In May 1810 a boy was born to the Geiger family of Frankfurt-am-Main in Germany. This child, Abraham , was to be the founder, philosopher and theologian of the world wide Progressive Reform movement.

At an early age he was introduced to the sacred texts and the intricacies of Semitic languages. For his bar Mitzvah he gave a lecture discussing the works of Maimonides - the Rambam. His home life was supportive of this, as his father Michael Lazarus Geiger (1755-1823) was a cantor of renown in the town. The family can be traced in the religious life of the Frankfurt Ghetto as far back as the early 1600s.

On reaching school leaving age he was accepted to read oriental languages at the University of Heidelberg. Here he first came into contact with his non-Jewish peers and honed his prowess at public speaking. His studies took him via the University of Bonn to a doctoral degree at the prestigious University of Marburg, where in addition he received his Rabbinic Ordination from Rabbi Moses Gosen. His seminal work was an essay in Latin delving into the Koranic verses of Judaic origin.

In 1833, at a tender age, he became Rabbi in Wiesbaden and later was engaged to Emilie Oppenheim of Bonn. This betrothal lasted for six years due to a strict city law allowing for only two Jewish marriages a year. Geiger became active in the Verien fur Kultuur und Wissenschaft des Judentums, which had been founded in 1819 by such luminaries as Heine, Gans and Zunz. This to him was a new philosophy, and a message of a vital and fresh Judaism, which led him on, as we now know, to even greater things, notwithstanding the troubled path he had to follow.

The other momentous development was, in the same year as Geiger's birth, the establishment of the first Liberal Synagogue. This was in the small Westphalian town of Seesen, by the court Jew, Israel Jacobson. This was to serve as his vocational school for poor boys. He introduced the organ, for which he had biblical justification, and placed the Bimah at the front, rather than in the middle as was the custom of those days.

Jacobson was not a planned reformer, but he wanted to make things more acceptable to his young wards; merely to bring a more understandable and friendly face to the impressionable young minds who made up his congregation.

Thus, in those years of emancipation and revolution, two great events occurred; the birth of Abraham Geiger and the unwitting creation of the Seesen Jacobstempel. To those modern thinkers we owe our existence, let us not forget them!