Download The Case of Brother Daniel

The Case of Brother Daniel:
Israel’s Law of Return allowed all Jews to immigrate freely to Israel. In the first few
decades of the state, but no official definition of "Jew" was included in the law.
The first legal challenge to the Law of Return came in 1962 with the "Brother Daniel"
case.
Brother Daniel (born Oswald Shmuel Rufeisen, 1921–1998) was born in Poland, in the
town of Zadziele in the Krakow region, to Polish-Jewish parents. As a boy, he belonged
to the Zionist youth movement, and later, in 1939, he spent two years on a hachsharah
(“training farm”) preparing for emigration to Palestine.
During World War II, when the Nazis invaded Poland, he fled to Vilna with his brother
and some friends, hoping to have a way out of Europe. When a limited number of visas
were made available, he sent his younger brother to Palestine (Israel). His brother arrived
in Israel.
When the Nazis arrived, Rufeisen became a forced laborer, chopping wood in the frozen
forests, but with the help of a farmer he escaped. Rufeisen had false identity papers, and
as a person fluent in Polish and German, he presented himself to the Germans as a Polish
German, and in November 1941 moved from Lithuania into White Russia, to the town of
Mir.
In November 1941 he came to Mir bearing false identity papers, and began working as a
translator at the local police station
While working with the Germans, Rufeisen helped Jews in the ghetto, providing them
with guns he had smuggled from police.
When Rufeisen heard from his superior about the date for the liquidation of the Mir
ghetto, Rufeisen warned the Jews, and between 200 and 300 of them managed to get out
of the Mir ghetto and flee to the forest, joining the partisans.
After the liquidation of the ghetto, Rufeisen's real identity was revealed and he was
arrested, but he managed to escape from the Germans, hiding for more than a year, from
August 1942 until December 1943, hiding in a monastery.
In 1945, after the war, Rufeisen returned to Poland. He converted to Christianity (Roman
Catholicism) and became a Carmelite Monk, studied for the priesthood, but still
continued to regard himself as a Jew. He.
In 1958, he relinquished his Polish nationality, asking to immigrate to Israel, and he was
given the “Jewish” travel document for emigration to Israel.
Brother Daniel arrived in Israel (in 1958) and applied for an identity card in, as all
citizens of Israel were requested to do, according to the Registration of Inhabitants
Ordinance of 1949. The identity card included, among others, entries indicating the
religion and nationality of the applicant. Brother Daniel applied to the card indicating his
religion as Roman Catholic and his nationality as Jewish.
Brother Daniel also applied for an immigration certificate under the 1950 Law of Return,
declaring that “A Jew who has come to Israel and subsequent to his arrival has expressed
his desire to settle in Israel may, while still in Israel, receive an oleh's (new immigrant to
Israel) certificate.” Brother Daniel’s petition was rejected. The government response was
that a person who has another religion could not be registered as a Jew.
The case was taken to Israel’s High Court of Justice in 1962. The High Court of Justice
ruled against Rufeisen, denying his request, on the grounds that the word “Jew” in the
Law of Return did not include an apostate, and that by joining another religion, Brother
Daniel had forfeited his right to for citizenship according to the Law of Return, and that
Brother Daniel was not immigrate under the Law of Return and could not be entitled to
an identity card listing “Jewish” as his “nationality.”
It is a paradox that the Chief Rabbinate in Israel ruled that Brother Daniel, though a
Christian, should be given citizenship as a Jew, because he was born to a Jewish mother,
while Israel’s Supreme Court’s refused his application and ruled that despite the Jewish
(Orthodox) law (Halacha), one couldn’t be both a Catholic priest and a Jew.