Jaffa, Israel – Holocaust Survivors Born Jewish Survived by Posing as Catholics

Jaffa, Israel – The embossed nameplate on the door of an apartment here a few blocks from the Mediterranean lists two occupants. The English letters identify Grzegorz Pawlowski; the Hebrew, Zvi Griner.
Only one man lives in the apartment. Grzegorz Pawlowski is the Polish name that Zvi Griner, a Jew, took while in hiding during the Holocaust. He survived by posing as a Catholic and later decided to become a priest.

Jew or Catholic? Like many Jews who accepted — or in the case of thousands of children during the Shoah, were raised in — Christianity, Pawlowski says he is both. But as a member of the Christian clergy, his case has special poignancy for the Jewish community, which, more than 60 years after
the end of World War II, is still dealing with the losses it suffered during the 12 years of the Third Reich.

Today, Pawlowski, who wears a collar and conducts Mass in his Roman Catholic church here, is a stark reminder of one of the realities of the Holocaust. Jewish lives could often find refuge in Christian hands, but their spiritual future was in doubt.

Like him, many survived. Like him, many never returned to Judaism. Like him, many, out of belief or gratitude, became priests or nun.

Today, many of these men and women have died, the rest are aging, and many have chosen to serve as living bridges between their religion of birth and their religion of choice.

An estimated several hundred Jews who are still alive took their Catholic or Protestant vows, especially in Poland, a phenomenon little known and scarcely documented. Two days before the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, The Jewish Week, following several years of research in the U.S., Europe and Israel, profiles some of these Jewish-born Christians, including a nun in Jerusalem, a priest in Poland and a woman in Manhattan who nearly became a nun.

The number is at least “a couple hundred,” says Rabbi Chaskel Besser, a Holocaust survivor who has served as director of the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation’s activities in Poland and has reconnected “hidden Jews” with their unknown or long-forgotten Jewish roots.

Jews in Poland alone talk of several hundred contemporary priests — and a like number of nuns — who are Jewish.

“This is primarily a Polish story,” says Holocaust historian Michael Berenbaum. That’s where the most Jews lived before the Holocaust, where the most Catholics honored by Yad Vashem as Righteous Gentiles lived during World War II.

And outside of Holocaust history circles, it is largely an unknown story.

As a hidden cost of the Shoah, these members of the Christian clergy — many, raised as Christians, probably remain unaware of their Jewish roots — present a conundrum to Jews who honor the risks taken by Christians in occupied Europe to save Jewish lives, but condemn any attempt to take Jewish souls.
Uncounted thousands of Holocaust survivors owed their lives to Christians — lay believers and members of the clergy — who joined the ranks of wartime Righteous Gentiles.
“There is hardly a Jew who survived,” said Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, the late, Jewish-born Archbishop of Paris, “ who did not, in one way or another, one day or another, receive help from a Catholic or a priest, or from a network connected with Catholicism or Protestantism.”

Cardinal Lustiger, who spoke Yiddish and had the Kaddish recited at his funeral in 2007, is the best-known Holocaust-era priest who was born Jewish and openly maintained his Jewish identity.
Others with similar stories include:

n Brother Daniel, the Carmelite monk who was born Oswald Rufeisen in Poland and rescued several Jews from the Nazis. Hidden in a monastery for a year, he converted to Catholicism; his attempt to make aliyah became a test case of Israel’s Law of Return.

n Israel Zolli, the controversial chief rabbi of Rome during the Nazi occupation who became baptized in 1945 and took the name Eugenio, the original name of Pope Pius XII, whom Zolli credited with saving thousands of Jews under the auspices of the Vatican.

n George Pogany, the priest raised by convert parents in prewar Hungary. The story of his twin brother’s return to Judaism is told in Eugene Pogany’s “In My Brother’s Image: Twin Brothers Separated by Faith After the Holocaust” (Penguin Books, 2000).

Many of the Jews who survived the Shoah with Christian help were children, given by their parents to Christian families or to convents or monasteries as the Nazi noose tightened.

“Most of us came from secular homes,” says Nechama Tec, Holocaust survivor and author of a biography of Brother Daniel. “Jewish Orthodox children hardly ever made it to the Christian world.”
As death at the hands of the Nazis approached, Jewish parents in Nazi Europe faced a crucial decision — trust their children with Christian friends or strangers, or keep the family intact and likely consign them to death?

Rabbis — notably Ephraim Oshry in the Kovno ghetto, author of “Responsa from the Holocaust” (Judaica Press, 1983) — had to answer such questions daily.

