What goes around comes around, according to Rabbi Walter Homolka, a professor at Abraham Geiger College in Potsdam, Germany.

Homolka, who helped establish the first rabbinical school in Germany since the Holocaust, was the keynote speaker for Women of Reform Judaism's fundraising dinner Wednesday night at Congregation Shaarai Shomayim on North Duke Street.

Homolka, who is a member of the Legion of Honor in France and a lieutenant colonel in the German army, is set to receive an honorary doctorate today from Hebrew Union College in New York City.

"I am the prime example of when others said 'No,' WRJ said 'Yes,'" Homolka told the crowd of about 50 people.

"I wanted to become a rabbi very early on in my life. I had a feeling that our community of less than 20,000 Jews in Germany before 1989 desperately needed Jewish professionals. But obviously training could only begin abroad, and it was very expensive, certainly expensive for anyone on the continent of Europe, because we have higher education free," Homolka said.

He applied to the World Union for Progressive Judaism for funding to study at Leo Baeck College in London in the early 1980s.

But the organization told him it didn't think it was prudent to support someone for rabbinical training for a Jewish community in Germany "that was basically dead and will never resurge again," Homolka said. "That was probably an accurate description of many people at that time."

Women of Reform Judaism, however, agreed to help fund his schooling.

"If it weren't for the WRJ, I would not have studied for the rabbinate, and I would not have been there when the wall came down in 1989," Homolka said.

Six years later, in 1995, Germany was the home of an ever-growing number of Reform Judaism congregations. The Reform congregations started receiving treatment and funding on par with other faiths.

"Now, today, we have a very strong Reform Movement," Homolka said.

That's important, he said, because the number of Jews in Germany has "grown and grown and grown."

Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl decided in 1989 to invite Jews from the former Soviet Union to immigrate to Germany to stabilize the dwindling Jewish community.

More than 200,000 Soviet Jews took Kohl up on the offer, and there are now 125 Jewish communities in Germany, Homolka said. The country now has a problem because only 20 rabbis are available for this large number of Jewish communities, although there is strong lay leadership, he said.

The Germans wanted to start a rabbinical school so they would be able to serve these communities immediately.

"The first rabbi (the German government) found was me, but I had already started a different career," Homolka said. He worked in publishing for Random House in America and was head of corporate giving at Deutsche Bank.

Homolka was told that the congregations needed his help and lobbying power to get the Reform Movement back to where it was before World War II.

Homolka helped establish Abraham Geiger College at the University of Potsdam 10 years ago.

It is now the only rabbinical school in the German-speaking world — and it is fully funded by the German government, he said.

"We don't have to lay off and are actually hiring," Homolka said. "We train rabbis free of charge because the German government pays for higher education."

Two years ago, Congregation Shaarai Shomayim donated a Torah scroll to the school.

"The Torah scroll has been immensely helpful for us," Homolka said.

"We waited 3½ years for a Torah scroll. When we rang up the WRJ, we had it in 10 days."

On May 21, a chapel will be dedicated at the school, where there will be a permanent home for the Torah, he said.

Homolka said the seminary soon will be moving into a side wing of the former Imperial Palace in Potsdam. It will be refurbished by the German government using 3.3 million euros from the German economic stimulus plan, he said.

E-mail: lvaningen@lnpnews.com