Alina Treiger only has to look at the portrait of her predecessor to realize the importance of the role she is about to assume. Regina Jonas made history when she was ordained as Germany’s first female rabbi — but that role ended in her death at Auschwitz.
Now, Treiger is about to become the first female rabbi ordained in the country since before World War II.
The picture of Jonas, hanging in Berlin’s Jewish Museum, shows her in her black velvet gown and cap as she sternly clutches a prayer book.
PHOTO: AFP
Jonas was largely forbidden to preach in Berlin’s synagogues, and she was eventually deported by the Nazis to the Jewish ghetto in Theresienstadt in 1942.
She died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz when she was 42 and her story became a largely forgotten footnote in the history of German Judaism.
Treiger, who was born in Ukraine and moved to Germany in 2001, will be ordained at a Berlin ceremony attended by leading rabbis from around the world, as well as German President Christian Wulff.
She will assume the same rights and responsibilities as male rabbis, unlike Jonas, who struggled to have her 1935 ordination recognized and was restricted to teaching religion.
Treiger, who spent five years preparing for her ordination, said that even today the divisions between male and female colleagues remained stark.
“When a man wears a prayer shawl he is taken to be a rabbi, whereas many don’t want to accept that a woman wearing one can also be a rabbi,” she said.
“When I’ve said I’m going to be a rabbi, people’s reactions have often startled me. They cannot imagine that a woman is capable of making ethical and religious decisions in a community and preaching to them,” she said.
The reason for such skepticism has to do with the fact that although Germany was the birthplace of liberal Judaism, the movement shifted to the US after the Holocaust. The first female rabbi in the US was ordained in 1972.
Germany’s liberal seminaries disappeared in the Holocaust, so until the country’s first liberal rabbinical seminary opened in Potsdam in 1999, there was no place of study for would-be female rabbis to attend. Orthodox Judaism does not accept female rabbis.
Treiger’s own story is also entwined in the history of 20th-century Europe. Born in 1979 in the Ukrainian town of Poltawa, she was aware of her Jewish roots from a young age — largely because the communist authorities forbade her father from studying and restricted him to factory work, simply because he was a Jew.
“This experience always made me very aware of my Jewish roots,” she said, “and also very aware that I had something that others didn’t.”
At the end of the Cold War, finally free to embrace her religion, she founded a Jewish youth club and met other young Jews. But stifled by the Orthodox community of which she was a member, Treiger decided to head west. She made her way to Germany, arriving with a tiny suitcase and unable to speak German.
“I didn’t choose this job, it chose me,” she said.
Her ordination has prompted renewed interest in Jonas, who remained in Berlin when other rabbis had fled or were imprisoned by the Nazis. After the war, she remained a largely forgotten figure, despite the significant role she had played in the course of German Judaism.
According to Elisa Klapheck, author of The Story of the First Woman Rabbi, her name began to resurface only after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 with the opening of East Germany’s archives. Among the 14 files left by Jonas was her seminal work entitled Can Women Serve as Rabbis? Jonas’ answer was that female ordination was not just possible, it was a “cultural necessity.”
“Jonas made the historical first attempt to argue, on the basis of Halacha, or Jewish religious law, for the emancipation of women ... including admission to the rabbinate,” Klapheck said.
Another document was her certificate of ordination, which showed she had been ordained on Dec. 27, 1935, by Max Dienemann, a leading liberal rabbi of the time.
According to Klapheck, Jonas’ near disappearance from the history of German Judaism can be explained by Holocaust survivors’ need to cut themselves off from their past.
“The survivor generation had cut itself off emotionally from German Jewry and suppressed its memory ... To remember Regina Jonas [was to] recall a time when hope for the future had been transformed into murderous self-betrayal,” she said.
Only fairly recently, she believes, have Jonas’ achievements been recognized.
“Her ordination cleared the way for new developments in Judaism and ended up encouraging many women ... to follow a similar path,” Klapheck said.
Treiger said of her predecessor: “I admire her courage, the fact that she lived through a very difficult time and that she fought for a dream within a Jewish community that found it hard to accept learned women. I appreciate that she opened the door for me.”
Treiger is due to take up her rabbinical post in the 300-strong liberal community of Oldenburg, in western Germany, most of whose members hail from the former Soviet Union. She is expected to be the first of a wave of female rabbis, with another group due to finish their studies in 2012.
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