As the first woman rabbi to be ordained in Germany since the Holocaust, Alina Treiger has cultivated the kind of progressive Judaism that had been the pride of German Jews before World War II. Growing up in Soviet Ukraine, Treiger witnessed her father being forced to work in a factory and denied the chance to study because he was Jewish. After the fall of the Soviet Union and its restrictions, she formed a Jewish youth club in her hometown before traveling to study at the Institute of Progressive Judaism in Moscow for two years. She returned home at age twenty-one to help found the liberal Congregation Beit Am, dreaming of becoming a rabbi. Then the World Union for Progressive Judaism offered to help her attend the Reform seminary Abraham Geiger College at Potsdam University in Germany in 2001. After two years of intensive German, she studied both in Potsdam and at the College of Jewish Studies in Heidelberg, interning with congregations in Hameln and Gottingen before she was ordained in 2010 at Abraham Geiger College. As of 2016 she works with Russian-speaking Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union living in the German towns of Oldenburg and Delmenhorst.