From left are Rabbi Robert Jacobs, Cantor Gershon Silins, Rabbi David
Lilienthal and Rabbi Walter Rothschild. [Tobias Barniske photo]
The Reform Judaism of my childhood in Chicago was imbued with a German spirit, of which I was barely aware.
I did not know then that Reform Judaism had begun in Germany in 1810 and had flourished there until it was sent into exile by the murderous betrayal that was the Holocaust.
This liberal German Judaism featured remarkable figures such as Rabbi Herman Schaalman, the Munich-born rabbi of the Chicago congregation I grew up in, and Max Janowski, the Berlin-born, Chicago-based musician and composer perhaps best known for his wonderful setting of Avinu Malkenu and with whom I sang when I was a teenager. And there were those that I met later, such as Rabbi Gunther Plaut in Toronto and Rabbi Walter Jacob, whom I met in the early 1990s, when I was the cantor in Ernest Bloch’s Sacred Service at the rededication of the Pittsburgh congregation Rabbi Jacob has served for so many years. The German Reform Jewish Diaspora, with its values of scholarship, liberalism and nobility of the human spirit, has spread through the entire world. It was the air I breathed as a child and youth.
On Nov. 4, 2010, Reform clergy gathered to participate in the ordination of rabbis at the Abraham Geiger College in Berlin. They were joined by clergy of all denominations, as well as diplomats and political figures from Europe, North and South America and Africa. Featured prominently among them was Christian Wulff, the president of Germany, something unimaginable only a few decades ago.
It was an extraordinary honour for me to be invited to serve as cantor at this service at the historic Pestalozzi Street Synagogue, one of the few German synagogues to survive Kristallnacht. The world press had its imagination further captured by Alina Treiger, the first woman rabbi to be ordained in Germany in 75 years. Her predecessor, Regina Jonas, the first female rabbi ever to have been ordained, died at Auchwitz.
In so many ways, this event marked the powerful resurgence of progressive Jewish life not only in Germany but in all of Europe. The three rabbis who were ordained were all from the former Soviet Union, the children of yet another Jewish Diaspora, exiled from a regime that sought to destroy Judaism. And now here, they were bringing back to Germany the values that German Reform Judaism had given to the world. Extraordinary, too, is the fact that the Abraham Geiger College, the seminary that has produced these new rabbis, is located in Berlin.
It was inspiring for me to sing the music of Janowski, which I had sung with him as a teenager, as well as two settings by Ben Steinberg, who has made the Reform values so manifest in his music, and with whom I have worked closely for many years. As I stood on the bimah facing the open ark, I could see the tears on the face of Rabbi Treiger and I heard the voices of my childhood, and the spirit of a people who have, despite all, not been vanquished, sing through me.
Gershon Silins is the cantor of Temple Sinai Congregation of Toronto
