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Prominent German rabbi resigns from leadership roles as report confirms allegations against him
BERLIN (JTA) – In a landmark step, investigators commissioned by Germany’s main Jewish organization have concluded that abuse of power and sexual harassment did occur at Germany’s liberal rabbinical seminary — and some of it, they say, may have crossed the line into illegality.
The 44-page “executive summary” of an investigation initiated by the Central Council of Jews in Germany is the latest and most damning report about the leadership of Rabbi Walter Homolka since accusations against him broke into public view last May.
Issued Wednesday after tense public conflict between the council and Homolka’s attorneys, the report concludes that structural changes are required to set Germany’s liberal rabbinical seminary, known as Abraham Geiger College, and other related Jewish institutions on the correct footing.
“A significant cause for the emergence of the problems identified by the investigators at the institutions under investigation is the personal misconduct of Rabbi Prof. Dr. Homolka in his function as a leader or person with great influence, which the investigators are convinced of,” the investigators wrote in their report.
Homolka announced Monday that he would withdraw from all functions in the seminary that he and a German-born American rabbi named Walter Jacob, founded in 1999. He also dropped out of the running on Tuesday for another term as chair of the Union of Progressive Jews in Germany.
A more comprehensive report including details about incidents in which investigators concluded that Homolka and his husband engaged in misconduct is due out in January, according to the Cologne-based law firm Gercke Wollschläger.
The preliminary report was welcomed in a joint statement by the Central Council, the German Interior Ministry and the Brandenburg State Ministry of Science, Research and Culture, which said they would “continue to fund the Abraham Geiger College to the same extent as before until the structural new beginning has been completed.”
It was also greeted with relief by the rabbinical student whose complaints kicked off the scandal.
“I think the report and the subsequent documents are a blessed development,” Itamar Cohen told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “It seems to confirm many suspicions which I and others share. It does affirm that I did the right thing and [this] could be the beginning of a new chapter of liberal Judaism in Germany.”
The scandal that erupted publicly in May began after Cohen sought help from Jonathan Schorsch, a professor at the School of Jewish Theology, in dealing with unsolicited pornographic material allegedly received from Homolka’s husband, who was also an employee at the seminary. (Abraham Geiger College is part of the School of Jewish Theology, which itself is under the auspices of the University of Potsdam.)
A German newspaper’s report about the allegations and an apparent effort to obscure them opened the floodgates for criticism of Homolka from past and current students, employees and colleagues. Homolka took a leave of absence from the numerous leadership roles he held with liberal Jewish religious and educational institutions that he had helped found since the late 1990s.
The scandal has shaken the foundations of modern liberal Judaism in Germany, and the new report suggests that those foundations were weak because they rested largely on one individual.
Josef Schuster, the president of the Central Council of German Jews, said the report made it clear that Homolka could not continue in his previous roles.
Homolka has rejected the allegations against him throughout, and his attorneys told German news media Wednesday that they believed the entire investigation was politically motivated. They accused Schuster of wanting to see Homolka exit Germany’s liberal Jewish leadership and said the Central Council had failed to consider fully the statement Homolka had given to investigators.
Rabbi Walter Homolka. at left, with other leaders of Germany Jewry including Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, at far right, at an event in October 2019. (Wolfgang Kumm/picture alliance via Getty Images)
The report is the first to emerge from a third-party investigation into the allegations against Homolka. A separate investigation by the University of Potsdam, released in late October, found that some of the accusations regarding abuse of power to be justified, but did not find any criminally actionable behavior and thus confirmed Homolka’s ongoing employment there as professor. It did not investigate the sexual harassment accusations, as Homolka’s husband had left his job by then.
The new report did scrutinize those allegations. The investigators said they found 13 specific incidents involving allegations against Homolka’s husband. German libel law bars the publication of his name. Using what they called a “traffic light system,” the investigators classified nine of these incidents as “red” cases, in which 25 instances of misconduct could be identified. Two of these cases involved the “initial suspicion of a criminal offense,” they added.
Regarding allegations of abuse of power against Homolka himself, they found — after interviewing 73 individuals — a total of 45 concrete incidents, 14 of which they classified as “red,” involving a total of 23 instances of misconduct. A detailed account of those cases, including responses that Homolka delivered earlier this week, will be included in the final report in January, they said.
More broadly, they said, their interviews had illuminated a culture of misconduct in which unchecked, unlawful or arbitrary decisions could be made largely because of a consolidation of power under Homolka. He presided over an institution ruled by a “culture of fear,” the investigators found, leaving employees and students alike less likely to express criticism or concerns because of the possibility of reprisals.
