Churches

Father Bronius Paukstys and his brother Juozas

The Priest’s Request Born in 1897 to a farming family with eleven children, Father Bronius Paukstys entered the priesthood and joined the Salesian order, living the life of a monk. When the Germans occupied Lithuania, Father Paukstys began saving Jewish lives. He did not follow the footsteps of Archbishop Vincentas Brizgyz, head of the Catholic Church in Lithuania, who turned down the Jews' petition for help on grounds that this may jeopardize the Church's position or of Father Ignatavicius... Continue reading

The Celis Family

Joseph Celis; his daughters Bona and Lucy Celis; his two sons, the priests Hubert and Louis CelisMarie Louise Tabruyn, Father Louis Celis’ housekeeperAlfons and Clementina MarisBaron Raymond and Baroness Marcelle de Tornaco   Priests, Farmers and Noblemen   This is the story of the rescue of four children of one family whose parents were deported to Auschwitz. Ten people were recognized as Righteous for their rescue. They came from different backgrounds – priests, nobility, farmers and a... Continue reading

Hieromonk Daniil Tymchyna

Three Boys in the Studite Monastery   Uniow (Univ) is a small village, Tarnopol district today in Ukraine. We know that during the war Jews were hidden in the village both in the schoolhouse and the monastery. Clara Safran, her young son Roald, her brother Samuel Rosen and  his wife Josefina, were hidden by the Dyuk family in the schoolhouse. Because of the need of secrecy, they probably were not aware that not far from their dark and small hiding place, there were also three Jewish children... Continue reading

Monsignor Giuseppe Placido Nicolini, Father Aldo Brunacci, Father Rufino Niccacci, Luigi Brizi and his son Trento

The Assisi Network Assisi is the home of Francesco di Bernardone – St. Francis of Assisi – the founder of the Roman Catholics' Franciscan and St. Clare (Poor Clares) Orders. As such it is a most meaningful place for Roman Catholics. No Jewish community was ever known to exist in Assisi. Paradoxically however, the only time in history when there is record of Jews living in Assisi is during the Holocaust, when the town and its churches, monasteries and convents became a safe haven for several... Continue reading

The Konyukh, the Kalutas and the Kuyavas

Filip and Teklya Konyukh and their sons Aleksander and AndreyAnna and Konon Kaluta and his daughters Anna Chugay and Mariya BlyshchikAndrey Yarina Kuyava and their son Nikolay “Saint Feodosiya”   This is the extraordinary story about the power of faith and of the rescue of a young Jewish woman by Baptist villagers in Volhynia. In early September 1942, a 20-year-old Fanya Rozenfeld from Rafałówka arrived at the home of Filip and Teklya Konyukh, simple farmers living in the village of... Continue reading

Euzebia Bartkowiak

The Mother Superior’s Tears On the morning of Sunday, August 16, 1942, someone knocked on the gate of the Sisters of Resurrection convent in the town of Mir (Stołpe County, Nowogródek District, today, Belarus). Opening the gate, one of the nuns who resided in the convent was astounded to see a man slip in right past her. Oswald Rufajzen (Rufeisen), later, Brother Daniel) had escaped from the police station adjacent to the convent. Oswald had come to Mir from Wilno posing as a Pole. His... Continue reading

Monsignor Pierre-Marie Théas

The Bishop of Montauban, Monsignor Théas, like the Archbishop of Toulouse, Monsignor Saliège, authored a vigorous condemnation of the Vichy regime’s anti-Semitic policies and instructed all parish priests in his diocese that it be read aloud on Sunday, August 30, 1942. Bishop Théas was aware of the pressures and threats exerted by the authorities on Archbishop Saliège in their attempt to prevent publication of his protest. Théas hid his plan from the intelligence services and his protest... Continue reading

Pastor Jean Séverin Lemaire

Pastor Jean Séverin Lemaire was pastor of the Evangelist congregation in Marseilles and a lecturer in Bible studies. As an intellectual and a pious Christian, he refused to acquiesce to the persecution of Jews. In late 1941, after delivering a lecture to an audience in Marseilles, Lemaire made the acquaintance of Joseph Bass, a Russian-born Jew who had gone underground and established a rescue organization called Service André. Lemaire agreed to support Bass’s organization which formalized... Continue reading

