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.
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.
Jewish lives could often find refuge in Christian hands, but their spiritual future was in doubt.
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.
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:
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
As death at the hands of the Nazis approached, Jewish parents in Nazi Europe faced a crucial decision.
"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."
FROM LUBLIN TO ISRAEL
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 longer version of this article originally appeared in The Jewish Week.
(23) Zev, July 23, 2010 1:46 PM
My cousin
It is more painful realizing this is my cousin. His story is painful. I suppose if one looks hard at the Catholic Church, s/he would realize that this church almost destroyed all the Jews in Europe and created the conditions for the Holocaust.
(22) Rachel, December 2, 2008 8:37 AM
On my in-laws
My in-laws were children in France during the War, they were separated from their parents and in hiding. Both their fathers were murdered. After the war, although reunited with their mothers, they had little connection with Jews & Judaism. My husband had a very secular upbringing. I am a convert TO Judaism, and our 2 children are the only great-grandchildren of his family's martyrs who are being raised as Jews.
(21) Anonymous, November 25, 2008 3:23 PM
I've spent the last 3 years in Poland trying to understand exactly what happened. Its the epicentre of our trauma. what have I learned: The powerful Catholic church in Poland is the reason why eastern europe today is liberated. I was there when the pope died. The way the people mourned was fantastic and at the same time worthy and I started to realize the power and greatness of good faith - the power to break down the walls of any evil empire. This article is an important piece of the puzzle.
(20) Laura Campos, November 22, 2008 3:04 PM
This is all so deeply touching and interesting to me. I am the granddaughter of Romanian Jews who emigrated to America in 1899. My mother is half Jewish on her father''s side, which, of course, means she''s not a Jew and neither am I. It''s amazing how Jewish she looks, and on a recent visit to Paris'' Jewish Museum everyone assumed I was Jewish because of my appearance. I feel such a kinship with the Jewish people and their traditions and am drawn to Jewish history as well, including Holocaust history. My mother and I visited Poland in the early 2000''s on Remembrance Day and visited Auschwitz/Birkenau. We both spend much of our free time reading Jewish subjects and watching Jewish themed documentaries. Yet I am a committed Catholic and she is secular, never having been instructed in the Jewish faith and feeling no need to convert. There is no way for these two parts of me to reconcile, but I am still, somehow, in a way I don''t understand, both Jewish and Christian. It is there, in my heart, no matter what the world says. HaShem will sort me out one day! May G-d''s blessings be on Israel always.
(19) Anonymous, November 19, 2008 1:51 PM
Greatful for conversion
When my grandfather retired about 4 years ago he began to research our family history. We found that our ancestors had converted to xtianity during the Inquisition in Spain and later in Germany. Had they not done this my grandfather and I would not be here, reviving our Jewish heritage. Surely, they could have been more courageous, but if that had resulted in their deaths generations of my family would have been lost!
(18) Aviya Isaacson, November 18, 2008 5:34 PM
What is Life?
G-d forbid, when a Jew is faced between embracing idolatry or death. We rather choose death and die faithful to HShm. What is life if not for Him? May HShm never again let us be trampled by our spiritual and physical enemies.
(17) Anonymous, November 18, 2008 7:19 AM
Intermarriage not the only threat
The weak have only taught the gentile that pogroms are a legitamate means for converting the Jew to xtianity.
(16) Michal, November 17, 2008 3:51 PM
All you write, reminds me of somebody I knew.
I knew such a priest too. Together with my brother, we became friends nearly 40 years ago. In Israel. Only many years later he told me, that his parents gave him into a monastery, to save his life. He was thankful. He did not want to disappoint them, he became a priest. Then he lived in Israel, worked as a priest, but what he believed, was Jewish. He was a real Zionist. And a Chassid and very rightous. To my brother and me and later to my husband and me he was like a real father. In the meanwhile he died. I am sure, Hashem took him home and he now lives in Olam Haba among his people. zichrono le v'racha!!!
(15) Ester, November 17, 2008 11:44 AM
Hindsight wisdom
Now that we know how the story turned out, we should say "never again!". If, G-d forbid, the unthinkable should ever happen again, we will go "with our old and with our young". You can die only once. Better to die as Jews than to live as non-Jews. Never again will we entrust Christians or others with the holy souls of our precious children.
