A German Jewish community shadowed by scandal and an uncertain future welcomes a moment to celebrate
Rabbis and cantors are ordained at Geiger College, which has been hoping to put an investigation of its founder behind it
Cantor Shulamit Lubowska accepts her new certificate of ordination and a key to the Jewish community of Magdeburg at a ceremony at Berlin’s Rykestrasse synagogue, Sept. 5, 2024. Cantor Isidoro Abramowicz is at left. (Toby Axelrod).
(JTA) — BERLIN — For the past 14 years, ever since she became the first woman ordained as a rabbi in postwar Germany, Alina Treiger has been serving Jews in the country’s northwest through song.
Now, Treiger has a new title to accompany her singing voice: cantor. She is one of eight new graduates of the Potsdam University-based Abraham Geiger College rabbinical seminary and its cantorial program, which are affiliated with the Liberal, or Reform, movement.
“I am just happy and fulfilled today. It has been a big dream of mine,” said Treiger. The roles of rabbi and cantor not only “complement each other,” she told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, but represent “a connection between reason, intellect and heart.”
Treiger and her seven fellow graduates — two rabbis and six cantors in all — were feted in ceremony last week with choir and harmonium. But the joy came during ominous times for Geiger College, which has been operating in the shadow of scandal, and may soon lose a major source of institutional support.
In 2022, the school’s founder and former director, Reform Rabbi Walter Homolka, was accused of misconduct. He stepped down from all his Jewish leadership positions that year and later sold all of his ownership shares in Geiger College’s rabbinical and cantorial schools, as well as Zacharias Frankel College, a Masorti (Conservative) institution.
But those moves did not end Geiger College’s troubles. On Friday, the official umbrella organization for affiliated German Jewish communities announced that the establishment of new Liberal and Masorti seminaries and cantorial programs under the auspices of the University of Potsdam — which would effectively replace the three existing institutions, including the school that had celebrated its new graduates just one day earlier.
“A long phase of turbulence and uncertainty for Liberal and Conservative rabbinical and cantorial training in Germany is to be ended,” the Central Council of Jews in Germany said in a statement. “Since the allegations of abuse of power became known in May 2022, the discussions about these training centers have not abated.”
The move was not a surprise, and prompted backlash from Reform Jewish associations. Previously, the Central Council — which together with the Federal Ministry of the Interior was the main funder of the three institutions — had declared it could not support the institutions’ status quo in the long term. In January 2023, the council called the setup envisioned by the Berlin Jewish Community “unsuitable in any case and just another act in the tragedy staged by Walter Homolka and his followers.”
The World Union for Progressive Judaism and the European Union for Progressive Judaism responded in a statement that they were “deeply concerned and surprised” by the council’s decision to establish new seminaries without involving them.
They accused the council of “embark[ing] on a path that endangers the unity of the Jewish community.”
Berlin Jewish community president Gideon Joffe stated that he had offered to discuss the future of the schools with the Central Council “on an equal footing” and accused the council and other main funders of “preventing the liberal Jewish religious community from being religiously independent.”
Meanwhile, Geiger College will continue its work: “We look forward to the new candidates who will now begin their studies,” Joffe said. Since it opened in 1999, the college has ordained 55 candidates, he said.
“The future is not up in the air,” Isidoro Abramowicz, director of the Geiger cantorial program, told JTA before the ordination ceremony. “We continue teaching and we continue preparing cantors and rabbis for Europe and for the world. Nobody knows what’s going to happen tomorrow in the world, but we continue.”
Rabbi Lea Mühlstein, chair of European Union for Progressive Judaism, told JTA,“Maybe there will be a short time of two seminaries, and hopefully in the future we will be able to come together again.”
She added, “Sometimes we have to wait to repair the fractures.”
The organizational battle did not dampen the ordination ceremony at Berlin’s Rykestrasse synagogue, which opened exactly 120 years ago and survived World War II nearly intact. The afternoon ceremony drew several hundred guests, including Jewish community leaders, local politicians and clergy, and took place amid heightened security, following an attempted terror attack in Munich that morning.
“It was like a distant dream that we would have rabbis in Germany, and especially women rabbis,” said Mühlstein, who grew up in Germany. “Being here for this ordination 25 years after the founding really was very, very moving.”
Set back from the street behind a large courtyard, the entrance to the grand synagogue was festooned with balloons for the occasion. Inside, the voices of children echoed from the balcony above the sanctuary, where Rabbi Andreas Nachama, director of Geiger College, and Abramowicz officiated over the ordinations on the bimah below. Each candidate was introduced by one of their instructors, who draped a new tallit over their shoulders.
“Help me to open my mind, to be imaginative, always to seek justice and to be compassionate,” said newly ordained Rabbi Sophie Bismut of Paris, addressing the assembly from the bima with a prayer of thanks. She will join the rabbinic team of the French progressive Jewish network Judaisme en Mouvement, as the first woman rabbi in Marseille and Montpellier.
Judaism is handed down like a beautiful necklace from mother to daughter, said Israel-born Avigail Ben Dor Niv, who has been appointed rabbi of the liberal Migwan congregation in Basel, Switzerland. In Germany, she said she met many people who, like herself, “carry broken, shattered chains, lost chains. Sometimes even a single precious bead: a story, a memory, a memory of people, of a village, of a home they never inhabited.”
Her role, she said, is to “assemble a new, beautiful, colorful chain.”
The graduation marks “a moment of joy,” Abramowicz told JTA before the ceremony. All eight candidates have jobs, “and we are very proud of that.”
Some are just starting out, while others, like Treiger, have been working for years. Milan Andics has been serving as cantor in the Jewish community of Thuringia since last May, and his classmate Dmitry Karpenko has been functioning as cantor of the Union of Communities of Progressive Judaism in Russia since 1999.
Shulamit Lubowska has been cantor of the Liberal Jewish Community in Magdeburg since 2023; Yoed Sorek was cantor of the liberal congregation in Hanover from 2021 to 2024 and is now a freelance cantor. Anette Willing is due to start working as cantor for the Liberal Jewish Community in Kassel.
The ordination ceremony concluded with the graduates reciting the priestly blessing in several languages, from French to German to Ukrainian to Yiddish: May God make his “punim” shine down upon you and give you peace, chanted Yoed Sorek, who frequently performs in Yiddish, known as the “mamaloshen.”
“I hope my parents are watching from heaven,” said Treiger, whose mother, Nadia, used to sing in a Jewish choir in Ukraine. Treiger delivered the priestly blessing in Ukrainian, her mother tongue.
Her advice to tomorrow’s students is to “follow your heart’s desire. The rabbinate is a calling,” she told JTA. “Even in difficult times, you have to draw on your strengths.”
Correction: Because of an editing error, this story initially mischaracterized the nature of the allegations against Rabbi Walter Homolka. It has been corrected.
Update: In May 2024 Homolka and Axel Springer, the German media company that was the first to report allegations against him, reached a settlement (as reported by Zeit Online) in litigation brought by Homolka. The settlement’s terms were not made public. Homolka’s attorney said the settlement proved that the main allegations against Homolka had been refuted. An addendum attached to the initial story by the Axel Springer publication Welt said the two parties had agreed that there were “not confirmed criminal or disciplinary allegations” and that, given the rise in antisemitism in Germany, they decided to end their dispute.
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