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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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Police denied Jewish community’s request for more security before Sydney massacre, commission finds
(JTA) — Days before a massacre on a Hanukkah event at Bondi Beach, Sydney, the region’s Jewish security organization asked the police to send officers to Hanukkah events in the city.
The organization, the Community Security Group, had already worked with Chabad of Bondi to create a security plan for the event that included fencing off an area that normally had no barriers.
Now, in the message to police, the group emphasized that Jews in Sydney were facing unusual danger. The threat level, it wrote, was “HIGH. A terrorist attack against the NSW Jewish Community is likely and there is a high level of antisemitic vilification.”
The police responded by saying that they could not devote additional officers to the events but would send patrols by. Three days later, 15 people, including rabbis and a child, were killed when two men opened fire on the event, known as Chanukah by the Sea.
The sequence of events appears in the first report issued by Australia’s Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, formed in the wake of the massacre amid pressure on the government to do more to keep Australian Jews safe.
The report, issued Thursday, contains 14 recommendations, some of which were obscured from public view for security reasons. They include elevating and strengthening counter-terrorism policing and improving policing of Jewish events.
The top recommendation: “The procedures adopted by NSW Police in respect of Operation Jewish High Holy Days should apply to other high risk Jewish festivals and events, particularly those that have a public facing element.”
The Australian Jewish Association welcomed the report’s release but said it was marred by failing to address the form of antisemitic extremism said to have motivated the Bondi Beach shooters.
“The report’s credibility is undermined by its failure to address the issue of radical Islamist extremism. No serious analysis of the lead-up to the Bondi massacre can ignore this,” it said in a statement. “It’s concerning that the report identifies no urgent legislative changes required. There were serious failings by multiple agencies. If the legislation is adequate, then these failings are inexplicable.”
In particular, the group said, the commission should explore the fact that gun-control laws bar private security from being armed in Sydney, adding, “Whether different security settings could have changed the outcome is a matter that warrants urgent examination.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Police denied Jewish community’s request for more security before Sydney massacre, commission finds appeared first on The Forward.
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Jewish man arrested for allegedly firing pellet gun at left-wing activists in Rome
(JTA) — Italian Jewish leaders are condemning the alleged acts of Jewish man who was arrested this week after police said he fired a pellet gun at participants in a parade marking Italy’s Liberation Day from Nazism and fascism.
Eitan Bondì, 21, was charged with attempted homicide in connection to the shooting of Rossana Gabrieli and Nicola Fasciano, two members of the National Association for Italian Partisans, a group founded by members of the Italian resistance, during the Rome parade.
Neither victim was seriously injured by the attack, according to Italian media.
Bondi’s arrest marks the second instance of confrontations involving Jews during Liberation Day festivities this year. In Milan, pro-Palestinian activists, including members of ANPI, blocked participants honoring the Jewish Brigade, a Jewish military unit that fought the Nazis in Italy during World War II.
Bondi said he was affiliated with the Jewish Brigade. Davide Romano, the director of the Jewish Brigade Museum in Milan, wrote in a post on X that the organization did not know Bondì, and that he felt “horror and condemn in the most resolute manner, and without any justification, anyone who dares to use the name of the Jewish Brigade to carry out acts of violence.”
“The Jewish Brigade fought for freedom and human dignity. Instrumentalizing its name to justify or cover up violent behavior is an outrage to its memory and to all those who sacrificed themselves under that flag,” Romano wrote, adding that the organization reserved the right to “pursue legal action against all those who use the name of the Jewish Brigade to associate it with this shameful act.”
Victor Fadlun, the president of the Jewish Community of Rome, condemned Bondì’s alleged acts in a statement, saying that his detention “fills us with dismay and outrage” and voicing his organization’s “full solidarity and closeness” to the victims.
“The Jewish Community of Rome condemns and dissociates itself unreservedly from any form of anti-democratic violence,” Fadlun said, according to the Italian news agency Ansa. “In such a tense moment … we appeal to political and civil society to avoid any exploitation (of the case) that could fuel hatred and generate new violence.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Jewish man arrested for allegedly firing pellet gun at left-wing activists in Rome appeared first on The Forward.
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British police pledge 25M pounds for Jewish security in wake of London stabbing
(JTA) — British police have allocated 25 million pounds, or about $33 million, in new funding to keep Jewish communities safe, officials announced on Thursday.
The announcement came a day after a stabbing in the Orthodox neighborhood of Golders Green left two men injured and a community reeling. The stabbing has been ruled a terrorist attack.
“There’s no getting away from the fact that this was not a one-off,” Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who visited the neighborhood on Thursday, said during a press conference. “This has been a series of attacks on our Jewish community, particularly in recent weeks, and there is a very deep sense of anxiety, of concern about security, about safety, about identity frankly.”
A new group called Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiya, or the Islamic Movement of the People of the Right Hand, that has claimed attacks on Jewish targets across Europe said it was responsible for the stabbing. British officials said they were investigating that claim.
They disclosed that the 45-year-old man arrested in the stabbing, who was first subdued by Jewish security forces, was a British national who had come to the country “lawfully” from Somalia as a child.
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, who joined Starmer in Golders Green, told the BBC that she was treating the spree of antisemitic incidents as “absolutely an emergency,” though she declined to adopt language used by Starmer’s terrorism advisor that there was a “national security emergency” because of its implications on civil liberties.
Still, she said, she believed that frequent pro-Palestinian protests in London contained “far too many instances” of hate crimes and she spoke of her opposition to antisemitism in terms of her own religious identity.
“When I take the stand that I am taking against antisemitism, I am doing so as a practicing Muslim. It is absolutely in line with my faith,” Mahmood said. She added about British Jews: “This land is their land. It is my land too. We share this land and we must all work together to keep each other safe.”
The incident, which followed arsons at synagogues and of ambulances owned by a Jewish emergency service as well as a deadly attack on a Manchester synagogue last year, has prompted an escalation of fear among British Jews. Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis warned that visibly Jewish people — those wearing symbols of their Jewish identity — were “not always safe” in England.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post British police pledge 25M pounds for Jewish security in wake of London stabbing appeared first on The Forward.