A Moral Challenge

Ha'aretz reports:

…"I sat in the synagogue during the Kabbalat Shabbat service and I said to myself: Is it real? After all, there are no Jews in Lublin, where did they come from?" said Yakub Weksler, a 63-year-old resident of the city, with excitement. "Until now I would just walk by this building, and now it will be a true home, a home of prayer."

Yakub Weksler is not exactly his name. He grew up with the name Romuald Waskinel, and he discovered his Jewish roots when he was 35 years old, after 12 years as a Catholic priest. His Polish mother revealed to him that during the war, his biological mother had entrusted him to her. She didn't remember his parents' name or where they came from. In 1992, Waskinel discovered he is the son of Yankel and Batya Weksler, and he found two of his uncles in Israel. He adopted his father's first name, Yakub.

His identity is split. Only after consulting with pope John Paul II did he decide to continue serving as a priest. Today he is a philosophy professor at the Lublin Catholic University, and accompanies groups to the Maidanek concentration camp, where his parents were murdered. He defines himself as "a Jew, the son of Jesus the Jew."

Waskinel-Weksler attended Sunday's ceremony at the synagogue wearing priestly robes and a black knitted skullcap. "God puts little people like you and me to the test, but we must remain as faithful to him as we can," he said. He considers himself a loyal Catholic as well as one of the Jews of Lublin, and is concerned that the new synagogue will not have a minyan of 10 worshipers for Shabbat prayers. "I have a prayer book, but the problem is that I don't know how to pray," he replied in response to the question of whether he would join the minyan.…

I have two hypothetical questions:

1. Would it have been better for this man to have died as an infant at the hand of the Nazis rather than live his life as a Catholic priest?
2. If you answered yes, why did you do so? Do you have sources to support you? If you answered no, why? Do you have sources to support you? Either way, please cite those sources.

Comments

I have heard of a number of people who have discovered that they are jewish very late in their lives. I find it fascinating that when these people discover they are Jewish; they suddenly have this drive to learn about their roots, and become very proud of the fact they are Jewish. Some even become religious Jews. For whatever reason, G-d decided to put these people in this situation, and they definitely fall under the category of tinok shenishba (a captured infant). From what I've learned, all of their aveiros are considered to be inadvertant in G-d's eyes. When young Jewish boys were conscripted for around 25 years to serve in the czars army, it was known that many of them would lose their judaism, and likely live and worship as Christians. I never heard of someone ever saying that it would be better if they had died than lose their Judaism.

[Paul]

Do we have to ask these questions at all? Shouldn't we rather try to relate with deep understanding to a person whose life has been shaped by the Shoah in a way that is incomprehensible to the vast majority of us? Neither triumphalism ("better he should have died")nor super-relativism ("at least he lived a Godly life, and he is as good a Jew as ...") provide anything other than facile and superficial answers. Only a supremely wise and compassionate posek could deal with this gentleman's situation from a halachic perspective; we don't seem to have to many of those around, and, they are unlikely to read or contribute to your estimable blog!
Here is a personally and theologically tragic situation, born out of the fires of the Shoah. We should not judge it.

[rebeljew]

If you mean the knee jerk answer, then yes, better that everybody should die etc. etc. This is really the same question posed around Rebbes who encouraged Jews to die in the Shoah, rather than seek relief in frei America or Israel.

http://rebeljew.blogspot.com/2007/02/worthy-goal.html

[Isa]

What would give a twist on this situation is instead of being a Catholic priest he instead married and had children...

[Yochanan Lavie]

I know of a man who converted to Islam, and moved his family to the Palestinean areas. The wife remained practising as a Jew, but the kids followed him to Islam. Although the circumstances are different, the kids are under the same dilemma.

[ira kaufman]

your question is no question.

[DovBear]

Only after consulting with pope John Paul II did he decide to continue serving as a priest.

Naturaly. The official policy of the church has always been that a bapitized Jew is no longer a Jew and can't be returned to Judaism. Ever. This is how the church justified the kidnapping of Jewish children and why Pope Pius told catholic orphanages not to return Jewish children to their families after the holocaust. JPII, incidently, affirmed this policiy.

[mazeartist]

As Jews, we are commanded to sacrifice our lives over worshipping idols. Even if we were to fake our conversions in order to survive, this priest has no excuses for staying loyal to Catholicism, a religion that hid his Jewish identity from him. He should have returned to Judaism a long time ago.

[Dan]

to be fair, its not as though Catholicism hid his heritage from him, it was his adopted mother. I don't know what prompted her to suddenly come clean about this, but there doesn't seem to be any indication that he faked anything in order to survive; it was all he knew, and he appears sincere in those beliefs. Finding out at the age of 35 that one had a Jewish mother does not impart any "Jewish identity", and ancestry alone would not necessarily alter one's belief system.

As to which is better, according to Qohelet not being born at all is much preferable to any length of time in this world. But on the other hand, Hashem takes a dim view of killing children (even to put them out of their misery), and states that having children is a blessing and even a mitzvah.

Since Yakub was alive, I'd say pikkuah nefesh would apply. A long tradition beginning with Ezeqiel 18 holds that even if a person becomes an idolator, life is better, because 'while there's life there's hope' - s/he have the opportunity to do tshuvah.

In any case, he made no deliberate renounciation of G-d and acceptance of idols; as I said before, that was the only life he knew, and he appears sincere in that life. Thus, he clearly falls into the tenok shenisba category.