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 in decades, died on Dec. 15 at her home in Scarsdale, NY. She was 96.

Ordained in 1981, for 25 years, she presided over the Fellowship for Jewish Learning, a congregation in Stamford, CT. Four years after her ordination, she led a bar mitzvah ceremony at the Tempel Synagogue in Krakow, Poland. Krakow’s Jewish community had been devastated by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Only a few hundred Jews, mostly older adults, 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.

Rabbi Korzenik had been recruited for the task by a Connecticut woman, who had just returned from Poland bearing an unusual request. The woman had asked an older woman in Krakow what American Jews could do for the impoverished Jewish community there. The older woman 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.

Rabbi Korzenik had been working to prepare a 13-year-old boy for his bar mitzvah. His great-grandparents had come from Poland, and he and his parents agreed to travel to Krakow. The decision was not without controversy, in this country and in Poland. Orthodox Jews objected on grounds that women could not be rabbis and, in Poland, rabbis there tried to disrupt the service by forcibly removing Rabbi Korzenik’s tallit. Rabbi Korzenik persisted, and the congregants were on her side. With a nod from Rabbi Korzenik, the young lad began to read his Torah portion. All was quiet.

[A personal note: “I was the feature editor of a group of Westchester County community newspapers when Rabbi Korzenik returned from her groundbreaking trip to Poland. She graciously granted me an interview, telling me that in spite of the strife, she never wavered in her determination to fulfill what was asked of her for the family and for the Jews of Krakow. The full story, which appeared in The Scarsdale Inquirer in October 1985, was awarded first place for feature writing that year by the New York Press Association.”]