Germany was scheduled yesterday to 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 World War II.
Daniel Alter, Tomas Kucera and Malcolm Mattiatiani were yesterday due to be 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.
PHOTO: EPA
Among the new rabbis are 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 in Germany 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 on Tuesday.
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. He said he did not think it strange to have done his studies in the country that carried out the Holocaust.
"We will never forget the Shoa. But we should remember that Jews have thrived in Germany for centuries," he explained. "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."
British Jewish leaders were also going to take part in yesterday's ceremony, including Baroness Julia Neuberger, whose grandparents fled the Nazis.
"It's fantastic," she said. "There was no German Jewish community to speak of after the war, with only about 12,000 left. Feelings towards Germany among Jews were very negative."
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