(14) Andy, November 17, 2008 10:26 AM
we can't judge and I can accept this man's struggl ewith what he views as 2 truths
if any of us had his experiences it's not known what would have been. it seems to me a rav who deals with these questions is the person to consult as to how the Jewish communiy view this gentleman.
(13) Ben S, November 17, 2008 9:23 AM
Probably Holocaust trauma Caused Much of THis
Probably being traumatized by the depth and breadth of the Holocuast, especially of parents or other relatives were murdered. And then being in a non-Jewish even anti-semitic European society it undoubtedly helped strengthen the feeling of a need to disappear Jewishly for "safety" of themselves and/or their children. Thankfully I think there's an organization dedicated to locating 'hidden Jews' to bring them back. We probably are duty bound not just for the Jewish people as a whole, but especially to the martyred parents that may have given their children away to save their lives, to rescue what we can for them.
(12) sz, November 17, 2008 6:41 AM
Delicious Irony
It is one of life's delicious ironies that the Christianity that spawned the antisemitism that made the Holocaust possible has generously saved Jewish bodies by stealing Jewish souls. The previous pope is an example of a truly caring and decent human being who did not take advantage of the Jews' vulnerability. As a priest, he told the Christian foster parents of a Jewish child to return him to his Jewish relatives after the war so he'd be raised in the religion of his own family. To a religion where kindness translates into conversion of the vulnerable, thanks for nothing.
(11) Anonymous, November 16, 2008 9:59 PM
Born Jewish, always Jewish
By way of introduction I'm a devout Christian with a deep love and respect for the Jewish people that has grown as I've studied the Bible. Perhaps I don't even have the right to comment because I'm a Gentile. But I do want to say that while I can understand your distress that Jewish people in a sense "lose" their Jewish roots and traditions upon conversion, if someone is born Jewish he or she is always and forever Jewish. That doesn't change when he or she converts to Christianity. Being Jewish is a fact of birth, not choice or the mere practice of a religion. However I agree that it's tragic that some Jewish children of the Holocaust became completely separated from Judaism to the point where their descendants perhaps didn't even know they were Jewish. But G-d never forgets.
(10) YH, November 16, 2008 4:34 PM
Pogany
"George Pogany, the priest raised by convert parents in prewar Hungary." His story is very different than the Jews who were hidden with Christians to save their lives. His parents converted to Catholicism long before the war and sent their sons to Catholic school. George lived out the war comfortably in Italy, under no threat of death. Ironically and tragically, his mother died holding the cross in Auschwitz. She died as a Catholic but was murdered for being a Jew.
(9) Anonymous, November 16, 2008 2:31 PM
Holocaust converts
I grew up knowing of this phenomenon. There was a book Called Daniel that I read as a young child. It was about a jewish boy being saved by the Catholic nuns. Yes, we owe them that debt of gratitude. But make no mistake, their intentions were to make these jewish souls Christian. That is their belief and mission. Yet, for these souls, thanks to Hashem, that they survived if not just to tell of the horrors of the Shoah.
(8) tara, November 16, 2008 1:27 PM
randy fuchs, i dont know if this is something that you consider possible, because it probably almost is but you have an obligation in somehow coonenting these people so that they can at least be aware of their origins.
(7) Anonymous, November 16, 2008 10:50 AM
Moses and the Egyptians
Moses was found floating in a basket by the Egyptian princess, and raised as an Egyptian. Despite this, he remained Jewish. Moses is not judged for growing up in the Egyptian home which ensured his survival, therefore no one who survived the Holocaust in Christian homes should be judged either. I am a descendent of Conversos. I do not judge them. They survived, and because of their sacrifice, I am alive today.
(6) Ronni, November 16, 2008 10:21 AM
My Grandparents
My grandparents were one of the few that actually got married and had a child during the Holocaust. They were moved from place to place by the Catholic Priest Father Borelli from a small town in France named something like Nom Deronde Delosi near Granabo and this priest has his people hide the Jews in their homes and in their farmhouses and so they did and provided food for them despite the German occupation at that time. When asked why he thinks he survived in a frank moment my grandfather says G-d although he was not a religious person whatsoever (no seder, no Yom Kippur, nothing at all). Now his grandchildren are all orthodox Jews and he was very proud of how we all turned out before he passed away.
