Oswald Rufeisen tricked the SS, saved Jewish lives, was thrown into prison for it, and escaped by hiding among Catholic nuns. The whole time, he dreamed of one thing: living in a Jewish country.
But when he finally applied to move to Israel, he was denied, even though he had been born Jewish. This was because during the war, while hiding in the convent, he had converted to Catholicism, so now, he was petitioning Israel’s Supreme Court for citizenship as a Catholic monk named Brother Daniel. Israel had to decide: can you be Christian and still belong to the Jewish people?
A Zionist from birth
Rufeisen was born into a traditional Jewish family near Kraków. To his community, he was Shmuel, and he hoped that one day, when he moved to the Jewish state, everyone would use his Hebrew name. For as long as he could remember, Rufeisen had dreamed of immigrating to the Jewish homeland, devoting himself to the Zionist Youth Movement and waiting for the day he would join his comrades in British Mandate Palestine to build the Jewish future.
But when the Germans invaded Poland, that dream gave way to one directive: survive.
When Rufeisen stumbled across a set of identification papers on the side of the road, he grabbed them immediately. These documents identified their owner as a Christian, allowing him a freedom of movement denied to his fellow Jews.
In November 1941, Rufeisen made it to the town of Mir, just days after the SS had slaughtered most of the town’s Jewish population. The terrified, grieving survivors were crowded into the ruins of an abandoned castle, surrounded by armed guards, another ghetto that bred fear and disease.
Rufeisen was horrified by what he found. But when he heard that the Germans were seeking translators for the local police, who spoke only Russian, he jumped at the chance to sabotage the SS from within. It was the perfect opportunity: Rufeisen spoke both German and Russian fluently, without a trace of an accent. Armed with his language skills and his stolen papers, the 19-year-old did the unthinkable: he got himself recruited to the German-controlled police force.
Once inside, he was no longer just another Jew on the run, but a spy who had infiltrated the enemy’s inner circle. He could stroll in or out of the ghetto whenever he wanted. It was there that he spotted Jewish men he recognized from before the war, quietly organizing an underground resistance, and Rufeisen wanted in. With his access to the outside world and his insider’s knowledge of the enemy, he became the perfect liaison to Mir’s tiny Jewish underground.
For nine months, he carried messages to the resistance movement outside the ghetto. But coded letters weren’t the only thing he smuggled in. Under the cover of night, he brought in whatever weapons he could scrounge, knowing that every mission could be his last. If the Germans discovered their translator was working with the Jewish underground, they would shoot him, or worse.
The great deception
In June 1942, Rufeisen overheard a chilling conversation: the Mir ghetto was to be liquidated on August 13. Everyone inside would be deported to concentration camps or murdered on the spot. The meager arsenal he had smuggled in was nowhere near enough for the resistance to mount a real defense. Starved, emaciated, and under-equipped, the fighters were no match for the Germans, and they knew it.
But Rufeisen had a plan. If it worked, hundreds of people would live. If it failed, the entire ghetto would pay the ultimate price.
As the Germans prepared for the liquidation, Rufeisen rushed to the police chief with urgent news: Russian partisans had been sighted nearby. Nearly all of the policemen fell for the tip, chasing after partisans who didn’t exist. With the ghetto left virtually unguarded, anyone who could run escaped through a hole in the fence, leaving behind the young, the sick, and the elderly. Nearly 200 Jews managed to escape that day, though many were rounded up within the month and executed. The remainder found refuge in the forest, fighting with the partisans. At the end of the war, only 50 of Mir’s 3,000 Jews survived.
Rufeisen’s diversion worked — until it didn’t. When the police returned empty-handed to find the ghetto mostly deserted, they immediately suspected their translator.
Without a convincing explanation, Rufeisen confessed everything.
“I am neither an enemy of the Germans nor a Pole,” he told them. “I will tell you the truth because so far I have always worked with you openly and honestly, but nevertheless I consider the planned anti-Jewish operation to be very wrong — for I myself am a Jew. And this was the only motive for my action.”
The convent
The Germans threw him into prison, but Rufeisen had managed to build real friendships among the local police force, and the guard assigned to watch him let him slip away, reporting his escape only after he had a head start.
Rufeisen raced through the streets with soldiers in hot pursuit. Desperate, he threw himself at the doors of a convent, where the nuns hurried him inside.
Outside those walls, the world was on fire. Inside, Rufeisen found something like peace, though grim possibilities raced through his mind. He had no idea if the escape plan had worked, or if anyone from the underground was still alive.
With nothing to occupy his time but his own dark thoughts, he worked his way through the convent’s library, starting with the New Testament. For the first time since the war had started, the Holy Land didn’t feel so far away. He found comfort in the story of Jesus, another young Jew at the mercy of a brutal empire. Jesus had suffered terribly, but he had risen again. Perhaps the Jewish people would one day be reborn, after all they had suffered.
The prospect was so enticing that just three weeks into his stay, Rufeisen approached the Mother Superior with a request: he wanted to convert to Christianity.
Until that moment, he had pretended to be a Christian in order to survive. But there were no SS officers in the convent, no danger at his back. This was a choice, made of his own free will. For over a year, he studied his new religion there. Eventually, once he felt secure in his new faith, he fled to the forest to join the partisan fighters, including some familiar faces who had made it out of Mir.
He had gone into the war a Jew, but came out of it a Catholic.
Brother Daniel
When the horror finally ended, Rufeisen faced a decision: where would he go?
