Ronit Kertsner’s documentary Torn, screening this week, through May 28, in the Times of Israel’s DocuNation

The Oral Law was meant to stay oral — flexible, merciful, alive. We wrote it into stone, and now even our most generous statute turns away the son of murdered Jews.

In 1943, in German-occupied Poland, a Jewish woman handed her infant son to a Catholic neighbor and asked her to take him in, in the name of the Jesus she believed in. It was the only way to keep him alive. The child’s parents were murdered in the Shoah. The boy grew up Romuald Waszkinel, devout, and at seventeen he entered a seminary. He became a Catholic priest and a professor of philosophy. He did not know he was a Jew. Then, when he was thirty-five and his adoptive mother was nearing the end of her life, she told him the truth: he had been born Jakub Weksler, the son of Jews the Germans had killed for being Jews.

What he did with that knowledge is the subject of Ronit Kertsner’s documentary Torn, screening this week, through May 28, in the Times of Israel’s DocuNation series. He took back his birth name. He found he could renounce neither the faith that had formed him nor the people he had been born to and nearly erased from. In his sixties he came to Israel to live as an observant Jew. And Israel — the one state on earth founded so that no Jew would ever again be homeless — turned him away. The Law of Return did not apply to him, the government ruled, because he still believed in Jesus. The son of murdered Jews, indisputably Jewish under halakha, was denied the automatic right of return and made to crawl through a five-year naturalization process to obtain by grudging discretion what should have been his by birthright.

Take the measure of that. A man whose parents were murdered for being Jews, who was hidden in the church to survive, who came home at last — and a rule said no. This is what happens when a law forgets that it was ever meant to serve justice. And it is not the accident of one statute. It is the late fruit of a much older mistake: the day we took a living law........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)