“In the case of uncertainty” — will the children emerge as Jews? — “regarding matters of life or death one should be lenient … and allow parents … to entrust their infants to non-Jews,” Rabbi Oshry wrote.
These issues “were examined … by groups of rabbis who acted as public leadership,” according to Esther Farbstein in “Hidden in Thunder: Perspectives on Faith, Halachah and Leadership during the Holocaust” (Mossad Harav Kook, Jerusalem, 2007).

Today the Jewish community faces an inevitable question: how do we regard these Jews who forsook, or never knew, their Jewish identities?

“Children who didn’t know anything [about their true identities] certainly are tinnuk b’nishbah,” says Rabbi Yitzchak Guttman, compiler of a recent CD on “Respona of the Holocaust” issued by Israel’s Machon Netivei Ha’Halacha, using the Hebrew term for a Jew taken into captivity and raised without a Jewish upbringing.

“You can’t judge them. Nobody can judge them,” says Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. He was saved by a Catholic nanny who had him baptized and raised him as a practicing Catholic.

“Had my parents not survived” and reclaimed him, Foxman says, “I wanted to become a priest or the cardinal of Warsaw.”

Foxman says he doesn’t condemn these individuals, but he mourns their loss to the Jewish people. “It’s still part of the price of the Shoah that we continue to pay.”
n
Pawlowski was raised in a “very religious” family. His parents ran a small wood-and-coal trading business. “We celebrated all the holidays. I have very good memories,” he says, sitting in the darkened library of the church where he has served since 1970.

Jakub Hersch — Zvi is the Hebrew version of Hersch — was 8 when the Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939, starting World War II.

The Jews of Hersch’s shtetl, Zamosc, near Lublin, were herded into a ghetto. His father was taken away for forced labor and did not return. His mother and two sisters were killed near a ravine.

The next six years, until the end of the war, were a succession of close calls, betrayals and escapes as he hid on farm after farm in the Polish countryside. At one point, a Jewish boy undercover provided a false baptismal certificate, explaining that “If you want to survive, that’s they way to do it,” by posing as a Catholic.

Hersch’s new identity was as Grzegorz Pawlowski.
Catholic neighbors in Zamosc taught him Catholic prayers. Homeless at the end of the war, he was placed in a small orphanage run by nuns. At 13, he was baptized. By then, he says, “I believed in it. I didn’t remember anything about Judaism.” He converted because “I didn’t want to be different from the [other, Catholic] kids.”
Zealous in his adopted faith, he studied for the priesthood; ordained in 1958, he worked in various villages around Lublin.

In 1970 he moved to Israel to be near his brother, who had survived the war and lived in Haifa. Pawlowski was assigned to Jaffa, where he served the country’s Polish-speaking Catholics.
His job does not call on him to bring Jews to Christianity, he says. “I am not a missionary.”
Pawlowski is a citizen of Israel, his Jewish identity widely known. Sometimes he is invited to synagogue services and Passover seders. His apartment, whose doorpost bears a mezuzah, features photographs of Jesus as a shepherd and of the memorial monument in Poland he and his brother erected for their martyred family members. “I didn’t forget” my roots, he says.

Pawlowski, 79, who recently marked his 50th year in the priesthood, has arranged to be buried near Zamosc, next to his relatives, when the time comes. A gravestone, inscribed in Hebrew and Polish, already stands in the cemetery. It bears two names: Father Grzegorz Pawlowski. And Jacob Zvi Griner.
A New Life At 35:
Father Romuald Waszkinel
Lublin, Poland — Father Romuald Waszkinel had his suspicions for many years.
He didn’t look like his mother or father. Sometimes, taunting Poles would call him “Jew,” but his mother would dismiss that as the talk of “stupid people.” Sometimes, he would hear about Jewish children handed over to Catholic families for protection during the Holocaust and wonder if “I was one of those kids.” His mother would dismiss his questions. He kept asking.

Finally, Father Waszkinel, ordained a priest at 23, had to know the truth. At 35, he confronted his mother, on Feb. 23, 1978. Tactfully, he asked Emilia Waszkinel, “Did you know any Jews?” in the town near Vilna where he was born.

The floodgates opened. “You had wonderful parents,” Emilia Waszkinel said. Jewish parents, who were about to be deported. They approached trusted Catholic neighbors. “You are a believing person, a Christian,” his biological mother pleaded with Emilia Waszkinel. “You have told me several times that you believe in Jesus. After all, he was a Jew! Please save a Jewish baby in the name of this Jew in whom you believe. When this little child grows up, you will see, he will become a priest and will teach people.”
Piotr and Emilia Waszkinel, risking their lives, took the infant into their home. “I was only saving you from death,” Emilia Waszkinel told her adopted son.

