Myriam Ackermann-Sommer

Origins and early life

Myriam Ackermann-Sommer was born at Perpignan in 1996 to a Tunisian Jewish mother and a Mennonite Protestant father, and she is a niece of Grand Rabbi Alexis Blum; she was raised in and has always lived within Judaism, the faith of her mother's family.

Work and career

She entered the École normale supérieure in 2015, read English literature at the Sorbonne and passed the agrégation in English, then went to New York to study at Yeshivat Maharat, the seminary that trains Orthodox women for the rabbinate. She was ordained a rabbi on 15 June 2023 in New York by Rabbi Daniel Sperber, becoming the first French woman ordained within modern Orthodoxy, on the same day as her husband Émile Ackermann.

Long before that she had begun building institutions for Jewish learning: Ayeka in 2017 to open Jewish study to a wide public, the podcast Daf Yummy in 2020, the first French-language Talmud podcast led by a woman, and Kol-Elles in 2021, the first French kollel of advanced study open to women. In June 2022 she founded an Orthodox and egalitarian community in Paris. She published Figures du retour with the philosopher Michaël de Saint-Chéron in 2023 and Les Nouveaux Moutons de Panurge in 2025.