Rufaisen, Oswald

Father Elias Rufaisen is a native of the village of Zywiec. He went to the synagogue, there was a man of wide views, he valued a secular education, which he himself did not receive, was fluent in the German language, and the culture in his eyes was associated precisely with German culture. He served in three armies - before the First World War - in Austria, after the outbreak of war - in Germany, after the war ended his career in the lowest officer rank in the Polish army. He had awards from all three armies, and eight years that he spent in military service, considered the best in his life.

Mother Fanny had a secular education, a dowry - a house with a tavern, which brought an extremely low income.

They got married in 1914, she was 30, her father 28. They are related to each other by distant relatives.

Born in Galicia, before the First World War belonged to Austria-Hungary, and after the war, Poland . The family adhered to the traditions of the Jewish home - they respected kashrut , but spoke Polish and German. Yiddish, the main language of Polish Jewry, was hardly spoken in the house.

He began his studies in a poor village school in Polish , where children of different ages studied in the same room. Each school day began with Catholic prayer, and Oswald took part in it.

At the age of 7 he was assigned to a non-religious school with teaching in German . The school was maintained by Jews and most of the teachers were Jews.

At age 12, he entered Joseph Pilsudski State School. The teaching was conducted in Polish, Catholics and Jews were separated only for lessons in religious disciplines. Classes at the school were divided into subgroups depending on the level of students and Oswald and his brother were in the best subgroup. He received his matriculation certificate a year earlier than classmates.

At 13, Oswald, like his brother Leo, went through the Bar Mitzvah , a traditional Jewish rite marking adulthood.

The Rufaisen brothers entered Akiva, a Zionist youth organization that became the center of their lives. They instilled pacifist views and contempt for profit.

In 1939, the whole family flees east. But on September 11, 1939, the parents decided to return home so as not to be a burden to the children, and the sons were ordered to make their way to Palestine . Oswald was 17, Arye - 15 years old. At the beginning of the 40th year the last letter from parents came. Mother begged them not to leave.

Parents managed to get home, but they could not stay there, because the lands of southern Poland were captured by the Germans and their parents were administratively evicted to another region of Poland, presumably to Calvary . On the way they were seen by distant relatives one last time. According to unconfirmed reports, in August 1942 they died in Auschwitz.

Only the younger brother of Arie managed to get to Palestine - for children under 18 years of age certificates for Palestine were issued free of charge and without hindrance.

And Oswald stayed in Vilna , studied and worked in the shoe business with a Jewish shoemaker, on his own initiative working part-time for free to help a large family of shoemakers survive. Later the whole family was destroyed by the Germans.

Then Oswald settled in the city of Turets, where he began the best relations with Belarusians .

And, in the end, hiding his nationality, he finds himself a clerk-translator in the Belarusian police of the city of Mir, thanks to his knowledge of many languages. I got a black police uniform with gray cuffs and a collar, riding breeches, boots and a black cap, but without the image of a skull, and weapons. So he became a German policeman with the rank of non-commissioned officer for nine months (before exposure).

Two weeks before his arrival in the Belarusian city ​​of Mir , on November 9, 1941, by order of the Germans, Jews gathered in a city square between two churches, the Orthodox and the Catholic, where they obediently arrived at the indicated time - with children, old people, bundles of clothes and supplies stocked up on the road. Over one and a half thousand (according to other sources - 1600 or 1700) Jews from the city of Mir and other places were shot by Germans in a sand pit on the outskirts of the city with the active assistance of the local police under the command of Semyon Serafimovich ^[2] . The remaining 800 Jews were resettled in the dilapidated Radziwill castle .

During his service in the German police, he took part in actions to save Jews. With his help, according to various sources, from 200 to 300 Jews of the city of Mir were saved from execution ^{[3] [4] [5]} . Another 500 Jews did not dare or could not escape, although all were warned by Oswald.

Hiding from the Nazis , in 1942 he ended up in a monastery , where he voluntarily baptized.

After the war, in 1945, Rufaisen returned to Poland, studied as a priest and became a Carmelite monk.

In 1962, Brother Daniel wished to obtain Israeli citizenship under the Return Act, but was refused. The appeal was also dismissed. However, Rufaisen was able to immigrate to Israel and obtain Israeli citizenship through naturalization .

Until the end of his days he lived in the Carmelite monastery "Stella Maris" in Haifa and was a shepherd of the community of Jewish Christians named after St. James at the Catholic Church of St. Joseph in Haifa.

He restored Christian worship in Hebrew .

In the city of Nahariya created a nursing home for the "Righteous of the World . "

When he was refused on the basis of “procedural orders” of 01/01/1960, Rufeisen appealed to the Supreme Court of Israel (case 72/62 “Oswald Rufeisen v. Minister of the Interior”).

