c. 2007 Religion News Service

BERLIN _ Everything here seems to be a work in progress. Up the hall, a new space soon will be ready to hold worship services. A kindergarten is ready to open. And here, in the study room, a group of young men debate theological points, some perhaps considering the life of a rabbi.

Anywhere else, this would be a typical Jewish cultural center. But this fledgling seminary, the Yeshiva Beis Zion-The Lauder College at The Skoblo Synagogue and Education Center, is located in the heart of what was once Nazi Germany, which nearly eradicated its Jewish population 65 years ago.

Despite the country’s dark past, Beis Zion and two other groups are training the first rabbis in Germany in decades. The challenges, seminary leaders have found, are immense.

Many outsiders _ Jews and non-Jews alike _ assume there simply are no Jews left here. Yet, little by little, a Jewish society is coalescing. It’s not necessarily German, and it’s a little unsteady about its Jewish roots, but nevertheless, new rabbis are being ordained for the first time in generations.

“It’s no renaissance,” says Stephan Kramer, secretary general of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. “We’re building something new.”

Many of Germany’s revived Jewish communities are strong enough to stand on their own, says Walter Homolka, rector of the Abraham Geiger College in Potsdam and Berlin. But those communities need leaders, which means not only training rabbis, but training rabbis who will, in turn, inspire others to follow in their steps some day.

“We need to make people study for the rabbinate, but right now, there are not many good role models,” he said. “That can only be changed with younger role models.

“Without rabbis in the Jewish community, you’ll end up as a social club.”

Kramer, for his part, offered a more blunt assessment of the state of German Jewry.

“Right now, I have to build more cemeteries and old folks’ homes than kindergartens,” he said. “That is the situation we face.”

Tom Kucera, 36, one of the first graduates from Abraham Geiger College, is now a rabbi, splitting his time between Munich and Prague. He acknowledged a certain weight of history in Germany, but said he doesn’t let it dominate his life. “You cannot do that on a daily basis,” he said. “But getting used to it does not mean forgetting.”

The Abraham Geiger College, which was chartered by liberal Jewish groups, ordained its first three rabbis last September. Meanwhile, the Berlin yeshiva with its debating young men is sponsored by the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation. It hopes to ordain its first rabbis in about a year.

Additionally, the College of Judaic Studies in Heidelberg, which has offered degrees in Jewish Studies since the ’70s, plans to graduate its own rabbis in six to seven years.

It’s a turnaround. Once numbering around 600,000, Germany’s Jews were nearly exterminated during the Holocaust. After the war, survivors fled. A brief influx of refugees brought the Jewish population to about 25,000.

But many of those refugees set down roots in Germany. When communism fell in Eastern Europe, the German government liberalized immigration laws for Jewish citizens of the former Soviet Union. Moving to Germany was sometimes easier than emigrating to Israel.

Germany’s Jewish population quickly swelled to about 225,000, but tensions followed. Many German Jews had become largely secular, maintaining Jewish organizations more for social than religious purposes. Many of the new immigrants were also secular, having claimed Jewish origins to help them escape the former Soviet Union. At times, the groups did not mesh well.

And it meant that new rabbis might not only face congregations unfamiliar with traditional Jewish rituals, but congregations that didn’t even speak German.

Kramer says only about 80,000 people are officially registered with the German state as Jews, organized into about 100 communities. Only about a third of those congregations have full-time rabbis.

During the Cold War, many existing Jewish communities flew in rabbis from Israel for special ceremonies, often at exorbitant prices. Many of those rabbis faced complaints from their colleagues at home, who could not understand how they could travel to the country where so many Jews had died.

“It does not work well,” Homolka says of the rabbi shortage. “It worked before because congregations were considered more social organizations for people who had found themselves stuck in Germany.”

Beis Zion began in 2000 as a way to allow Jewish men to study religious texts. At first, there was no plan to train rabbis. But when leaders saw potential in some of their students, they created a second track toward ordination.

Still, there are hurdles, says Josh Spinner, vice president of the Lauder foundation, who raises funds for the school. Many times, he says, older people simply will not donate money to an operation in Germany because their memories of the country are too dark.

On top of that, the schooling has its own hurdles, since so few students ever had formal training in Judaism. “We’re a special-needs yeshiva,” Spinner quipped, comparing the program to making concert pianists of a 20-year-olds who have never studied music.

Nonetheless, Spinner, who is a rabbi himself, says he’s proud of his students’ achievements. But he always has to fight perceptions that German Judaism is not quite as well formed as in other regions.

“Our problem primarily is one of perception,” he said. “Our goal is not `Oh, for Germany, that’s not too bad.’ That’s not acceptable.”

KRE/LF END SORRELLS

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