Rabbinical seminary

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Rabbinical seminars serve to train rabbis . The first institutions of this kind emerged in the 19th century to distinguish them from the orthodox Talmud schools ( yeshivot ). The oldest rabbinical seminary still in existence is the Budapest Rabbinical Seminary . In 1956, lecturers from the College for the Science of Judaism in Berlin founded Leo Baeck College in London. In 2002 the Levisson Instituut in Amsterdam was launched.

history

The first rabbinical seminars originated in 1829 in Padua and Metz, which, however, moved to Paris in 1859 ( Séminaire israélite de France ). In 1854 the Jewish Theological Seminary was established in Breslau . The seminars were the consequence of the Haskala , the Jewish form of the Enlightenment, which was founded by the Berlin philosopher Moses Mendelssohn . It was connected with the demand for emancipation and equality. But this was only possible because the Jews opened up to the societies and cultures in which they lived, and also to science. The Judaism itself was at this time the object of science: its history, its roots, its spiritual foundations, its links with other religions. Rabbis in particular with the appropriate secular education should carry the ideas of the Enlightenment into the Jewish population. It was also about refuting anti-Semitic allegations.

While most of the early rabbinical seminars , with the exception of the one in Budapest , fell victim to the Holocaust or the communist dictatorships, a number of new seminars emerged after the war, especially in Europe and North America. The Abraham Geiger College , which opened in Potsdam on November 12, 2000, was the first rabbinical seminar in continental Europe after the Holocaust. In 2009 the Rabbinical Seminar in Berlin was founded.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The first after the Holocaust Deutschlandradio .de of November 13, 2000, accessed on August 3, 2018