Munich, Germany - The first orthodox rabbis to be ordained in Germany for seven decades, Avraham Radbil and Zsolt Balla, were handed their certificates Tuesday in Munich at a ceremony attended by senior political figures. Their graduations follow the 2006 ordination of three liberal rabbis in Dresden. Before that, most rabbis employed in Germany since the Holocaust had been trained abroad. The government has funded training in an effort to heal the wounds of the Holocaust.
Radbil and Balla come from Ukraine and Hungary and were trained at a seminary in Berlin which began courses in 2005. They have positions awaiting them in the cities of Leipzig and Cologne.
Jewish leaders from abroad, Central Council of German Jews president Charlotte Knobloch and German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble attended the ceremony.
Schaeuble said it was a source of gratitude that Jews were migrating back to Germany and that Jewish life was reviving. "The battle against every form of anti-Semitism is a duty of government," he added.
Some 600,000 Jews lived in Germany before the World War II, but the figure declined to around 12,000 after 1945 and today stands at around 110,000. German Jews trained their own rabbis before the Holocaust.
The Nazis closed the last Jewish seminary, the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies in Berlin, in 1942.