The new Abraham Geiger College, Germany's first rabbinical school since the Holocaust, was inaugurated three days after a march against neo-Nazism by some 200,000 Germans in Berlin to show solidarity against neo-Nazi violence.
On the same night 62 years earlier, the streets of Berlin were also filled with people - burning synagogues and looting Jewish businesses. November 9th, 1938 - Kristallnacht, the night of glass - marked the beginning of the Nazi pogrom against Jews that would see Berlin's Jewish community of more than 160,000 reduced to just 6,500. During the 1990s, immigration from eastern Europe increased the city's Jewish community to more than 11,000. The new college in Potsdam, just outside Berlin, is only the second rabbinical seminary in continental Europe. The other is in Budapest. From next year it will begin a five-year course training rabbis to work in Jewish communities in Germany and around Europe. Rabbi Abraham Geiger, after whom the college is named, was one of the most important figures of the Jewish liberal tradition that emerged in 19th-century Germany as an alternative to both orthodoxy and assimilation.
He taught at Berlin's University for Judaic Sciences, Germany's last rabbinical college, which was forcibly closed by the Nazis in 1942. The new college will attempt to re-establish Liberal Judaism, but college authorities are anxious to emphasise that the college will be pluralist. "Our students will be able to work in synagogues of all persuasions," says Dr Jan Muhlstein, chairman of the Union of Progressive Jews in Germany and a backer of the new college.
As part of the five-year programme, the trainee rabbis will participate in the degree course in Jewish studies at the nearby University of Potsdam. The university has become a centre for Jewish studies in Germany and its Jewish studies course, offered since 1995, now attracts more than 200 students. "Several of our students are considering training at Abraham Geiger College to become rabbis, as many women as men," says Dr Michael Bergner, course co-ordinator at the University of Potsdam. At least 80 synagogues are looking for German-speaking rabbis. Until now, trainee rabbis had no choice but to study in Britain, the United States or Israel, leaving them with little practical experience of German communities.
The inauguration of Abraham Geiger College attracted great interest from the Jewish community as well as the wider German public. "This is a new episode in the post-war history of the Jewish people in Germany," interior minister Otto Schily said at the inauguration ceremony. "This seminary finally closes the gap torn open 60 years ago by German sin."