The investigators said structural changes were needed if there was any hope of shifting the culture. “As long as institutions are in private hands or even in the hands of an individual, or at any rate within the essential sphere of influence of the person who, in the opinion of the investigators, practices and exemplifies misconduct himself, it is hardly conceivable that the causes of the deficits identified can be remedied,” their report says.
Cohen told JTA he wants to see “real change in the leadership” of all liberal Jewish institutions in Germany, and “an external compliance system set up.”
He said, “I hope to see the institutions Homolka founded take a life of their own, no strings attached.”
Anticipating the report, the Abraham Geiger College had announced its own restructuring plans on Monday, a day after ordaining four new rabbis and two cantors at a ceremony in Berlin.
In a statement, interim director Gabriele Thöne said a new foundation would become the provider of rabbinical training in Potsdam.
Gabriella Thoene, interim director of Abraham Geiger College, in Berlin’s Rykestrasse Synagogue on the occasion of an ordination ceremony, Dec. 1, 2022. (Toby Axelrod)
Further, Thöne said the “door is open to Zacharias Frankel College” — the Conservative movement seminary also under the umbrella of the School of Jewish Theology at the University of Potsdam — “to join the new foundation on an equal basis while at the same time maintaining its independence.”
But in a scathing response issued Wednesday, the Conservative seminary said the Geiger College interim administration had not consulted them about the restructuring.
“A partnership between equal parties requires joint preparation, mutual trust, transparency and consensus. All this has been lacking so far, and continues to be lacking,” the statement said.
Signed by Rabbi Bradley Artson, dean of Zacharias Frankel College and the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies, the Conservative seminary in Los Angeles among others, the statement also said the preliminary report released Wednesday “confirmed the asymmetrical constellations of power in the two Potsdam rabbinical training colleges.”
Zacharias Frankel College “was in a state of dependency on the will of one person from the time it was founded in 2013. Our institution was deliberately pushed into invisibility and excluded from communication with funders in Germany,” the statement read in part.
“From the outset, the project of a Masorti rabbinical training in Potsdam was merely a makeshift means of being able to found the School of Jewish Theology [also in 2013] and give it the appearance of representing several denominations, and thus of being pluralistically positioned. Instead, however, the accumulation of power led to a monopolization of non-Orthodox Judaism in one person” – namely, Homolka.
For their part, the government and Jewish funding organizations said in their statement Wednesday that they were “committed to ensuring that there will continue to be both liberal and conservative rabbinical training in Potsdam in the future,” but that the proposals developed so far at the Abraham Geiger College do not meet the requirement of being “a clear cut from the previous structure and a comprehensive new beginning.”
The release of the Central Council-commissioned report was preceded by a volley of statements by lawyers for both parties.
On Monday, the council’s attorneys announced that their preliminary report would come out in two days. On Tuesday, Homolka’s attorneys issued a statement criticizing the impending “sudden” release of the report’s summary, suggesting it reeked of “prejudgment.”
The law firm representing Homolka — Behm Becker Geßner — noted that its client had received “a list of questions with serious accusations” from the council’s attorneys, and that he had responded in writing last Sunday. “Should the result not take into account the meaningful statement of our client, there would be a massive violation of personality rights,” warned the lawyers, who have successfully battled some critical press coverage of Homolka.
The Central Council criticized what it called Homolka’s delay tactics, saying its attorneys had asked Homolka in early September if he would respond to questions but had not gotten any response to questions sent Oct. 19 until late Sunday night, well after multiple previous deadlines. Still, the council confirmed, its investigators would take Homolka’s responses into account.
“This tactic is the main reason why the law firm will not be able to complete the final and detailed report of the investigation by the end of the year,” the Central Council said. “The courage of the numerous victims must not be sacrificed to Homolka’s delay tactics.”
Meanwhile, the Union of Progressive Jews in Germany is to meet next week in Berlin, after a three-month postponement. Board elections will be held for the position of chair, previously held by Homolka.
On Nov. 26, that group published a report from an investigation that it had commissioned, which concluded that there was no proof of abuse of power at Abraham Geiger College.
German rabbis who are part of the General Rabbinical Conference, Germany’s liberal rabbinical association, file into Berlin’s Rykestrasse Synagogue for an ordination ceremony, Dec. 1, 2022. (Toby Axelrod)
On Wednesday, a critic within the body, the State Association of Jewish Communities of Lower Saxony, said the Central Council’s commissioned report “supports us in our demand for the resignation of Walter Homolka from all his offices within the Jewish community, which we already made in May.”