Father Waszkinel hugged the woman he now calls his “Polish mother.”
And he calls that day 30 years ago his second birthday. “It changed everything. For 35 years I felt I was only half alive.”

Though Emilia Waszkinel had forgotten the names of her son’s biological parents, years of research determined that they were Jakov, a tailor, and Batia Weksler, who perished at separate death camps. He determined that his real name was Jakub Weksler, and that he had an uncle living in Israel.
He shared his discovery with Pope John Paul II, a Polish colleague for many years. Keep working as a priest, the pope advised in a letter addressed to “my dearest brother.”

Now calling himself Romuald Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel, “a Jew, the son of Jesus the Jew,” he traveled to Israel to meet his uncle, an Orthodox Jew, and, as a teacher at Lublin’s Catholic University, serves as conduit between Judaism and Catholicism.

A member of Lublin’s small Jewish community, he lives in an apartment marked by a mezuzah and occasionally attends worship services at the city’s rededicated yeshiva, a kipa on his head, collar around his neck. In shul, they call him Yaki, he says.

What would he tell his biological mother about her decision to entrust him to the Waszkinels?
“I would thank her that she had me, that she didn’t put a pillow on my head.” Many reports surfaced from the Holocaust of Jewish parents suffocating infants to protect the rest of the family.
What would his mother think of his life?

“My mother would be happy,” Weksler-Waszkinel says. “I did what she wanted me to do.”
A Vocation In The Holy Land:
Regine Canetti’s Journey Of Faith

Jerusalem — On Friday nights Regine Canetti and her friends make the traditional blessings over wine and challah.
Canetti and her friends are nuns.
Down a quiet side street from the Old City walls, in the dining room of the Sisters of Zion convent, across from bookcases packed with Orthodox Jewish prayer books and the Encyclopedia Judaica and English translations of the Midrash, Canetti recites the Hebrew blessings as a member of a religious order that was formed 165 years ago to convert Jews to Christianity. The Congregation of Our Lady of Zion, with a presence in about a dozen countries, now de-emphasizes witnessing to Jews and stresses an improvement in Jewish-Catholic relations.

Unlike the other people profiled here, sheltered by Christians in Europe during the Holocaust, Canetti came under Christian influence in Israel — then Palestine — after escaping her native Bulgaria. In Palestine she became a nun.

“The vocation,” a life of service, “attracted me,” she says. Originally, “I wanted to study medicine.”
A cousin of the late Nobel Prize-winning author Elias Canetti, she grew up in a typical secular Bulgarian Jewish home, and attended Catholic schools because of their superior reputation.
During the war, Bulgaria, an ally of Nazi Germany, expelled Sofia’s Jews to the rural provinces. Canetti’s family, in Varna on the Black Sea, received an offer of help. A “little boat” was sailing to Turkey, then on to Palestine. On Dec. 4, 1940, the Salvador, a coal freighter with more than 300 Bulgarian Jews aboard, left Varna. Ten days later it ran into a reef near Istanbul and sank. Most of the passengers drowned, including Canetti’s mother and brother.

Canetti and her father swam to shore. In Istanbul, the Jewish community helped her; she and a small group of Jewish teens decided to continue on to Palestine, by car to Haifa. “I didn’t know a single word of Hebrew — even ‘shalom.’”

Familiar with Catholic institutions, she visited a convent. “I didn’t know anything about Judaism. I was not religious. I didn’t want to hear about God anymore.” Impressed by the nuns’ warmth and Catholic teachings, “little by little” she began to accept Christian doctrine. “I converted.” In 1943 she became a nun.
Over the next 20 years, working as a teacher in northern Africa and France and the Middle East, she had little contact with Judaism. In 1967, in Rome, “I wanted to come home” — to Israel. She began to study Hebrew and Judaism.

Profiled on Israeli television, she is often invited to address Jewish groups.
Canetti says she has been offered teaching posts outside of Israel. “I refused,” she says. “Because I want to die here.”

