First Jewish ordination in Germany since Holocaust

A TRIO of students will be confirmed as rabbis today, the first such ordination in Germany since the Nazi regime began the slaughter of six million European Jews more than 60 years ago.

The first graduating class of the Abraham Geiger College at the University of Potsdam is made up of just three men. But Dieter Graumann, vice president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said he hoped this number would rise exponentially.

“We need many, many more rabbis in Germany. We have a great hunger for rabbis,” he told a news conference introducing the rabbinical candidates who will be ordained at a ceremony at the New Synagogue in the eastern city of Dresden today.

There are now an estimated 100,000 Jews in Germany, compared with 600,000 before the war. Most of those fled or were killed, leaving Germany with only 12,000 Jews after the war.

The flood of Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s led to a rebirth of Germany’s Jewish community, but has highlighted the dearth of rabbis.

There are only around 25 rabbis serving 100 congregations.

“Things have changed over the last 17 years. The community has gotten bigger and we have to do something to maintain unity,” Mr Graumann told reporters.

The Potsdam seminary, established in 1999, was named after Abraham Geiger.

He was a rabbi in Berlin from 1870 to 1875 and pioneered liberal Jewish thought in Germany during that time.

The choice of Dresden for the ordination is also significant. It is the capital of Saxony, the German state with the strongest neo-Nazi movement.