(189 1-1942)
Catholic nun and convert from Judaism who was murdered in a gas chamber at Auschwitz. Edith Stein, the daughter of a timber merchant, was born on October 12, 1891, in Bres-lau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland). Stein’s father died when she was two, and she and her seven surviving siblings were raised by a strong and devout Orthodox Jewish mother. Stein, however, renounced Judaism and proclaimed atheism in 1904. She was among the first generation of German women to attend a university. She began her studies at the University of Breslau and continued them at Gottigen.
There she studied philosophy under Edmund Husserl. When Husserl moved to Freiburg, Germany, Stein, whose intellectual acuity had impressed him, moved as well and worked as his assistant. At Freiburg she earned her doctorate with highest honors. Drawn to Catholicism through her philosophical studies, Stein decided to convert while reading the autobiography of St. Theresa of Avila. She was baptized on January 1, 1922. She then relinquished her assistantship with Husserl to teach at a Catholic girls’ school in Speyer. In 1932 she began teaching at the German Institute for Scientific Pedagogy, but in 1933, after the Nazis came to power, she was dismissed because of her Jewish ethnicity. The dismissal led her to take a step she had long contemplated. In 1934 Stein entered the cloistered Carmelite order in Cologne as Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. In 1938, with the intensification of Nazi anti-Jewish measures, the order sent her to a convent in Echt in the Netherlands. The transfer did not save Stein. Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940. In 1942 leaders of the Catholic and Reformed churches in the Netherlands protested to the Nazi Reichs Commissioner Arthur Seyss-Inquart against the deportation of Dutch Jews. He informed them that if they did not publicize their protest, he would continue to make an exception for Jewish converts to Christianity. Nevertheless, when the Bishop of Utrecht issued a pastoral letter condemning the Nazi’s anti-Jewish policy, Seyss-Inquart ordered the arrest and deportation of all Jewish Catholics (Rhodes 1973, 344-345).
On July 26, 1942, Stein and her sister Rosa, who had also converted to Catholicism, were seized and transported to Auschwitz. On August 9, 1942, they were killed in a gas chamber there. Edith Stein was canonized by Pope John Paul II on October 11, 1998. That the Catholic Church proclaimed Stein a saint angered some Jews because of Stein’s status as a Jewish convert to Christianity who died in the Holocaust.
