c. 2006 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) During the same week in September that Pope Benedict XVI’s speech at a German university ignited violent reactions among many Muslims, another event also helped propel Germany onto the religious center stage: the first ordination of rabbis in Germany _ yes, Germany _ since the horrific days of 1942. That was the year the Nazis closed the last remaining rabbinical school in Germany, the College of Jewish Studies in Berlin.
Jews have been in Germany for nearly 1,600 years. When the Nazis gained political power in 1933, the Jewish population numbered between 500,000 and 600,000. Tragically, most of them were murdered during the Holocaust.
My colleague and friend Rabbi Walter Jacob is the president of Berlin’s Abraham Geiger College, which was established in 1999. Geiger was an important 19th-century leader of German Reform Judaism. The college, a long-time dream of Jacob, trains progressive rabbis for service in Europe and other parts of the world.
As a young boy, Jacob, born into a prominent rabbinic family in Augsburg, Germany, in 1930, fled Hitler’s gangster state for the safe haven of Springfield, Mo., where his father became the spiritual leader of a small Jewish community.
Following his family’s rabbinic tradition, Jacob later served with distinction as the senior rabbi of Pittsburgh’s Rodef Shalom Congregation and the president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis. Following his retirement, Jacob devoted his considerable talent and energy to the creation of a new rabbinical seminary in Germany.
His effort to train rabbis in Berlin, the belly of the Nazi beast, was often met with skepticism and even anger. Jacob’s critics questioned the need for rabbinic training in the nation and city that was the epicenter of the Holocaust. But Walter Jacob prevailed, and last month three rabbis, the first of more to come, completed their studies and in a moving and historic moment in both Jewish and German history, Jacob laid his hands upon the trio in the traditional ceremony that confers the title of “rabbi” on a student.
The new rabbis are Daniel Alter, who will serve synagogues in Delmenhorst and Oldenburg, Germany; Tomas Kuccera, who will lead Munich’s Congregation Beth Shalom as well as the Progressive community in Prague in the Czech Republic; and Malcolm Matitiani, who will be the rabbi at Temple Israel in Cape Town, South Africa.
Today, Germany, with its estimated 300,000 Jews, has the third largest Jewish community in Europe. Much of that extraordinary, even surprising growth took place after the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of East and West Germany in the early 1990s. One of the new rabbis will serve a congregation whose members speak both Russian and German.
In the late 1990s the American Jewish Committee opened an office in Berlin. The AJC’s presence in Germany, along with the Geiger College, are visible signs that despite Hitler’s lethal “war against the Jews” in the 1930s and 1940s, Jewish life in Germany is slowly reviving.
Of course, it can never again be what it once was. But the nascent German Jewish community, heir to an extraordinary religious, cultural, academic and scholarly tradition, stands on the shoulders of a world that once was, even if it is no more.
Before Hitler, there was a remarkable German-Jewish symbiosis that increased political freedom and gave rise to Reform, Conservative and Modern Orthodox expressions of Judaism. Those religious movements were among the chief exports of German Jewry.
That symbiosis ended in mass murder, but the German Jewish achievements of first-rate scholarship, path-breaking reform, philosophic exploration and cultural creativity are remembered and revered by the students and faculty of Geiger College.
Jacob’s courageous action in establishing a rabbinical school in Berlin can never bring back that which was so cruelly destroyed. But the three new rabbis, and those who will follow, are inextricably linked to that past even as they lead a new, growing German Jewry.
(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of the recently published book “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)
KRE/PH END RUDIN
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