Monseigneur Jules-Gérard Saliège

Monsignor Saliège, the Archbishop of Toulouse, was an active and vigorous supporter of Jews who endeavored to improve the Jews’ situation in the detention camps of southwestern France. As early as November 23, 1941, Saliège sent a protest letter to the Vichy authorities against their Jewish policy, even as the rest of the French Catholic hierarchy maintained silence or supported this policy. Saliège obtained precise information about the first deportations, in August 1942, from the... Continue reading

Father Jean Fleury

During the occupation, Father Jean Fleury of Poitiers was active in rescuing persecuted Jews. In his capacity as priest, Fleury paid daily visits to a detention camp for Gypsies which was adjacent to a camp for Jews, the Route de Limoges camp. There, Fleury met with his friend, the young Rabbi Elie Bloch, who was forbidden to enter the Jews’ camp and the two discussed difficulties; Fleury brought Bloch news from the camp and letters from the internees and supported his efforts to protect the... Continue reading

Anna Borkowska

Anna Borkowska was the mother superior of a small convent of nine Dominican nuns located near Kolonia Wilenska, on the road leading from Vilna to Vileika. When the killing of the Jews in Vilna began, Borkowska opened the convent's gates to a group of 17 members of the illegal Jewish Zionist pioneer underground movements. Despite the enormous difference between the two groups, very close relations were formed between the religious Christian nuns and the left-wing secular Jews. The pioneers found... Continue reading

Vladimir and Galina Imshennik

The Orthodox priest Vladimir Imshennik and his wife Galina were residing in the village of Nosilowo, Molodeczno District, Wilno County, Poland (nowadays the region is a part of Belarus). From 1940 to 1950 Vladimir served as rector at the village Church of Transfiguration.  At the end of June 1941 the area was occupied by the Germans, and in October the same year a ghetto was established in the nearby town of Lebiedziew. Among its inmates was one of Vladimir’s acquaintances, a Jewish doctor... Continue reading

Metropolitan Chrysostomos, Mayor Lucas Carrer

Here Is the List of Jews You Required When the Second World War broke out, there were about 275 Jews living on the Greek island of Zakynthos in the Ionian Sea. Until 1943 the island was under Italian control and the Jews remained unharmed, however after Mussolini’s fall the Germans occupied the Italian territories and on September 9, 1943 a German force landed on the island. The German commander ordered all Jews to be assembled so that they could be deported to the mainland and from there to... Continue reading

Lucien Bunel (Father Jacques)

“Goodbye Children”   Lucien Bunel, or Father Jacques, as he was know by everybody, was a Carmelite priest and the director of the Petit Collège des Carmes, in Avon, near Fontainebleau. Born in 1900, into a working class family in Normandy, he was ordained as a priest in 1925. In his first years as a priest he served in the St. Joseph seminar in Le Havre. While teaching religion and English to the students, he felt especially close to the port’s dock-workers and the people from the poor... Continue reading

Iosif and Anna Nazaruk

Hinka Goldfarb lived in Kobryn, Polesia (today Belarus). The Germans occupied the town on June 23, 1941, and five months later established a ghetto, where they crowded together 8,000 Jews. In July 1942, about 3,000 Jews from the ghetto were taken to Brona Gora and murdered. Most of the others were left to live for another three months, and were killed in October 1942. About 500 managed to escape to the forest in the midst of an armed uprising by the local underground, but most of them were... Continue reading

Father Pierre-Marie Benoit

Father Pierre-Marie Benoit was a French national who until 1940 lived in the Capuchin monastery in Rome. When war between France and Italy was clearly inevitable, he returned to his homeland and moved into the Capuchin monastery in Marseilles. The Jewish laws enacted by the Vichy government set in motion a tumultuous and active chapter in Father Benoit's life. Out of a profound commitment to humanitarian values, Father Benoit pledged himself to protecting Jewish refugees. Utilizing his ties... Continue reading

