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In 1962, the Israeli Supreme Court faced a case so unusual that the judges themselves admitted the real difficulty wasn’t legal — it was moral. How do you tell a man who saved 150 Jews from the Nazis that he isn’t Jewish enough?
Meet Oswald Rufeisen. Born in Poland in 1922 into a Jewish family, raised in the Zionist youth movement, dreaming of moving to the Land of Israel. Then the war came, and his biography took a turn that no screenplay writer would dare submit.
Using forged documents identifying him as German and Christian, he got himself hired as a secretary and translator at a German police station in the Belarusian town of Mir. From that position, he systematically tipped off the local Jewish community about upcoming Nazi operations, smuggled weapons, and when the ghetto was about to be liquidated — warned them in time. Around 150 people fled to the forests and survived. Most of them eventually settled in Israel.
When he was caught and arrested, he escaped and hid in a convent. It was there, in 1942, that he converted to Catholicism. By 1945 he had become a Carmelite monk — deliberately choosing that order because it had a monastery in Israel. He spent the next thirteen years trying to get permission to move there.
He arrived in Israel in 1958, known by then as Brother Daniel. He applied for an immigration certificate under the Law of Return and asked to be registered as Jewish by nationality. The Minister of Interior said no.
So he took it to the Supreme Court.
The Court’s Dilemma (Or: When Secular Law Turns Out to Be Stricter Than Religious Law)
Here’s where it gets genuinely interesting — and a little philosophically dizzying.
Under halacha (Jewish religious law), the answer is unambiguous: a Jew who converts to another faith remains a Jew. Full stop. The Babylonian Talmud puts it plainly: “Israel, though it has sinned, is still Israel.” If an apostate performs a Jewish betrothal ceremony, it’s legally valid and requires a get (religious divorce) to dissolve — precisely because his Jewish status was never lost. Justice Silberg, who wrote the majority opinion, walked through sources from Maimonides to the Shulchan Aruch and found them entirely consistent on this point.
The prosecution tried to argue that an apostate is somehow a “partial” Jew — pointing out that he can’t count toward a prayer quorum, can charge interest to fellow Jews, and doesn’t inherit from his father. Silberg dismissed this with elegant logic: status is binary. You either have it or you don’t. You can’t be three-quarters Jewish. The asymmetries the prosecution cited are sanctions directed at the person, not evidence that the status has evaporated. (As for the prayer quorum: it would be rather odd, Silberg noted, for someone praying to another god to count toward a Jewish quorum.)
So: under religious law, Brother Daniel is Jewish. Case closed?
Not quite. Because the Law of Return is a secular law, passed by a secular parliament, containing no reference to religious law whatsoever. And secular laws, Silberg argued, should be read the way ordinary people actually use words.
The question became: what does “Jew” mean to Jewish people in everyday life?
And the answer, the majority concluded, was painfully simple. In the living consciousness of the Jewish people — shaped by centuries of persecution, by the memory of those who died rather than convert in Spain, during the Crusades, in the pogroms — “Jewish” and “baptized” simply don’t coexist in one person. Not as a theological ruling. As a gut feeling. As collective memory.
The secular state, paradoxically, drew a harder line than religious law. As Silberg himself put it with a trace of sadness: had Israel been a theocracy, Brother Daniel would have gotten what he asked for.
The Dissent That Stings
Justice Haim Cohn disagreed — and his dissent is the most memorable part of the whole decision.
His argument was straightforward: the Law of Return doesn’t define “Jew.” The government’s 1958 directive adding the condition “does not profess another religion” was, in his view, an unauthorized restriction — the government narrowing a law that the legislature had left intentionally open. The registration form itself separates “nationality” and “religion” into two distinct fields, which is the legislature telling you: these things can differ.
But Cohn’s sharpest moment was historical. He reminded his colleagues of the thousands of Jews throughout history who converted publicly while secretly remaining Jewish — Marranos, crypto-Jews — hiding their identity to survive in countries where they’d put down roots. They concealed who they were, and the doors stayed open.
Now here was a man who did the exact opposite: openly Christian, openly claiming Jewish identity. And the doors were shut again.
He cited a Midrash on Isaiah: “Open the gates, that the righteous nation may enter.” The text doesn’t say priests, Levites, and Israelites — it says the righteous nation. The gates are open at any hour, to whoever wishes to enter.
Four justices to one. Petition denied.
Epilogue
Brother Daniel’s identity card was issued with a blank where “nationality” should have been. Justice Silberg was almost cheerful about this: not everyone can fill in every field of a form. Like someone with no religious affiliation, for instance.
In 1963, Rufeisen obtained Israeli citizenship through naturalization — as a non-Jew, on general grounds, like any other foreign resident.
He lived the rest of his life in the Stella Maris Carmelite monastery on Mount Carmel. He never stopped considering himself Jewish. The court’s decision didn’t change that — it just put a dash in a box on a form.
Ludmila Ulitskaya thought his story was worth a full novel. Daniel Stein, Interpreter, published in 2006, became one of the most celebrated works of Russian literature of that decade.
The legal question was settled 4–1. The human question remains open.
