Incoming German prime minister Friedrich Merz has named Karin Prien as education minister, the first Jewish woman appointed as a minister in the country, and only the second Jewish minister overall, since the Holocaust.

Prien, a lawyer who currently serves as education minister of the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, is a member of the center-right Christian Democratic Union party, whose National Board she co-chairs. Prien serves as spokeswoman for the CDU’s Jewish Forum.

The cabinet named Monday is expected to enter office on May 6.

Born in Amsterdam, where her maternal grandparents moved from Germany before Hitler’s rise to power, Prien moved to Germany when she was young and took citizenship there at 26.

Though she was not raised religious, she grew up conscious that members of her father’s family had been killed in the Holocaust. When Prien became a German citizen, she said, it was for her mother “a big to-do, and she didn’t really like it.”

In 2016, after a visit to the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem at........

© The Times of Israel