Germany ordains first rabbis for 60 years

Sixty years after war, first rabbis ordained in Germany

· Ceremony marks new stage in healing process
· Russian immigrants boost Jewish communities

Luke Harding in Dresden
Thursday September 14, 2006
The Guardian


Germany's Jews will today celebrate 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 will today be ordained as rabbis at a synagogue in the east German city of Dresden. All three graduated yesterday from Abraham Geiger College, a progressive rabbinical seminary near Berlin set up to cater for 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.

Today's new rabbis include a middle-aged German, a Czech and a South African, who recently worked at a synagogue in Pinnar. 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.