Instead, she enrolled at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (Higher Institute for Jewish Studies), in the Academy for the Science of Judaism, and took seminary courses for liberal rabbis and educators for 12 semesters.

Baeck, while acknowledging Jonas as a "thinking and agile preacher", refused to make her title official, because the ordination of a female rabbi would have caused massive intra-Jewish communal problems with the Orthodox rabbinate in Germany.

In 1938, Jonas wrote a letter to Martin Buber, an Austrian Jewish philosopher, where she expressed some interest in emigrating to Palestine to possibly pursue potential rabbinical opportunities there.

The Reich Association of Jews in Germany allowed Jonas to travel to Prussia to continue her preaching; however, the Jewish situation under the Nazi regime quickly degraded.

Even if there had been a synagogue willing to host her, the duress of Nazi persecution made it impossible for Jonas to hold services in a proper house of worship.

While interned, she continued her work as a rabbi, and Viktor Frankl, who later became a psychologist, asked for her help in building a crisis intervention service to prevent suicide attempts in the camp.

Her particular job was to meet the trains at the station and screen disoriented newcomers arriving at the increasingly overcrowded ghetto with a questionnaire on the topic of suicide, designed by Frankl.

[17] Regina Jonas's literary work was rediscovered in 1991 by Dr. Katharina von Kellenbach, a researcher and lecturer in the department of philosophy and theology at St. Mary's College of Maryland, who had been born in Germany.

[21] In 1995, Bea Wyler, who had studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York, became the first female rabbi to serve in postwar Germany, in the city of Oldenburg.

[22] In 2001, during a conference of Bet Debora [de] (European women rabbis, cantors and rabbinic scholars) in Berlin, a memorial plaque was revealed at Jonas' former living place in Krausnickstraße 6 in Berlin-Mitte.

[citation needed] In 2003 and 2004, Gesa Ederberg and Elisa Klapheck were ordained in Israel and the US, later leading egalitarian congregations in Berlin and Frankfurt.

[citation needed] In 2010, Alina Treiger, who studied at the Abraham Geiger College in Potsdam, became the first female rabbi to be ordained in Germany since Regina Jonas.

[28] On 5 April 2014, an original chamber opera, also titled "Regina" and written by composer Elisha Denburg and librettist Maya Rabinovitch, premiered[29] in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

[31] In 2014, a memorial plaque to Regina Jonas was unveiled at the former Nazi concentration camp Theresienstadt in the Czech Republic, where she had been deported to and worked in for two years.

[34][35] In 2015, Abraham Geiger College and the School of Jewish Theology at the University of Potsdam marked the 80th anniversary of Regina Jonas's ordination with an international conference, titled "The Role of Women's Leadership in Faith Communities.