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10 months into leadership crisis, fighting has renewed over German rabbinical schools’ future
BERLIN (JTA) — A plan to get Germany’s non-Orthodox rabbinical schools back on track after nearly a year of tumult has hit a snag: the country’s main Jewish organization says it can’t fund the group that took control of the schools in January.
The Jewish Community of Berlin had announced in a surprise move that it had paid 25,000 euros to buy out the ownership stake of the schools’ founder and rector Rabbi Walter Homolka, who stepped down from almost all positions amid investigations into whether he abused his power.
The Central Council of Jews in Germany, the country’s main Jewish group, had been working on a plan to overhaul the schools and initially expressed skepticism about the Berlin Jewish community’s purchase. But the Central Council’s president, Josef Schuster, said he had been persuaded to work with the new owners after getting assurance that Homolka would have no role at the revamped schools.
Now, the Central Council says its auditors have advised that it cannot legally pass along government funds to the Jewish Community of Berlin. The Central Council announced on Thursday that it would instead create a new foundation to support the Reform Abraham Geiger College and Conservative Zacharias Frankel College, and it could move to reopen the schools with new names. (Both schools are named for prominent 19th-century German rabbis.) The Central Council has supported both schools to the tune of about $530,000 a year.
“The takeover of the rabbinical training centers by the Jewish Community of Berlin was done with the best of intentions,” Schuster said in a statement. “However, it is not possible for the Central Council to support rabbinical training in the present support structure.”
Jewish Community of Berlin President Gideon Joffe attacked the plan as an “abuse of power,” saying that his organization would “not bow to the feudal fantasies of omnipotence harbored by old white men.” Joffe and Schuster have sparred intensely over the future of the two seminaries.
Joffe said the Central Council already had ceased transferring funds to the seminaries, “massively hindering rabbinical education in Germany, which it actually claims to protect.”
In fact, it is usually an entity’s owner — which since January has been Joffe’s group — that would be responsible for securing funding. The three major and longtime funders of the seminaries — the Central Council, the Federal Ministry of the Interior and the Brandenburg Ministry of Science — have all been aligned, declaring together in December their support for an independent liberal rabbinical seminary under a new structure.
The Central Council was in the midst of devising that new structure when Joffe’s group swooped in and purchased a leadership stake in the schools. The council had hired Gerhard Robbers, an expert in religion and law, to develop a new model for the schools, after an initial version of its commissioned investigation reported that Homolka had created a “culture of fear” there. A final report of the investigation by the law firm of Gercke Wollschläger is due out soon.
The council released Robbers’ “roadmap” for the schools on Thursday. He recommended that the Central Council establish a foundation under which two independent seminaries and a cantorial program would operate, under the auspices of the University of Potsdam. A board including the elected president and appointed executive director of the Central Council as well as representatives of both the Progressive and Masorti (Conservative) movements — appointed by themselves — would make fundamental decisions together. In general, the roadmap is designed to ensure stability and quality of education, and to prevent any one person or group from monopolizing the structure, Robbers wrote.
“If bringing in existing institutions is not possible or proves inopportune, institutions could be newly established,” Robbers’ recommendation says. “Through them, existing tasks, staff and students could be taken over. Appropriate names for the institutions should be found in agreement with the stakeholders.”
Schuster said the dramatic changes were warranted by the recent findings against Homolka. The former rector announced this week that he would resign from the leadership of another institution he had created: The Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Scholarship Foundation for talented Jewish students; he has also sought legal relief against the criticism against him, with some recent, albeit partial, success.
The Central Council aims to “offer students and employees a secure perspective, securing teaching in the long term and restoring lost credibility,” Schuster said. “With the present findings on the abuse of power, discrimination and the prevailing culture of fear at rabbinical training institutions, there can be no ‘business as usual.’ A new beginning is necessary.”
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The post 10 months into leadership crisis, fighting has renewed over German rabbinical schools’ future appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Board of Peace Members Have Pledged More Than $5 billion for Gaza, Trump Says
A drone view shows the destruction in a residential neighborhood, after the withdrawal of the Israeli forces from the area, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, in Gaza City, October 21, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas/File Photo
US President Donald Trump said Board of Peace member states will announce at an upcoming meeting on Thursday a pledge of more than $5 billion for reconstruction and humanitarian efforts in Gaza.
In a post on Truth Social on Sunday, Trump wrote that member states have also committed thousands of personnel toward a U.N.-authorized stabilization force and local police in the Palestinian enclave.
The US president said Thursday’s gathering, the first official meeting of the group, will take place at the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace, which the State Department recently renamed after the president. Delegations from more than 20 countries, including heads of state, are expected to attend.
The board’s creation was endorsed by a United Nations Security Council resolution as part of the Trump administration’s plan to end the war between Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas in Gaza.
Israel and Hamas agreed to the plan last year with a ceasefire officially taking effect in October, although both sides have accused each other repeatedly of violating the ceasefire. According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, more than 590 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli troops in the territory since the ceasefire began. Israel has said four of its soldiers have been killed by Palestinian militants in the same period.
While regional Middle East powers including Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Israel – as well as emerging nations such as Indonesia – have joined the board, global powers and traditional Western US allies have been more cautious.
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Why a forgotten teacher’s grave became a Jewish pilgrimage site
Along Britton Road in Rochester, New York, a brick gatehouse sits across from ordinary homes. Beyond it lies Britton Road Cemetery, its grounds divided into family plots and sections claimed over time by Orthodox congregations and fraternal associations, past and present. Names like Anshe Polen, Beth Hakneses Hachodosh, B’nai Israel, and various Jewish fraternal organizations are found here.