Europe was in ruins. While he was fully committed to his newfound faith, he had never stopped dreaming of the Jewish homeland. He knew the Carmelite Order of the Catholic Church had a division in the Holy Land. Hoping to be sent to the new Jewish state, Rufeisen took his final vows as a monk. He was 27 years old, but he was reborn: no longer Shmuel, the Polish Jew, but “Brother Daniel,” a devout Catholic who, like his Biblical namesake, had survived the lion’s den.
For 10 long years, the Carmelite Order denied his repeated requests to be transferred to Israel. But finally, in 1958, he received the news he had waited for his whole life. The Polish government granted him a travel document with one condition: he had to give up his Polish citizenship, which he did without a second thought. Technically stateless, he didn’t care. Soon, he would be living in his homeland.
After Israeli authorities approved his temporary visa, he applied for citizenship under the Law of Return, the law that guaranteed every Jew the right to settle in Israel and claim citizenship immediately. After all, the Jewish state had been founded as a sanctuary, on the promise that the Jewish people would never again be homeless refugees.
In his application, Brother Daniel described his intense love for the Jewish homeland, and his conviction that despite his Catholic faith, he would always belong to the Jewish people.
“I base this application on the ground of my belonging to the Jewish people, which I have continued to do although I embraced the Catholic faith… I chose an Order which has a Chapter in Israel… to travel to the land for which I have yearned since my childhood,” he wrote.
But the Jewish state rejected him. The Law of Return was for Jews. By his own admission, Brother Daniel was a Catholic.
The trial
Shocked and despondent, he sued. “My ethnic origin is and always will be Jewish,” he argued. “I have no other nationality. If I am not a Jew, what am I? I did not accept Christianity to leave my people. I added it to my Judaism.”
The Israeli government wouldn’t hear it. But Brother Daniel’s case had forced an uncomfortable truth to the surface: the Law of Return had never actually defined who counted as a “Jew.”
Brother Daniel was ethnically Jewish. He had survived the mass extermination of his people and resisted heroically. He felt Jewish to his very core, a member of the tribe who simply worshipped in a church rather than a synagogue. The government, however, insisted that by converting to Catholicism, he had removed himself from the Jewish nation.
In 1962, the case reached the Israeli Supreme Court. The stakes extended far beyond one man’s identity. The court’s decision would shape decades of Israeli immigration policy and determine the fate of hundreds of thousands of Jews with complex identities who might one day seek to immigrate. After all, the Jewish people had been exiled for two thousand years, and the diaspora had not been kind. Many people around the world saw themselves as Jewish even if their families had intermarried, been forced to convert centuries earlier, or in this case, had willingly left Judaism for another religion.
The trial began in a packed courtroom. Nuns and monks in their habits sat alongside Jews in kippahs and peyos. Rufeisen appeared in his brown habit and sandals, his hair shaved into a monk’s tonsure. The judges combed through pages of rabbinic literature, Jewish law, history books, and essays by Israel’s founders, searching for answers.
Jewish law, in fact, held that Brother Daniel was still a Jew. According to the rabbis, even a sincere conversion could never erase that status: “an Israelite, even when he sins, is an Israelite.” Being Jewish was more than just a religion, it carried a national and peoplehood dimension that no act of conversion could sever. At the same time, rabbinic tradition held that full participation in Jewish communal life required returning to Judaism. You couldn’t remain a practicing Christian and still function as a full member of the Jewish community.
That was the tension the judges were grappling with. They felt strongly that Jewish identity was about more than religion. Being Jewish meant choosing to identify with the Jewish past and the Jewish future. Could Brother Daniel truly share in the fate of the Jewish people if he had converted, not just to any religion, but to the Catholic Church, historically responsible for centuries of forced conversions, persecution, and charges of deicide?
After five hours of debate, the court arrived at a decision by a four-to-one majority. The Law of Return was for Jews who identified as Jews, not Jews who had voluntarily distanced themselves from the Jewish people by converting to another religion. Yes, Brother Daniel was a Zionist. Yes, he had saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust. Yes, according to Jewish law he was Jewish. But the court ruled that his conversion had separated him from the Jewish people, and denied him the right to Israeli citizenship.
A life in Israel nonetheless
Brother Daniel was devastated. The court’s decision felt like a denial of his inner truth, of his Jewish soul. But he refused to let the rejection crush his dreams. He spent the rest of his life at the Stella Maris Monastery in Haifa, conducting Mass in Hebrew, and eventually became an Israeli citizen through naturalization. He remained connected to his Jewish past, regularly meeting with the Jewish survivors of Mir and testifying against the police chief who had once been his boss.
Until he passed away in 1988, Brother Daniel continued to identify as Jewish. In his will, he wrote: “I don’t know if I am to be doomed or spared, but from all the things you may know about me, I would like you to remember that I was born a Jew, and died a Jew.”
The law that had to be rewritten
His story did not end with his death. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling, Israel amended the Law of Return, defining a Jew as someone “born to a Jewish mother or who has converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion.”
It sounds straightforward, but questions of identity are never simple.
The core tension that Brother Daniel’s case exposed — between the individual’s sense of belonging and the state’s responsibility to safeguard the collective identity and continuity of the Jewish people — has never fully gone away. Israel has held fast to the Supreme Court’s ruling, blocking the immigration of various groups who identify as Jewish but practice Christianity. Nevertheless, the core tension between individual identity and the state’s responsibility to safeguard the collective identity and continuity of the Jewish people remains a sticking point to this day.
