Deborah Silver is made a rabbi in a British first

Mazeltov to Rabbi Deborah Silver. British-born and US-based, she has been ordained as a rabbi by the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies in Los Angeles. She is believed to be the firstBritish Masorti woman to have been ordained there.

Rabbi Silver, a former lawyer with Mishcon de Reya and assistant professor at BPP law school in London, says she had wanted to be a rabbi since she was young but realised it was "not a job that women (at that time) did". She tells People: "I fell in love early with Hebrew - my early doodles of the alphabet prove it - and I used to sit in shul and read the pieces at the back of the Siddur." She adds that the journey to the rabbinate has been a series of long, slow coincidences: a Hebrew degree at Cambridge (she was one of the first women at her college, Gonville and Caius), followed by qualification as a lawyer and then a law tutor. "Each stage represented another set of skills that would be relevant to my rabbinate, although I didn't see it at the time."

The course at Ziegler lasted five years. "It was exhilarating - and often exhausting - to be a student again and to learn from the likes of Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, Reb Mimi Feigelson and Rabbi Elliot Dorff."

Rabbi Silver, who grew up in north London, will be the assistant rabbi at Adat Ari El Synagogue, a 750-family Conservative congregation in Valley Village, Los Angeles. She is most looking forward to "helping people to rediscover their relationship to the Jewish tradition.