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Rabbis ordained in Germany since Holocaust

Luke Harding

PHOTO: AFP

Rabbi Daniel Alter (centre) from Germany, Malcom Mattitiani (right) from South Africa and Thomas Kucera from the Czech Republic inside the Dresden synagogue on Wednesday.

Dresden (GERMANY): Germany's Jews on Thursday celebrated a remarkable stage in the slow and often painful recovery of the community that faced annihilation in the Holocaust — the first ordination of rabbis on German soil since the Second World War.

Daniel Alter, Tomas Kucera and Malcolm Mattiatiani were ordained as rabbis at a synagogue in the east German city of Dresden. All three graduated on Wednesday from Abraham Geiger College, a progressive rabbinical seminary near Berlin set up to cater to more than 100,000 Jews in Germany.

Germany has the fastest growing Jewish community in Europe, second only in size to France and Britain. This is largely because of massive, and at times chaotic, immigration of Russian Jews to Germany in the 1990s from shattered pieces of the former Soviet Union.

Thursday's new rabbis include a middle-aged German, a Czech and a South African. They are the first to be trained here since the Gestapo closed Berlin's last rabbinical seminary in 1942, snuffing out a tradition of Reform Judaism that had gone on since the 1830s.

``I'm excited. I feel rather privileged,'' Malcolm Mattitiani (35), said. Mr Mattiatiani, whose grandparents were Jewish Lithuanian refugees, and who lost a great-uncle in the Holocaust, will take up a job next week at a liberal synagogue in Cape Town, South Africa. He said he did not think it strange to have done his studies in the country that carried out the Holocaust.

``Modern Germany is making an effort, and has succeeded in large degree, to correct the mistakes of the past. We need to start moving on as well.''

The immigration by Russian Jews since the fall of the Berlin Wall has been spectacular. Around 200,000 Jews from Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan have begun new lives in Germany. Reunified Germany's Government, mindful of the country's historical guilt, and keen to atone, has offered the Russian-Jewish newcomers generous social benefits, flats, German courses and citizenship.

Some newcomers flourished — they include the Russian-Jewish writer Wladimer Kaminer. Active Jewish religious communities have sprung up across Germany. There has also been a renaissance in Jewish academic studies. On Wednesday, however, one Jewish leader suggested the community had a long way to go. ``We need at least another 30 rabbis,'' Dieter Graumann, vice-president of Germany's Jewish Council, told a press conference in Dresden. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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