Romuald Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel

Romuald Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel (born February 28, 1943 in Stare Święciany ) is a Polish Roman Catholic priest of Jewish descent.

Life

He was born in the ghetto in Stare Święciany near Vilna as the second son of Jakob and Batia Weksler. A few days before the eviction of all ghetto residents to the Sobibor extermination camp , his mother entrusted him to the Polish Catholic family of Piotr and Emilia Waszkinel. A few days later she and her other son, Samuel, died in the gas chamber in Sobibór. His father probably only died in 1944/1945 during the death march from the Stutthof concentration camp .

The child was baptized in the Catholic Church and was given the first name Romuald; it was raised as a child of its own by the foster parents. In 1945 the family was relocated to Pasłęk . He was teased at school for his "non-Aryan" appearance, but his foster parents continued to claim that he was their birth child. He was raised in a strictly religious manner. It wasn't until February 23, 1978, when he was 35 years old, that his mother told him his true story. Then he decided to combine his previous first and last name with the name of his murdered father. On September 1, 1995, Piotr and Emilia Waszkinel were awarded the honorary title Righteous Among the Nations by the Yad Vashem in Jerusalem .

After graduating from high school, he entered the seminary in Olsztyn . In 1966 he was ordained a priest . In 1968 he began studying philosophy at the Catholic University of Lublin . There he was employed as a lecturer at the Institute for Theoretical Philosophy. He mainly dealt with philosophical anthropology , metaphysics and French philosophy. In 2008 he took early retirement. In 2009 he decided to move to Galilee in Israel to study the Hebrew language.

He is a member of the Polish Philosophical Society and in 2007 was a co-founder of the Polish B'nai B'rith Society.

Jakub Weksler, who is now called Yaacov, received Israeli citizenship in September 2014.

literature

• Romuald Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel: Zgłębiając tajemnicę Kościoła ( Exploring the mystery of the Church). WAM, Krakow 2003, ISBN 8373180540 .
• Katarzyna Wiśniewska: Z motyką na antysemityzm (With the pick against anti-Semitism). In: Gazeta Wyborcza , Warsaw, 10. – 11. October 2009, p. 27.
• Renee Ghert-Zand: When the Law of Return does not apply to a Holocaust survivor ( When the Law of Return does not apply to a Holocaust survivor ). In: The Times of Israel, Jerusalem, October 16, 2014.

media

• Andrzej Klamt, Peter Hartl : In someone else's skin. D / F 2009, 52 min. First broadcast by arte, more information at www.halbtotalfilm.de