Jerusalem - Bar Ilan University Appoints Israel's First Female Haredi Dean

Prof. Malka Schaps was appointed dean of Bar Ilan University's Faculty of Exact Sciences on Tuesday, becoming the first ultra-Orthodox woman to be appointed to this high academic post, the Haredi website Kikar Hashabat reported.

According to the report, Schaps is the only female Haredi professor in Israel, possibly in the world. She is a mathematician at Bar Ilan and a best-selling author, writing under the nom de plume Rachel Pomerantz, mostly to a female, American, ultra-Orthodox audience.

Schaps lives in Bnei Brak with her husband David Schaps, who is a professor of classical studies at the university, and their children.

According to Kikar Hashabat, Schaps was born as Mary Elizabeth Cramer and converted to Judaism before marrying her husband in 1986. That year the two made aliyah.

"We were impoverished grad students there, but we came here and got jobs as professors, so our standard of living actually went up," Schaps told Haaretz in 2003.

She wrote her doctorate on non-singular deformations of space curves at Harvard University.