On the east side of the cemetery, a modest gray headstone draws visitors who do not personally know the man buried there, who were never taught his name in school, and who claim no personal connection to his life. Some leave notes. Some light candles in a small metal box set nearby. Others whisper prayers and stand for a moment before going. They come because they believe holiness can be found here.
The grave belongs to Rabbi Yechiel Meir Burgeman, a Polish-born teacher who died in 1938. He did not lead a major congregation or leave behind an institution that bears his name. And yet, nearly a century after his death, people still visit.
Over time, Burgeman has come to be remembered as a tzaddik nistar, a hidden righteous person, whose holiness is known through their teaching and daily life rather than through any title or position. His grave has become a place of intercession. People come to pray for healing, for help in times of uncertainty, and for the hope of marriage. What endures here is not an individual’s biography so much as a practice: the belief that a life lived with integrity can continue to shape devotion, even after the body has been laid to rest.
In life, Burgeman was not known as a miracle worker or a public figure. He was a melamed, a teacher of children, living plainly among other Jewish immigrants in Rochester’s Jewish center in the early decades of the 20th century. At one point, he was dismissed from a teaching post for refusing to soften his instruction. He later opened his own cheder, or schoolroom. There was no congregation to inherit his name, no institution to archive his papers. When he died, he was buried in an ordinary way at Britton Road Cemetery, one grave among many.
What followed was not immediate.
Remembered in return
The meaning attached to Burgeman’s resting place accumulated slowly. Stories began to circulate. People spoke of his kindness, his discipline, his integrity. Over time, visitors came. The grave became a place not of answers, but of belief. For generations, this turning toward the dead has taken this same form. It is not worship. It is proximity. A way of standing near those believed to have lived rightly, and asking that their merit might still matter.
In Jewish tradition, prayer at a grave is a reflection on those believed to have lived with righteousness, asking that their merit accompany the living in moments of need. Psalms are traditionally recited. Words are often spoken quietly.
I have done something similar too. Years ago, before I converted to Judaism and before I had the means to travel, I sent a written prayer through a Chabad service that delivers letters to the grave of the Lubavitcher Rebbe in New York. Someone else carried it. I cannot say with absolute certainty what happened because of it. Only that the practice itself made space for hope that I was seen, and that a prayer was later answered in ways that shaped my life and deepened my understanding of Judaism.
Burgeman’s grave functions in a similar register, though without any institutional frame. People come not because his name is widely known, but because the story has endured. Over time, that story gathered details. The most persistent involves a dog said to have escorted Jewish children to Burgeman’s cheder so they would not be harassed along the way by other youths. The dog then stood watch until they were ready to return home. The versions differ. Some are reverent. Some are playful. Some verge on the miraculous. The story endures because it names something children needed: care, in a world that could be frightening.
In recent decades, Burgeman’s afterlife has taken on a digital form. His name surfaces in comment threads and genealogical forums, passed along by people who never met him and are not always sure how they are connected. Spellings are debated. Dates are corrected. A descendant appears. A former student’s grandchild adds a fragment. Someone asks whether this is the same man their grandmother spoke of. No single account settles the matter. Instead, memory gathers. What once traveled by word of mouth now moves through hyperlinks.
The internet allows fragments to remain visible. Burgeman’s story survives not because it was officially recorded, but because enough people cared to remember it. In this way, his legacy resembles the man himself: quiet, unadorned, sustained by actions rather than declaration.
This story does not offer certainty. It is about remembering a life and asking if we might still learn from it and if, perhaps, it can bring us closer to faith. Burgeman left no grand monument. He left descendants. A grave. A life of Jewish values that continues to teach.
Burgeman did not seek recognition in life. After death, he became something else: a teacher still teaching, not through words, but through the way people continue to act on his memory. That is the lesson. Not any miracle. Not any legend. The quiet insistence that a life lived with integrity does not end when the casket is placed into the earth.
Some graves are instructions.
This one still asks something of us.
The post Why a forgotten teacher’s grave became a Jewish pilgrimage site appeared first on The Forward.
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Turkey Sends Drilling Ship to Somalia in Major Push for Energy Independence
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan speaks during a ceremony for the handover of new vehicles to the gendarmerie and police forces in Istanbul, Turkey, Nov. 28, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Murad Sezer
i24 News – Turkey has dispatched a drilling vessel to Somalia to begin offshore oil exploration, marking what officials describe as a historic step in Ankara’s drive to strengthen energy security and reduce reliance on imports.
Turkish Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Alparslan Bayraktar announced that the drilling ship Çagri Bey is set to sail from the port of Taşucu in southern Turkey, heading toward Somali territorial waters.
The vessel will pass through the Strait of Gibraltar and around the coast of southern Africa before reaching its destination, with drilling operations expected to begin in April or May.
Bayraktar described the mission as a “historic” milestone, saying it reflects Turkey’s long-term strategy to enhance national energy security and move closer to self-sufficiency.
The operation will be protected by the Turkish Naval Forces, which will deploy several naval units to secure both the vessel’s route and the drilling area in the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea. The security arrangements fall under existing cooperation agreements between Ankara and Somalia.
The move aligns with a broader vision promoted by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, aimed at reducing Turkey’s dependence on foreign energy supplies, boosting domestic production, and shielding the economy from external pressures.
Bayraktar said Turkey is also working to double its natural gas output in the Black Sea this year, while continuing offshore exploration along its northern coastline. In parallel, Ankara is preparing to bring its first nuclear reactor online at the Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant, which is expected to begin generating electricity soon and eventually supply about 10% of the country’s energy needs.
The current drilling effort is based on survey data collected last year and forms part of Ankara’s wider plan to expand its energy exploration activities both regionally and internationally.