And there is dissent within the General Rabbinical Conference, Germany’s liberal rabbinical association, as well. About a dozen members issued a statement in November, breaking from the official, cautious tone, saying that “the abuse of power proven against Rabbi Prof. Dr. Homolka [in the university’s report of Oct. 26] is not compatible with the values of Jewish and general ethics.”
The association, known as ARK, issued a statement at the end of November stating that, despite differences of opinion in their ranks, they join the call for a structural and personal new beginning, as “a chance for the next phase of rabbinical training in Germany.”
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Amid blazing heat and rising tides, artists find beauty and desperation in these biblical times
Daniel Rothbart’s floating aluminum and glass forms are at once playful and lyrical, biomorphic and other-worldly; prehistoric and futuristic. They are set in a pond and two small pools in Staten Island’s Snug Harbor, a hidden pastoral gem that once served as a safe haven for sailors.
Overflowing with colorful flowers and plants and shrubbery, the scene is idyllic, short of the oppressive, steamy heat that has settled over the landscape. But then that’s part of it too. Rothbart’s Serpentine Sibyls: A Floating Sculptural Installation, animated by winds and currents, are site-specific and immersive. He is keenly in tune with its ecology.
“No, my work has not always addressed political issues, but water is a fraught medium,” he told me over the phone. “You can’t work with water without addressing its importance to life on this planet and climate change and stewardship. Water has always fascinated me.”
Growing up in the Pacific Northwest the ocean was a constant alluring presence. And as a Jew, the water’s historical, cultural and religious traditional significance is defining, he said.
“There’s the purification ritual of the mikveh, the parting of the Red Sea, the washing of hands and feet before entering the temple in Biblical times and the casting off of sins, Tashlich on Rosh Hashanah. Water diplomacy and technology has always been central in Israel. Making the desert bloom.”
Rothbart, a multidisciplinary artist whose work has been exhibited across the globe, is the author of Jewish Metaphysics as Generative Principle in American Art, which examines how Jewish mystical traditions, especially Kabbalah, informed abstract American art in the post-World War II years.
Erudite and heady, Rothbart said that his work can be viewed through the lens of tikkun olam, the Jewish imperative to help repair a fractured world, but it also borrows from Japanese culture, outer space imagery, Marcel Duchamp’s dadaism and Greek mythology.
The title of his exhibit references Sibyls, the Greek female prophets who were consulted in catastrophic times, not unlike our current era cursed by floods and wildfires and heat waves.
Rothbart started thinking about floating sculptures in 2007 for a piece he was conceiving for the Venice Biennial. A city surrounded by water cried out for it. Japanese glass fishing floats came to mind.
“The Japanese fishing floats would wash up on shore in Oregon where I grew up,” he recalled. “I loved the fragile recycled pieces of glass that came from the orient and that I could de-contextualize a common object and in so doing create something new.”
To anchor the sculptures, Rothbart and his assistant kayaked to the middle of the pond. There, once he established where he wanted each sculpture, he dropped each form, now attached to two to five-pound iron weights.
“The sculptures are sensitive to any existing life in the water,” he said. “The pond here has turtles and fish. I’ve found that the animals adjust to the new forms. I love the relationship between life in the pond and the foreign objects.”
Three artists, one flood
The Interchurch Center in upper Manhattan is currently hosting Noah, A Future of Hope, 3 Faiths/ 3 Artists/ 1 Story. A traveling exhibit, it employs the story of Noah and the flood to gently remind viewers to save, protect and celebrate the environment. The topic is explored respectively through a Christian, Muslim and Jewish vision. The artists — Yona Verwer, a Dutch-born Jew, Brian Whelan, a British-born Christian of Irish heritage and Hady Boraey, an Egyptian Muslim — each merge their religious identity with personal aesthetics and the need to advocate for the environment.
“Each artist was invited to create eight paintings that visually inspire our imaginations to heal our world by honoring our intricate connection to the earth as our sustainer, and by maintaining a sacred balance with all her life forms,” said curator Paul G. Chandler in his introductory remarks at the exhibit’s opening night reception. “In this way, the story of the ark, its animals, and the flood, take on contemporary relevance as we face today’s climate crisis.”
Seven is a significant number in each religion, so Chandler selected seven core lessons, each reflecting some part of the Noah story, for the artists to address. The eighth painting from each artist served as a kind of synopsis of the work that was to follow.
Water is a common image throughout the exhibit; indeed, water plays a major role, not only in Judaism, but in Christian and Islamic rituals as well, from Christian baptism to the washing of feet and hands before prayer in a Mosque.
