The man who sought to eliminate Jews just gets another one in der fuhrer’s face: Germany is ordaining its first rabbis since 1942. Say “Shalom,” Adolf.
Oh, wait. You can’t. You’re dead.
BERLIN Sep 13, 2006 (AP)— More than 60 years after the Nazis shut down Germany’s only rabbinical school, the first rabbis will be ordained Thursday in a ceremony welcomed by many as confirmation that Jewish life can again flourish in the country decades after the Holocaust.
[…] “After the Holocaust, many people could never have imagined that Jewish life in Germany could blossom again,” President Horst Koehler said Wednesday. “That is why the first ordination of rabbis in Germany is a very special event indeed.”
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 communities.
But for years Germany has had to rely on rabbis trained in 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.
Of course, it wouldn’t be an AP article if it reported only good news about Jews.
Dieter Graumann, the vice president of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, noted it would take a long time before the relationship between Germany and its Jews could be considered “normal.”
“That will only be possible when we don’t need to support this normalcy and when we don’t have to talk about it anymore,” Graumann said.
Hate to tell you this, Dieter, but if it’s Jews, it’s news. There will never be normalcy for Germany’s Jews, because there will never be normalcy for any of the world’s Jews. People simply will not let us live in peace. They haven’t for thousands of years, and it doesn’t look like it’s changing anytime soon.
However, one has to be happy about the ordination of German rabbis. And old Adolf? Spinning in that metaphorical grave of his.
Somewhere in a basement of the Kremlin, his charred jawbone spins.
Somewhere in heaven, or in the human ash-strewn fields of Auschwitz-Buchenwald, my grandfathers are smiling.
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There is a saying in German, “Die Deutschen werden den Juden Auschwitz nie verzeihen,” which roughly translates to, “Germans will never forgive Jews for Auschwitz,” as in, “If only there was no Auschwitz then Germans could vent their anti-Semitism much more freely.”
It’s much closer to reality than Horst Koehler’s fluffy-puffy speech.
Nevertheless this is heartening news.