Today, the Abraham Geiger Kolleg stands proudly and competently in the tradition it established,” says the website of the institution at Potsdam University, which was founded by Walter Homolka in 1999.

Because it offers the only liberal rabbi training in continental Europe.

The fact that liberal rabbis and cantors can be trained in Germany again at all excited quite a few those responsible for German education policy.

Heike Schmoll

Political correspondent in Berlin, responsible for “Bildungswelten”.

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The state of Brandenburg even had to change its constitution for the establishment of the School of Jewish Theology, where the liberal rabbis and cantors do the academic part of their training with a master’s degree or bachelor’s degree, because there should not be theological faculties at state universities in Brandenburg .

In addition to the long-established Faculty for Jewish Studies, there has been the School of Jewish Theology since 2013, at which only Jewish professors can teach.

Potsdam hoped that the almost ten-year-old center of Jewish scholarship would have a great international impact and offer a real alternative to the denomination-open Jewish University in Heidelberg.

The shock about the allegations of sexualized harassment against students, which are said to have emanated primarily from Walter Homolka's life partner B., is now all the greater.

But sexualized harassment seems to be just one side of a system of abuse of power that is only just beginning to be clarified.

Homolka, previously director and managing director of the Abraham Geiger College, an institute affiliated with Potsdam University, is temporarily on hold because of the allegations.

The Union of Progressive Jews, of which Homolka is a member, called early elections for this summer.

Gabriele Thöne runs the business as interim director

At the Abraham Geiger College, the lawyer and former Berlin Secretary of State for Finance, Gabriele Thöne, is currently acting as interim director and probably wants to ensure that the Abraham Geiger College does not lose its non-profit status.

As a shareholder, Homolka himself owned 90 percent of the private shares in the Abraham Geiger College (as a corporation a non-profit limited liability company), which he transferred to the Leo Baeck Foundation free of charge.

The Abraham Geiger College is co-financed by the Central Council of Jews, the federal government and the state of Brandenburg, and the Conference of Ministers of Education also subsidizes it with a sum of 350,000 euros a year.

The Potsdam institutions are closely related.

The Leo Baeck Foundation was founded in 2005 and has been headed by Homolka as a board member.

The former chancellor of the Abraham Geiger College, Anne-Margarete Brenker, has now taken Homolka's place.

She declined a request for an interview due to her lack of time, and the foundation's website was changed shortly thereafter.

Brenker's photo no longer appears on it.

According to its own account, the foundation is primarily responsible for “raising funds for the Abraham Geiger College and the Zacharias Frankel College at the University of Potsdam, as well as the Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Studienwerk”.

The list of members of the Board of Trustees reads like a "Who's Who" of Berlin's politics, science and church.

The enumeration ranges from Federal Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Greens) to the military commissioner Eva Högl (SPD), Armin Laschet (CDU), Thuringia's Prime Minister Bodo Ramelow (Left) to Brandenburg's Science Minister Manja Schüle (SPD).