I gave him a double lesson. He picked up the pronunciation quite quickly and gave the impression of being linguistically very gifted. As he was leaving he told me that he has no money at the moment to pay for the lessons, but will be sure to settle up with me at the first opportunity. He is the most original private pupil of the few I have had over the years. Oh, and he saw my index cards on the table and asked what they were for. I told him I was compiling a Hebrew-Arabic dictionary and was particularly interested in the Palestinian dialect. He opened his arms and rushed to kiss me. He really is quite small, barely as high as my shoulder. Very expansive and very observant. As he was leaving he asked if I was a monk.
“I teach French in an Arab Catholic school for girls,” I told him, and did not mention that I am also a member of the Community of Little Brothers.
“Oh, you teach French!” he exclaimed in delight. “That’s simply splendid! We can work a bit on my French as well!”
Is it really so obvious I am a monk? I would never have believed it.
17. 1963, Haifa
L
ETTER FROM
D
ANIEL
S
TEIN TO
W
ŁADYSŁAW
K
LECH
Dear Władek,
Let me try to explain what is going on. The picture I had in my mind of the country I so loved from afar bore absolutely no relation to reality. I have found here nothing of what I expected, but what I have seen has greatly exceeded my expectations. I came to Israel as a Jew and a Christian. Israel has welcomed me as a war hero, but does not accept me as a Jew. My Christianity is the touchstone for my people. All the years I have been here, I have been reluctant to write to you about the long saga of my lawsuit, but everything has finally come to a conclusion and I will summarize what it was all about.
My difficulties with the immigration service began the moment I arrived at the port of Haifa. I considered that I had the right to come to Israel under the Law of Return, which was framed to enable Jews to come and settle in Israel no matter where they had been living before the state was created. For this purpose a Jew was defined as anyone born of a Jewish mother who considered himself a Jew. The young official when he saw my soutane and cross furrowed his brow and concluded I was a Christian. I confirmed this dreadful surmise and compounded his misery by informing him that by profession I was a Catholic priest and by nationality a Jew. A whole conclave of customs and immigration sages assembled who, after much disputation, put a line through the box for ethnicity.
This was the beginning of an epic which developed into a seemingly endless three-year lawsuit and reached its culmination a month ago. I lost. It was a ridiculous waste of time. I asked permission from my superiors at Stella Maris, they asked their superiors, and I was allowed to appeal to the Supreme Court of Israel. I then had to raise money for the legal fees. Everybody tried to talk me out of it but, as you know, I am stubborn. The other side proved even more stubborn. They have not granted me citizenship as a Jew but have promised it by naturalization. I will shortly become an Israeli citizen but will have no right to call myself a Jew in Israel. If I go to Poland or Germany everybody accepts that I am a Jew. Not the State of Israel. My certificate reads, “Nationality not established.” I did pretty much come out on top in my struggles against the Gestapo and the NKVD, but suffered ignominious defeat at the hands of Israel’s bureaucrats.
You are bound to wonder why I made such a fuss about this. Władek, I was thinking about the Jewish Christians who will come to this country after me. You cannot imagine what a hullabaloo there has been around this lawsuit. Judges and rabbis have fallen out over it, which was not at all my intention.
I would like Jewish Christians, and there are not a few of them in the world, to be able to return to Israel and restore the Church of St. James, the Jerusalem community whose origins lie in the Last Supper of the Master and his disciples, which all Christians venerate. So far I’m not succeeding too well. We have, nevertheless, a small group of Catholics, mainly Poles, which includes several baptized Jews. We meet in an Arab church, where our brothers allow us to celebrate Mass on Sunday evenings after their own service.
I’m very grateful for the magazines and have to admit that you are my only source of news about the Church. Our monastery lives outside of time and recent Catholic publications are rarely available. Instead the library is full of the kind of literature I am not very keen on, although sometimes it can be interesting. You do not write about the state of the Pater’s health. Has he had his operation?
Brotherly greetings,
Daniel
18. 1959–83, Boston
F
ROM
I
SAAK
G
ANTMAN’S NOTES
I have come across an Israeli newspaper with an item which took me back in memory to events which occurred 20 years ago. In the spring of 1945 Esther and I emigrated on the very first train out of Belorussia to Poland. A young Jew was traveling with us, Dieter Stein, who had played a crucial part in saving some of those in the Emsk ghetto. In other words, it was he who had saved our lives. We knew nothing about him at first beyond the fact that Stein had helped us in some way, been arrested and sentenced by the Germans to be shot, but had escaped. We were told there were “Wanted” posters with his portrait in the towns. A considerable reward was offered for his capture.
We met him later when he turned up in Durov’s brigade. They very nearly shot him, too, but fortunately I had just been brought to the brigade to operate on a wounded partisan. Because I was there and able to vouch for him I managed to save the life of the man who had saved mine.
All the details of our train conversation two years later have quite gone from my mind. He gave the impression of being a somewhat exalted young man. He was talking about entering a Catholic monastery, but in those years to be unbalanced was the norm. Genuinely normal people were the first to die. Survivors were the few individuals endowed with exceptional toughmindedness and a certain insensitivity. Highly strung people were ill-equipped to get through the ordeal. If I had been a psychiatrist I would have written a research paper about psychological adaptation in the extreme conditions of a partisan camp. Actually, that would have comprised only one section of a major study about prisons and camps. It is a book which should be written and no doubt someday will be, but not by me. I hope others will write it.
The mental adaptations I observed in this young man served a noble purpose, and no doubt originated in a refusal to accept the kind of actions he had observed. This rejection motivated him to withdraw to a monastery. It was an escapist impulse.
Over the following years I lost track of Dieter Stein and, although I maintained contact with one or two people, it was sporadic. Most of the “partisan” Jews who survived ended up in Israel or, less frequently, in America, but they were all “am haaretz.” very simple country people, and I’m not so sentimental as to want to meet them more frequently than once in ten years.
To come back to the monk, Dieter Stein. Even after I moved to America, I always read the Israeli newspapers, and in 1960 or so discovered they were full of photographs of him. He had evidently gone to live in Israel, entered the Stella Maris Monastery on Mount Carmel, and promptly started a lawsuit against the State of Israel, demanding that he should be granted Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return.
The newspaper commentaries accompanying this news were fairly surprising and I could feel that the issue had brought hidden tensions to the surface. Stein was an unusual instance of a war hero who had achieved something extraordinary, but who had also to explain having served in the Gestapo, which in itself is considered a crime. To cap it all, Stein was a Roman Catholic priest, a Christian.