In June 2007, Berlin's historic Oranienburger Strasse synagogue witnessed a transformative moment: the installation of Gesa Ederberg as its first female rabbi since Regina Jonas's groundbreaking 1930 ordination and subsequent murder in Auschwitz. Through participant observation and reflective narrative, this ethnographic account examines how Ederberg's installation embodies both the possibilities and tensions in post-Holocaust German Jewish reconstruction. The ceremony's location in a synagogue built in 1866, destroyed during Kristallnacht, and damaged by Allied bombing provides a powerful symbolic backdrop for analyzing contemporary Jewish renewal. Ederberg's unique journey from German Protestant roots through conversion to Judaism and rabbinical ordination at Jerusalem's Schechter Institute illuminates broader questions of Jewish identity and leadership. Despite the Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland's official pluralistic stance, significant institutional resistance to female rabbinical leadership persists within German Jewish communities, reflecting wider gender and conversion controversies in European Judaism. The installation marks a critical juncture where new forms of Judaism emerge from pre-war ruins, even as progressive religious leadership continues to face institutional challenges in reconstructing European Jewish life.