Chana Timoner

Chana Timoner (1952–1998) was the first female rabbi to hold an active duty assignment as a chaplain in the U.S. Army , which she began in 1993. She was born in New Haven, Connecticut . Her mother had joined the Canadian Army to fight in World War II in 1940, a year before the United States entered the war, and in 1941 her mother transferred to the newly organized Women's Army Corps of the United States. Chana Timoner married at 18, and had two children by the time she graduated from college, yet was unhappy and restless as a homemaker and mother. She began rabbinical studies in 1984 after a friend remarked one day, "you know, in 7 years you could be a 40-year-old housewife or you could be a 40-year-old rabbi." She became a Conservative Jewish rabbi, ordained in 1989. She joined the army in 1993, and on the very day that year that she began her first assignment, at Fort Bragg in North Carolina , President Clinton announced the Don't ask, don't tell policy in the military; even so, Rabbi Timoner said she would gladly provide a full range of counseling for gay soldiers. Furthermore, when she heard that gays and lesbians, including but not limited to those diagnosed with AIDS , were being shunned by the Jewish religious establishment in Connecticut , she formed study groups for Jewish gays and lesbians and became active in AIDS organizations. As the only Jewish chaplain at Fort Bragg, Rabbi Timoner held regular Friday services for the few Jewish soldiers at the base, but spent most of her time counseling other soldiers in a helicopter battalion, many of them women. Rabbi Timoner completed her Army service as a Captain , at Fort Benning in Georgia , where among other noteworthy acts she insisted on adding prayers for Catholic , gay and gypsy victims of the Nazi terror at a Holocaust service. Indeed, when Elie Wiesel once addressed a large Jewish gathering at Yale University and made an impassioned reference to "the six million", Rabbi Timoner, who was sitting on the first row, stood and rebuked him for not including the other oppressed groups who died in the gas chambers (such as Roma ). She died at age 46 in 1998, having received a medical discharge from the army that very year due to the Epstein–Barr virus .¹