First Rabbis Ordained in Germany Since Holocaust

Thomas Kucera, left, rehearses for ordination. He was one of three to be formally received as the first graduates of a small Jewish seminary in Potsdam. (By Carsten Koall -- Getty Images)

BERLIN, Sept. 14 -- The first rabbis since the Holocaust were ordained in Germany on Thursday, the latest marker in the gradual return of Judaism to a nation where most vestiges of Jewish life were once eradicated.

At a synagogue in the eastern city of Dresden, three rabbinical students were formally received as the first graduates of a small Jewish seminary founded to train religious leaders throughout central Europe, but especially in Germany, which has relied exclusively on foreign-trained rabbis to serve its burgeoning Jewish population.

"Obviously, it's a big step forward," said Walter Homolka, the executive director and co-founder of Abraham Geiger College in Potsdam, the seminary that produced the new rabbis. "It's been five or six years of very hard work to get to the point where all of a sudden we are getting swept up into something that people are calling a miracle."

Of the three rabbis ordained Thursday, only one, Daniel Alter, 47, is a German native. "I would like to give to others what my faith has given me," he told the Maerkische Allgemeine newspaper in Potsdam before the ordination ceremony.

Alter said his father survived concentration camps in Auschwitz and Mauthausen and had difficulty passing on his faith to the next generation. "He hardly spoke about his fate," Alter said. "Jewish spirituality was mentally exhausted."

A second graduate, 35-year-old Thomas Kucera of the Czech Republic, will remain in Germany and serve as a rabbi in Munich. The third, Malcolm Matitiani, 38, of Cape Town, will return to South Africa.

About 600,000 Jews lived in Germany before the Nazis took power in 1933. Almost all died in the Holocaust or fled the country, with only an estimated 12,000 remaining after World War II. All told, about 6 million Jews were killed across Europe.

Germany has seen its Jewish population rebound since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, fueled by the emigration of Jews from Russia and other former Soviet republics. Until last year, the German government granted automatic entry to people with Jewish ancestry, quadrupling the number of Jewish residents to about 100,000.

There are only about two dozen rabbis in Germany, however; community leaders said the need for more is especially great because many of the Soviet bloc immigrants were raised in the absence of Jewish culture and religious rituals.

"We have a great hunger for rabbis," Dieter Graumann, vice president of the Jewish Central Council in Germany, told reporters. "Things have changed over the last 17 years. The community has gotten bigger and we have to do something to maintain unity."

Abraham Geiger College, named after the 19th-century Berlin rabbi who is considered the founder of Reform Judaism, opened its doors in 2001. It currently enrolls 15 students but hopes to expand gradually, Homolka said in a telephone interview. "We are just at the beginning of a huge process," he said.

Tuition is free, although the cost of educating each student over the five-year course of study totals about $100,000, school officials said. The budget is subsidized partly by the German government and Jewish organizations, as well as private donors, including many in the United States.

Homolka said he and co-founder Walter Jacob, a rabbi from Pittsburgh, had to overcome persistent doubts from others about the wisdom of opening a seminary in Germany, given its history.

"We obviously had to take a low-key approach," he said. "In the beginning, people were hesitant that this would be the right thing. One European colleague said to me that he couldn't believe a rabbinical institute could be set up on the ashes of 6 million."

The last rabbinical seminary in Germany, the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies in Berlin, was shut down by the Nazis in 1942.