When I asked Chandler if he could guess the religion of each artist on the basis of their paintings he said he could for the Jew and Christian, but wouldn’t have had a clue that Boraey emerges from an Islamic tradition.
“His paintings have an individual aesthetic and a more universal feeling. Still, you never see the face of Noah in his work. In Islamic tradition you can only view him from the back. To see his face is idolatry. Jews have the same tradition, but may not adhere to it as rigidly.”
Some of Verwer’s work incorporates Hebraic texts and characters. In “Care for the Species,” a figure is blowing a shofar. Similarly, Chandler said, he’d know that Whelan’s paintings were made by a Christian. They are literal illustrations of key moments in the Noah story.
His depiction of Noah evokes a figure right out of vaudeville, grinning broadly, sporting a little hat and in more than one instance looking slightly confused.
“Christians turn catastrophe into a kind of children’s bedtime story,” Chandler said. “It’s very Christian to sanitize the story. Jews don’t do that.”
“My being Jewish — a religious Jew—has had a bearing on how I look at everything,” said Verwer who says that water and its preservation is deeply important to her not least because for more than 2,000 years Judaism has had many rules to safeguard water. As a Holland native, she, like Rothbart, grew up near water and so it was always part of her universe.
Verwer’s work is also exhibited in an accompanying solo show, Fluid Futures-Living Waters, which features eight paintings that explore ocean pollution through a comic sensibility. One piece, bal tashchit (prohibition against needless destruction) depicts an octopus, submerged in deep ocean waters, clutching a soda can in its mouth.
“I don’t feel a painting is finished if I haven’t laughed at least once,” Brian Whelan said. “But it also needs a message.”
His major challenge was Chandler’s insistence that the paintings embrace a note of optimism.
“I don’t see any hope in what’s happening to this planet,” said Whelan. “My work mostly follows in the tradition of East Anglican medieval narrative paintings found in churches dating back to the 14th-to-16th centuries.”
For me his strongest piece is “Humans Outside the Ark Perished,” which appears in his linked, one-man show, 40 Days and 40 Nights. Here we see desperate hands reaching towards Noah for safety. A mouse sits alongside Noah, a poignant image. It’s safe and sound compared to the desperate humans.
Of the three painters, Boraey said his work was the least likely to be connected to any one particular religion. Unable to obtain a visa to the States he spoke to me on the phone from the Northern coast of Egypt.
He said his piece “The Great Collapse” spoke most vividly to both the Noah story and the ecological precipice we’re now facing as a result of climate change.
In the foreground, we view Noah from the back gazing out across a body of water at masses of people crushed together and almost immobilized as they hopelessly struggle to move forward. In the background hangs a giant and cratered blue moon sinking below the horizon and into the ground. It is at once foreboding and exquisite.
Having participated in exhibitions in the Middle East and Europe, Boraey said he was most influenced by the surrealist art movement in Cairo in the late 30s. The marriage between folkloric and political motifs is its hallmark.
The Noah tale for him is “both pessimistic and optimistic because hope is always there and they survived at the end of the story,” he said. “Noah saved humanity. He reminds us that we have to be very careful with the earth.”
In harmony with nature
Back at Snug Harbor, the late afternoon heat dome has made the airless, sun-baked space even more relentless than it was earlier in the afternoon. Rothbart’s visitors are slowly straggling out of the park, some wiping away sweat with bits of tissue, others fanning themselves; still others pouring water from their bottles onto reddened necks and arms and legs indifferent to the water splashing on to their clothes.
“Talk about global warming and climate change,” he told me. “This weather only drives home the point of just how serious this is and how we have to learn to live in harmony with nature and our environment.”
Serpentine Sibyls will run through Sept. 28.
Noah: A Future of Hope will run at the Interfaith Center through Aug. 26 and then continues its global tour.
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Fire at Postville, Iowa, kosher meat processing plant shuts down production ahead of the High Holidays
(JTA) — A major fire at one of the largest kosher meat processing plants in the United States is poised to increase the price of kosher meat ahead of the High Holidays, in addition to devastating the plant’s local community.
Investigators in Postville, Iowa, said on Wednesday that the fire that devastated AgriStar Processing started accidentally in the facility’s laundry room. The fire, which began on Tuesday, destroyed at least 75% of the plant and has put more than 600 people out of work, Fire Chief Jeff Bohr told the local TV network KCRG.
The fire has also interrupted a linchpin of kosher meat production, according to OU Kosher, the oversight agency run by the Orthodox Union.
“The damaged facility means a significant portion of kosher beef and chicken slaughtered and sold in the US will not enter the kosher supply chain,” Rabbi Moshe Elefant, the organization’s CEO, said in a statement on Wednesday. “Kosher consumers will feel the impact of the tightening supply with reduction of availability.”