In his appeal, Brother Daniel sought recognition of his right to repatriate to Israel on the basis that he was a Jew — if not religiously, then by birthright from a Jewish mother. He did not hide the fact that he converted to Christianity on a sincere and deep conviction, but insisted on his belonging to the Jewish people in the "national plan". Halakha also sees him as a Jew. The Ber-Yehuda directive, corrected in July 1958, and Shapira's “procedural orders” do not correspond to the exact wording of the Law on Return and, therefore, are not legal.

The Supreme Court recognized that Halakha regards the crossings as Jews, but did not recognize Halakha as part of Israeli law. The court acknowledged that Shapira’s “procedural orders” are a departmental instruction of a lower order that is inconsistent with Israeli law. The court also recognized that not a single Israeli law defines the term “Jew.”

The Supreme Court ruled that due to the lack of written legislative norms and, based on the secular nature of the Law on Return, the concept of “Jew” should not be interpreted in a strictly halachic sense, but based on the subjective opinion of the majority of the people: according to “how is this word sounds today in the mouth of the people ”(wording of Judge Berenzon),“ as we Jews understand it ”(wording of Judge Zilber), or simply in accordance with the opinion of a simple Jew“ from the street ”. Thus, according to the Supreme Court,

The judges also added that since neither the fathers of Zionism nor any Jew would ever have considered a Christian a Jew, the Law of Return does not apply to persons born of Jews who voluntarily changed their religion. Such a person can certainly apply for a right of residence in Israel, like other non-Jews, but he cannot be considered a Jew under the Law of Return, and he is not entitled to automatic Israeli citizenship or the rights of new immigrants. On this basis, Brother Daniel’s lawsuit was rejected.

Judge Haim Cohen did not agree with the majority opinion, opposing the subjective-collective criterion (the opinion of the majority of the people) in favor of the subjective-individual (the plaintiff’s own desire), but remained in the minority.

In the trial, Judge Zvi Berenzon said of Christian Jews:

The Jews jumped them out of the community of Israel ^[6]

Original text (Hebrew)

היהדות הקיאה אותם ובקהל ישראל

I didn’t like it when they called him “father”, “pater” ... According to Lyudmila Ulitskaya , he expressed anti-Trinitarian views ^{[7] [8] [9] [10] [11]} . The reliability and correctness of these testimonies raises a number of doubts ^[12] , since they also assert that Rufaisen allegedly “calls into question the deification of the Virgin Mary widely accepted in the Christian tradition” ^[7] - while such deification in orthodox Christianity does not exist at all.

Rufaisen's life became the basis of the biography of the protagonist of the novel Lyudmila Ulitskaya Daniel Stein, translator ( 2006 ).

• Cholawski Shalom . Oswald Rufajzen in Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust Volume 3, p. 1311.
• Nosenko-Stein E. “Fates of the Cross”: reality, myth and history in the “high” and popular cultures // “History - Myth - Folklore in Jewish and Slavic Cultural Traditions: collection. - M .: Center "Sefer", Institute of Slavic Studies, RAS, 2009. - Issue. 24 . - S. 214-230 .
• Oswald Rufaisen - brother Daniel. Anthology. Sam Ruzhansky, Leonid Komissarenko .

• http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/twersky080598.html
• http://www.opoka.org.pl/biblioteka/Z/ZF/daniel.html (gender)
• Daniel Rufaisen
• Way of the Cross from the World of Father Daniel
• http://7iskusstv.com/2011/Nomer5/Ruzhansky1.php S.Ruzhansky, L.Komissarenko: The experience of amateur study of the texts of books by Nechama Tek, Dieter Korbach and Lyudmila Ulitskaya
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfPXznzVVFA The Last Jew movie (Part 1/4) (prototype of Daniel Stein)
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5NMKGIPxAc The film "The Last Jew" (Part 2/4) (prototype of Daniel Stein)
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIABYD8TBLo The Last Jew movie (Part 3/4) (prototype of Daniel Stein)
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I7fbuCxW4Q The film "The Last Jew" (Part 4/4) (prototype of Daniel Stein)
• http://berkovich-zametki.com/2011/Zametki/Nomer8/Ruzhansky1.php S.Ruzhansky, Leonid Komissarenko: Portrait of Oswald Rufaisen (Aka brother Daniel) through the eyes of his savior and godmother Igumena EUZEBIА BARTKOWIAK
• http://berkovich-zametki.com/2012/Zametki/Nomer3/Ruzhansky1.php S. Ruzhansky, L. Komissarenko: Oswald Rufaisen: “I was born a Jew and die a Jew”
• http://berkovich-zametki.com/2011/Zametki/Nomer7/Ruzhansky1.php S. Ruzhansky: The truth about Oswald Rufaisen (brother Daniel). Interview with Professor Nehama Taek
• http://berkovich-zametki.com/2011/Zametki/Nomer9/Ruzhansky1.php S. Ruzhansky: Thanks to Daniel, I found myself in Israel. Conversation with Olga Agur, a member of the community of Daniel Oswald Rufaisen, with the appendix of her poems
• http://berkovich-zametki.com/2014/Zametki/Nomer2/Komissarenko1.php L. Komissarenko: Father Daniel. Fiction and reality. Special opinion.