In December 2015, when Angela Merkel, then the chancellor of Germany, stood on a stage at Berlin’s Jewish Museum to accept the Abraham Geiger Prize “for promoting pluralism,” she spoke about the “great gift … that there is once again a diverse and rich Jewish life in Germany.” It was a nice line, one fully endorsed by the two rabbis who flanked her onstage.
One was Rabbi Walter Jacob, an American who had fled Nazi Germany in 1939, as a child. The other was Rabbi Dr. Walter Homolka, a German convert to Judaism who was the rector of Abraham Geiger College, the first liberal Jewish seminary to open in Germany since the Nazis shuttered Berlin’s Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in 1942.