Elefant said OU Kosher was working to “find solutions for ramping up production at other plants” while warning that the crisis could fuel bad actors.
“Unfortunately, when supply is limited, it creates opportunity for unscrupulous individuals who seek to make money by preying on the well-meaning Kosher observant public,” he wrote.
Jarad Bernstein, the executive director of the Jewish Federation of Greater Des Moines, said the fire represented “a terrible situation” in an email to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“The impact on the local community and the business will be large,” he said.
The fire is not the first time that a crisis at AgriStar has sent the community into a tailspin. In 2008, a federal immigration raid at the plant, then known as Agriprocessors, netted the arrest of hundreds of workers and led to the arrest and conviction of the company’s longtime CEO Sholom Rubashkin on 86 counts of bank fraud, mail fraud and money laundering. It also led most of Postville’s Jewish residents to leave the town, which had developed as an unusual stronghold of Orthodox life in eastern Iowa.
Saying that “many people” believed Rubashkin’s 27-year prison sentence had been excessive, President Donald Trump commuted Rubashkin’s sentence in 2017. Rubashkin’s conviction stands.
Canadian Jewish billionaire Hershy Friedman purchased Agriprocessors and reopened it as Agri-Star. He told JTA in 2016 that he had done so after being urged by Jewish leaders to ensure competition in the kosher meat processing industry.
“It wasn’t done for financial purposes; it was done to really cater to the Jewish community,” he said about the purchase. “During the time Rubashkin was closed, the price of beef roughly doubled. After we acquired it, it came right back down.”
Friedman also said he had shored up the company’s employment practices, which had run afoul of the law, and made improvements to the slaughter process that had made Agriprocessors a target of animal rights activists.
Agri-Star said in a statement on Wednesday that it appreciated the first responders who “worked tirelessly and selflessly to protect lives and contain the fire” and the employees who had shown “inspiring” care for each other. It also indicated that it did not yet know the future of the plant.
“We understand there are many questions about what comes next,” Agri-Star wrote on social media. “While we are still gathering information and evaluating our short-term plans, we are committed to sharing verified updates as soon as they become available. We appreciate your patience as we work through this process thoughtfully and responsibly.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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California law on antisemitism in schools will be enforced after free speech challenge is defeated
(JTA) — A California law to prevent antisemitism in schools will be enforced after a federal judge dismissed a challenge from teachers and students who said it violated free speech.
U.S. District Judge Noël Wise on Tuesday ruled against a lawsuit opposing Assembly Bill 715, which went into effect in January. The new law introduces measures to curb the “widespread surge in antisemitic discrimination, harassment, and bullying” faced by “Jewish and Israeli American pupils across California.”
As part of the law, California is establishing an Office of Civil Rights with a new statewide antisemitism prevention coordinator for public schools, who has not yet been appointed. The law mandates teachers to provide “factually accurate” instruction rather than “advocacy, personal opinion, bias, or partisanship.” It requires local educational agencies to take action if they find that instruction or school-sponsored materials are discriminatory.
A group of teachers, students and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee filed a challenge in November. They said the law was unconstitutionally vague, chilled speech in the classroom about Palestinians and discriminated against Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students and perspectives.
Wise said it was too soon to consider these claims, given the uncertainties still surrounding the new Office of Civil Rights, its leadership and how it will define and respond to antisemitism. She also said that teachers and students did not provide sufficient evidence of infringements on free speech, and teachers could not claim speech rights on the job.
“Teacher Plaintiffs are not acting as private citizens and therefore do not have First Amendment rights while teaching,” Wise said in her ruling.
She also dismissed the claim that the law would discriminate against non-Jewish students. “The existence of an Antisemitism Coordinator does not change the Office’s overarching purpose to stop discrimination generally; it merely reflects the State’s decision to accord specific funds to a specific problem,” she said.
Malak Afaneh, a staff attorney at ADC, said the group was reviewing the court’s decision and considering its options.
“AB 715 has already caused educators to alter the way they teach out of fear that classroom discussions or activities could trigger complaints or investigations,” Afaneh said in a statement. “When teachers feel compelled to abandon cultural identity projects or avoid discussions about Palestine, it is students who are denied the opportunity to engage with diverse ideas and perspectives.”
The Jewish Community Relations Council of San Francisco celebrated Wise’s decision as “great news.”
“This ruling, and the fact that the case has been dismissed with prejudice, affirms that AB 715 is a strong, legitimate approach to protecting Jewish students — and all students — against harassment and discrimination,” the group said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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