Jean-Marie Lustiger walked nervously up to the dais to preside over his first mass. The church was packed and the silence palpable. Just as the young priest was about to speak, someone from the crowd yelled, “Get the Jews out!” Lustiger’s reply broke the stunned silence, “All right, if the Jews must leave, that means the guy on the cross and his mother behind me will have to go as well!”
Max Jacob, an important French poet of the early 20th century, was born to Jewish parents in 1876. Also a painter, he lived in extreme poverty. Jacob met Pablo Picasso in 1901. They shared a studio and later lived three doors from each other in Paris.
Edith Stein, the first Jew to be declared a saint by the Catholic Church, was born in Breslau, Germany, on Yom Kippur, 1891. Her father died when she was two and her mother, a devout Jew, raised her and her six siblings. Stein earned a doctorate in philosophy at the University of G÷ttingen. In 1921 she read the autobiography of Teresa of Avila, which drew her into a personal relationship with Jesus.
Born Israel Zoller in 1881, he was appointed chief rabbi of Trieste, Italy, in 1918. In the 1930s, he helped German Jews fleeing the Reich. As World War II broke out, he became Rome’s chief rabbi.