Father Arrigo Beccari and Dr. Giuseppe Moreali

The names of Arrigo Beccari and Dr. Giuseppe Moreali are connected with the rescue of a hundred Jewish youths. A group of orphaned children from Germany, Austria and Yugoslavia had been transferred to the village of Nonantola, in central Italy. Don Arrigo Beccari served as a teacher in the village, and as the principal of a Catholic seminary for priests, and Dr. Moreali was the lead physician. When the children arrived, a warm relationship developed between the two villagers and the children,... Continue reading

Bernhard Lichtenberg

Bernhard Lichtenberg was born on December 3, 1875 at Ohlau, some 30 kilometers southeast of Breslau in the then Prussian province of Lower Silesia. He was the second oldest of five siblings. The small merchant family of the Lichtenbergs belonged to the Catholic minority  in a predominantly Protestant city. In 1886 the Catholics made up some 31 per cent of the 15,787 strong population of Ohlau. There was also a tiny Jewish community of 123 (0.8%). Bernhard Lichtenberg obtained his Abiturium... Continue reading

André and Magda Trocmé, Daniel Trocmé

The Village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon Pastor André Trocmé was the spiritual leader of the Protestant congregation in the village of Le Chambon sur Lignon in the département of Haute-Loire in Southeastern France. His predecessor, Charles Guillon, had been elected mayor of the town in the early 1930s, and André Trocmé took over as spiritual leader of the congregation. When in June 1940 France was occupied and the Vichy regime was formed, Trocmé urged his congregants to shelter persecuted... Continue reading

Don Gaetano Tantalo

Seder at the Parish   A small piece of paper with hand written numbers displayed in the Yad Vashem Museum of Holocaust History tells the extraordinary story of the celebration of Passover at the home of an Italian parish priest during the German occupation of Italy in 1944. It is the page on which Don Tantalo did his calculation to determine the exact date of Passover. He not only saved seven Jews from deportation and murder, but manifested deep respect for their religious identity and went... Continue reading

Jane Haining

“There is not much to report here on the way to heaven.”   The story of Jane Haining is the story of a Scottish woman who was deeply committed to her faith and who sacrificed her life for her ideals. It was her calling that took her away from her native Scotland, first to Budapest, and finally to Auschwitz, where she perished. Born in 1897, on a farm near Dunscore, Dumfriesshire, in Scotland, Jane Haining was appointed matron of the Girls’ Home of the Scottish Mission in Budapest,... Continue reading

Gertrud and Reverend Otto Mörike

Reverend - and later dean - Otto Mörike (b. April 7, 1897) was a pastor of the Evangelical Church and one of the members of the “Bruderrat” (fraternal council) of the Confessing Church in Württemberg. The Bruderrat, in response to an appeal by its Berlin Branch, provided refuge and help to Jews “on the run”, especially during the final phase of World War II. Mörike consistently opposed the Nazi regime. On the occasion of the 1938 plebiscite on the annexation of Austria and Hitler's... Continue reading

Hermann Maas

Hermann Maas was born on August 5, 1877 in Gegenbach/Schwarzwald.  Through both his father’s and mother’s sides, he was descended from a family of Protestant pastors from Baden.  Having studied theology at the universities of Halle, Strassburg, and Heidelberg, in the autumn of 1900, he entered the office of curate, which was the beginning of a life-long career in the Protestant church. Since the days of the Sixth Zionist Congress in 1903, which Maas had visited out of curiosity while on a... Continue reading

Bishop Pavel Gojdic

Bishop Pavel Gojdic was acting as an administrator of the Greek Catholic Diocese in Presov region since 1927. There were also a few Russian Orthodox inhabitants under his jurisdiction. Believers under his administration were composed of four different nationalities: Slovak, Rusyn, Ukrainian and Hungarian. They differed also in their language. His efforts to minimize their differences and to emphasize the unifying factors of his believers were cut short by Slovak nationalism, which led to Slovak... Continue reading