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Female Rabbi Ordained IN Germany First since WWII

Melanie Nathan 11-040-10

I find the heading to this Article I picked up quite strange – so notice mine is quite different. “Germany has ordained its first female rabbi since World War II.” Germany does not get to ordain Rabbis, nor Priests; neither does any country in the World. It is the religious denomination in a land of freedom of religion that could effect such ordination.    For me its nt semantics – it assumes a Country such as Germany has the right to ordain the clergy.   If anything that concept resounds Nazi all over again.

Alina Treiger has been ordained at a ceremony in Berlin and is the country’s first female rabbi since 1935. Now that makes sense. Her predecessor Regina Jonas, the country’s first female rabbi, was gassed by the Nazis during the Holocaust in Auschwitz Concentration Camp.

Rabbi Jonas was forbidden to preach, but Germany’s newest rabbi will have the same responsibilities as her male colleagues.  To draw the analogy is quite superfluous because Germany is no longer run by the Nazis, hence any ordination will require complete freedom to preach otherwise it would not in effect be an ordination.

Treiger,  spent five years preparing for her ordination.

“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.”

The reason for such scepticism 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.

In Ukariane and at the end of the cold war, she was free to embrace her religion, and started Jewish youth club. 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.

Treiger’s ordination has prompted renewed interest in the original first female rabbi, 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 hugely significant role she had played in the course of German Judaism. Read more http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/03/alina-treiger-germany-female-rabbi

Melanie Nathan