RELIGION: First Rabbis Ordained in Germany Since the Holocaust

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Jess Smee

Berlin, Sep 15 2006 (IPS) - The ordination of three rabbis in Germany – the first such event since the holocaust – has been lauded by politicians and Jewish organisations as a step forward in Germany’s long battle to come to terms with its traumatic history.

Daniel Alter, Tomas Kucera and Malcolm Mattitiani were ordained Thursday at a synagogue in the eastern German city of Dresden. Taking place more than six decades after the Nazi regime took power and slaughtered six million European Jews, the historic ceremony signalled progress in Germany’s drawn-out healing process.

“After the Holocaust, many people could never have imagined that Jewish life in Germany could blossom again,” German President Horst Koehler said in the run-up to the event. “That is why the first ordination of rabbis in Germany is a very special event indeed.”

It was an important step for Germany’s Jewish community, which officially totals just over 100,000 people, compared with 600,000 before World War II. The Nazis closed down the last German Jewish seminary in 1942, and no rabbis were ordained until now.

“This can be seen is a belated victory against the Nazis,” said Mattiatiani, one of the rabbis freshly graduated from the Abraham Geiger College, a progressive rabbinical seminary in Potsdam near Berlin.

Mattitiani will head back to his synagogue in Cape Town, South Africa. His fellow graduates German born Daniel Alter and Czech-born Tomas Kucera will respectively lead congregations in northwest Germany and the Bavarian capital Munich.

Many in the Jewish community hope the ordination will kick-start a new trend. Due to the massive influx of Jews from the former Soviet Union following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Germany now has the fastest growing Jewish community in Europe, and is severely short of rabbis: at the moment 25 rabbis serve 100 congregations.

“We need many, many more rabbis in Germany. We are hungry for rabbis,” Dieter Graumann, vice-president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany told a news conference.

Walter Homolka, rector of the Abraham Geiger college, stressed that the new rabbis should be more than just “imported ritual machines” and instead have a role as a moral and political authorities.

The German Jewish community, like its counterparts elsewhere, encompasses a wide variety of attitudes ranging from reform-minded liberals to more traditional orthodox Jews. The Potsdam seminary, which was founded in 1999, is a reformist school which takes its name from Abraham Geiger, a German rabbi of the 19th century and a key founder of Reform Judaism.

Given the modern stance of the new rabbis, there was only muted enthusiasm for the development from Germany’s more traditional Jewish groups. Mario Offenberg, director of the Adass Jisroel congregation in Berlin, stressed that although this step was to be welcomed, it also highlighted the difference in thought between sections of Germany’s Jewish population..

“We are an orthodox congregation and so although we respect this school it must be remembered it comes from another part of the wide Jewish spectrum,” he told IPS.

Media reports estimate that post-iron-curtain era newcomers now make up four out of five of all German Jews. These immigrants were welcomed into Germany after the collapse of communism, much due to Germany’s weighty burden of guilt, and have been given special benefits including flats, German courses and citizenship.

Offenberg stressed that a key task facing his congregation in Berlin and synagogues across the country was re-teaching Judaism to immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. “These people were cut off from Jewish tradition for 70 years and so there is a big need to strengthen their roots and for them to ‘relearn’ being Jewish.”

These immigrants have altered the nature of German Judaism. In the post-holocaust years until the 1970s, West German Jews were typically socially conservative while in the communist East, the Jewish community had only a few hundred active members.

But the mass immigration of Jews triggered a rebirth of German Judaism by encouraging diversification and modernity. Many of the new arrivals felt uncomfortable with the orthodox tradition of German synagogues. The rising importance of liberal tendencies has been emphasised by the fact that the first German ordinations came from a reformist seminary.

“With young clergy like Tom Kucera, German Judaism gets a new face,” German weekly newspaper Die Zeit commented.

Ahead of the ceremony, both Homolka and Graumann sounded a note of caution about the ordination, saying the milestone did not imply that Jewish life was back to normal in the country responsible for the Holocaust. The fact that the ordinations took place in Dresden – the capital of Saxony, the state with the most powerful neo-Nazi movement – served as a reminder of the divisions within German society.

“It would be premature to speak of a normalisation,” said Graumann. “We are far from any kind of normalcy here, but we are getting a fresh perspective.”