What kind of life would she have lived had she stayed in Bulgaria?
“I would have married,” Canetti says, “and had a normal life as a Jew.”
Renee Roth-Hano:

A Non-Believer, Almost A Nun:
The skies over Flers, in northern France, were smoking, and the ground was shaking on June 6, 1944. It was D-Day, and the Allied forces had gone ashore that morning on the nearby English Channel coast.
Renee Roth, a 12-year-old Jewish girl from Alsace, was playing that afternoon in the garden of a convent where she and her two younger sisters had found refuge two years earlier. Allied bombs were falling, sirens were wailing and Roth was frightened. “God in Heaven,” she prayed, with the survival of her parents in hiding in Paris in mind, “Don’t let us die!”

Then she made a vow. “I’ll become a nun. I promise.”
Roth and her sisters and parents emerged alive from the Holocaust and the Allied bombings. Roth didn’t keep her promise.

Returning home, she soon moved to the United States, where she became a psychiatric social worker. That profession, she says, “was my way of becoming a nun. Social work is a way to make a better world.”
Unlike the other people profiled here, who remained Christians and became members of the Christian clergy because of their early exposure to life-saving individuals in the Church, Roth-Hano (her married name) slowly returned to the Jewish fold. She did it as a non-believing Jew with still-strong Catholic connections. But her experience sheds light on Holocaust survivors from her background who continue to call themselves Christian.

“I’m a Jew but I’m attracted to the Church,” she says, sitting in her Upper East Side apartment, one decorated with small carvings of angels and churches.

Roth-Hano and her sisters at the La Chaumiere convent, posing as Catholics, learned Catholic liturgy and were baptized — with their parents’ permission — to hide their true identity. The nuns “didn’t push us.”
Roth-Hano says she didn’t believe in God, but found comfort in Catholic ritual, in some Catholic prayers, in saints and angels, in a statue of the Virgin Mary.

Even today, she can’t explain why she made the promise to become a nun. “For that moment, I must have believed.” Maybe, she says, “I was testing God.”

After Liberation, back with her parents, she told no one about her pledge. She continued to go to church until her father forbade it.

After she came here, at 19, she embraced her Jewish identity again. “You cannot deny your roots,” she says. She married a Jewish man (they had no children), but did not join a synagogue or affiliate with any Jewish organization; her primary Jewish activity is giving speeches to school groups about her wartime memories and participating in Hidden Child activities.

One of her sisters, who remained in France, still considers herself Catholic. They disagree about the importance of Judaism in their lives. “She says I make too much of it,” Roth-Hano says. “I say she doesn’t make enough.”

A stranger who called Rabbi Yaacov Haber in Buffalo had an unusual accent and a more unusual request.

The stranger, a minister in the Hungarian Reformed Church, wanted to meet to discuss the “Old Testament.”

Rabbi Haber, spiritual leader of a small Orthodox synagogue and director of an educational outreach center, usually was wary of possibly missionary-inclined Christian clergy. But he invited the stranger – the rabbi, who now lives in Jerusalem, calls him Rev. Andre Fekete, a pseudonym, to protect his anonymity – to his study.

Why are you so interested in Jewish scriptures, Rabbi Haber asked.

“I’m Jewish,” Rev. Fekete answered.

“What do you mean you’re Jewish?”

Rev. Fekete explained – raised in a secular Jewish home in Budapest, he and his sister were sheltered in a convent on the outskirts of the capital after the Nazis occupied Hungary in 1944. Bar mitzvah age then, he stayed in the convent after liberation and converted to Christianity; he eventually married a Jewish girl who also had been protected by the nuns, became a minister in the Hungarian section of the Protestant church, moved to the United States after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, took over a pulpit in Buffalo, and struggled with his Christian faith.

Then he read an article about Rabbi Haber and requested a meeting.

The day after his first meeting with Rabbi Haber, he went to a class at the rabbi’s Torah Center of Buffalo. He kept going for more than a year, attending Shabbat services at the Saranac Synagogue and becoming a frequent guest at the Habers’ Shabbat meals.

The more he learned about Judaism, the more Rev. Fekete came to doubt the tenets of Christianity. He and his wife raised their children, he told Rabbi Haber, without a religious tradition.

How did he preach on Sundays without mentioning Jesus?

“I listen to your sermon” on Saturday “and I say it over in Hungarian” the next day, Rev. Fekete told the rabbi.

He began coming less frequently to Shabbat services, to avoid driving on Shabbat.

Finally, tired of “living a lie,” Rev. Fekete left his church. He quit his job, and with his wife, a nurse, opened a nursing home in a wealthy suburb of Buffalo.

Before he died about a decade ago, Fekete, no longer a reverend, lived as an identified, if not a fully observant, member of the Jewish community.

“He definitely lived as a Jew,” Rabbi Haber says. “He definitely died as a Jew.”