Balinsky-Friedman, Rachel Kohl Finegold and Abby Brown Scheier. In 2015 Yaffa Epstein was ordained as Rabba by the Yeshivat Maharat. Also that year Lila Kagedan was ordained as Rabbi by the Yeshivat Maharat, making her their first graduate to take the title Rabbi. In January 2013 Tamar Frankiel became the president of the Academy for Jewish Religion in California, making her the first Orthodox woman to lead an American rabbinical school. The school itself is transdenominational, not Orthodox. In 2013 the Israeli Orthodox rabbinical organization Beit Hillel issued a halachic ruling which allows women, for the first time, to say the Kaddish prayer in memory of their deceased parents. Also in 2013, the first class of female halachic advisers trained to practice in the US graduated; they graduated from the North American branch of Nishmat's yoetzet halacha program in a ceremony at Congregation Sheartith Israel, Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in Manhattan. However, this event was met with only faint enthusiasm among Orthodox feminists for several reasons. One is that Nishmat consistently distances itself from feminism, as its founder Chana Henkin often pronounces that she is not a feminist and that the women who graduate from Nishmat do not adjudicate halakha but always ask male rabbis. Another reason is that against the backdrop of the graduation of women from Yeshivat Maharat, in which women are full leaders with complete authority to adjudicate and function as communal rabbis this event does not necessarily represent the greatest advancement for Orthodox women and is arguably a step backward. That is, women counseling women only on "women's issues" without any real halakhic authority of their own keeps women in a somewhat more official version of traditional gender roles. In 2014, the first women were elected as national officers of the Orthodox Union; specifically, three female national vice presidents and two female associate vice presidents were elected. In June 2015, Lila Kagedan was ordained by Yeshivat Maharat and in keeping with newer policies, was given the freedom to choose her own title, and she chose to be addressed as "Rabbi". In 2015, Rabbi Kagedan completed a residency at Shira Hadasha in Australia. However, in the fall of 2015, the Rabbinical Council of America, representing over a thousand Orthodox rabbis across the United States, formally adopted a policy prohibiting the ordination or hiring of women rabbis by synagogues that operate within the boundaries of their figurative jurisdiction,