Last update - 00:00 13/09/2006
German Jewish community to ordain three new rabbis, first since 1942
By The Associated Press
Three Jews who are to be the first rabbis ordained in Germany in more than 60 years were celebrated Wednesday as harbingers of a new era of Jewish life in the nation responsible for the Holocaust.
The accomplishments of Daniel Alter, Thomas Cucera and Malcolm Matitiani, marking the end of five years of studies at Potsdam University's Abraham Geiger College, were praised as a testament to the revival of Jewish life in Germany.
"After the Holocaust, many people could never have imagined that Jewish life in Germany could blossom again," President Horst Koehler said. "That is why the first ordination of rabbis in Germany is a very special event indeed."
Alter, Cucera and Matitiani, natives of Germany, the Czech Republic and South Africa, respectively, are to be formally ordained on Thursday in Dresden's new synagogue, which was rebuilt after the fall of the Berlin Wall - the first in the territory of the former East Germany.
Germany's Jewish community has more than tripled since the country reunified in 1990 and the government set up a program to take in Jews from the former Soviet Union. More than 100,000 Jews now live in some 102 established communities throughout the country.
But for years the country has had to rely on rabbis imported from England, Israel and the United States, because Germany's last Jewish seminary, the Berlin-based Higher Institute for Jewish Studies, was shuttered by the Nazis in 1942.
Alter and Cucera are to remain in Germany, taking up positions at temples in Oldenburg and Munich, respectively, while Matitiani will return to South Africa to a Jewish community in Cape Town.