spiritual leader at the congregation where she was to spend her career, the Fellowship for Jewish Learning, which The Times called a “liberal unaffiliated congregation.”
Her husband, Sidney Korzenik, a lawyer, died in 2005. Along with her daughter, Deborah, she is survived by three sons, David, Jeremy and Josh, and eight grandchildren.
Recalling the scene in Krakow in 1985, Mr. Rudavsky, the director of “Spark Among the Ashes,” said of Rabbi Korzenik: “She took it very much in stride. She certainly was not interested in creating a scene. She was breaking ground. It was a brave thing to do.”
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans and is now a writer on the Obituaries desk.
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