Bomhoff Recommends
On January 27 we remember the victims of the Holocaust, and later this spring, in March, we will mark the 70th anniversary of the destruction of Hungarian Jewry. It is still hard to grasp the mechanisms behind that genocide. At the same time, we are happy to witness a reemergence of Jewish life all over Europe, a phenomenon that feels miraculous. It was also 70 years after the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem, when finally Jews began to return to their ancestral home to rebuild what was to become the Second Temple. “It took 70 years of mourning, grief, and exile before we could begin the work of return,” explained Rabbi Bradley S. Artson, vice president of the American University of Judaism in Los Angeles, at the opening of Germany’s new School of Jewish Theology in Potsdam some weeks ago. “It is now approximately 70 years after the Shoah, and the work begins.”
At the University of Potsdam, conservative and progressive Jews from the United States, Israel and Europe join their German partners in doing what we can to repair a broken world. While Jewish learning is built up in Germany 70 years after its destruction, we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that there is still much despair, bias and harassment to be overcome. However, the School of Jewish Theology opens a new chapter in the history of German Jewry and in the general understanding of Judaism in this country and beyond. There is an increasing diversity of European Jewry, but future growth is limited by the lack of educated leadership which can speak to them in authentically Jewish ways yet also share their embrace of modernity as contemporary Europeans. The new generation of European Jews needs rabbis who share their worldview, commitment and values.
At the school opening, speakers referenced back to Rabbi Abraham Geiger and his vision of 1836, remarking how now, only now, his dream has come to fruition, where rabbis and cantors can train in the university together with their colleagues of other religions, all as equals under the state (German universities, unlike their American counterparts, have continued to pursue their original charters of educating candidates for church ministry, but only recently Germany extended this to the country’s Jewish and Muslim communities). That is surely a great fulfillment, and some may call it God’s hand in history. This extraordinary development encourages us to dream big and to stake out our claims on behalf of scholarship and human betterment.