GERMANY: 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 serving 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 the 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.
"I'm excited. I feel rather privileged," Mr Mattiatiani (35) said yesterday. Mr 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. 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 will take part in today'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. Now we have a new community."
The immigration by Russian Jews since the fall of the Berlin Wall has been spectacular. Around 200,000 Jews from Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan have begun new lives in Germany. Reunified Germany's government, mindful of the country's historical guilt and keen to atone, offered the Russian-Jewish newcomers generous social benefits, flats, German courses and citizenship.
Some newcomers flourished; others failed to get a job. A few vanished, prompting federal interior ministers to toughen up rules for prospective Jewish immigrants. - (Guardian Service)