(5) Feigele, November 16, 2008 8:55 AM
No One Can Judge These People But G-d.
G-d didn’t intend for them to perish but opened doors for them to survive. Their stories will always be told to remind us that life is stronger than death and to show the world that Jews are everywhere even if converted. My parents too lost their families in Poland and in Lithuania, one sister in Paris and one in Belgium. One of my mother’s cousin spent 5 years in a concentration camp and if it weren’t for the Americans who came just on time, he would not have survived. He had lost his family, wife and child as well in Lithuania. He survived by the grace of G-d. But he had lost his mind and had terrible episodes of terror and violence all his life. Towards the end, you could see that peace had finally come to him and the world. He seemed to be waiting for something better to come. My parents too were hiding in farms in Normandy, France, but their relatives, neighbors and friends didn’t want to follow them and they perished. I remember my mother telling stories, how they walked on the roads, slept in the barns with the cows, begging for some food. While in Paris, they had to wear the Jewish star and wait on line for some food. I know they had to go to church with the farmers in order not to raise suspicions among others people there. After the war, we still visited these farmers who saved us, and I remember one time when they took me and my sister to church, as they all were kneeling to pray, my instinct was so strong that I knew in my heart that it was wrong, so I did not do it and the farmer understood and never took me there again. My sister was about 1 and my mother was pregnant with me. One their way to Normandy, they stopped in Orleans where the director-nun of the convent hid them and fed them. Her name was Genevieve, a very Christian name, and it is mine now and I am very proud of it. But with all the ordeal my family went thru, they still kept their Jewish faith, how and why, I don’t know. Like I said before, the source is in you and stays with you. For those children who were too young to remember, if there was no documentation about them, maybe they will find in their hearts later on to have compassion for Jewish people. It is a burden and a privilege to be Jewish. But it is up to the individual to choose his path in life according to circumstances--not to be judged but only by G-d.
(4) Charlie, November 16, 2008 8:35 AM
Interesting History and surviving tagedy
Thank you for sharing.
(3) Anonymous, November 16, 2008 8:34 AM
Hmmm! Important information...
I have also thought that the Catholic Clergy is sometimes a safe place to hide out for some souls who are very wounded and not ready to be in an intense personal relationship with others....and/or rear a family. My mother-in-law, who was reared Jewish in the Bronx in the 40s, remembers seeing the tattoos on refugees. She was advised as a little girl to not have much to do with the refugees, but did not understand why. As someone who does not meet a stranger, this really bothered her.
(2) Randy Fuchs, November 16, 2008 8:32 AM
my non-Jewish relatives
My parents were born in what is know known as Sovakia but came here before the war. I have a first cousin, Arpad Ronai, did not. I met for the first time about 25 years when I went to visit him in Jamaica. He and his wife had converted to Catholicism while in hiding and had become devout Catholics. When he visited me in Miami, he came to a Jewish festival with me and a holiday meal at my home, he broke down and cried and told me it was the first Jewish thing he did since he was a child. We hugged for a long time. It was a poignant and touching moment- everyone there became misty eyed. A few years later he moved to Curitaba in Brazil and passed on. I do not know if his grandchildren have any ideas if they are jews...
(1) Deborah, November 16, 2008 8:18 AM
Thank you
I am a great grand child of this! My entire life I have walked in both worlds. It was only in doing geneology that I came upon what the reason was. Either Nahon or Nahum became Mahon and then McCann. My great grand mother lost her husband and oldest daughter and was able to escape. She hide herself and her other 5 children in the Reformed Church of Scotland and came to America. They kept to Presbyterian. Why is a question I can not ask as they are all gone now. I do not know what my own father knew. He did have us keep certain traditions. I kept trying for years to trace my father's maternal side, and then found this out. It explained why we did certain things that my Christian friends found odd and my Jewish friends would say, "We did not know Christians did this." I am working on converting because I have trouble with some of the Christian concepts-have my entire life. Again, thank you for explaining this and giving insight.