6 - Rabbinerin Regina Jonas: seeing the face of the Shekhinah

Summary

Stein died “for” her people, while Jonas served and suffered “with” her people. These are two very different forms of spiritual resistance. Stein's resistance was that of a Catholic nun; Jonas's was that of a Jewish rabbi.

When Sister Teresa Benedicta was arrested in the summer of 1942 and deported to the east, Jonas was working as a slave laborer in an armament factory and as a rabbinerin in Berlin to communities that had lost their rabbis. In 1942, Berlin Jews were being deported at a rate of a thousand a day to Theresienstadt and to ghettos in Riga and Lodz, but more and more they were sent directly to Auschwitz. Rabbinerin Jonas ministered to local congregations who had lost their rabbis due to deportation or emigration. She worked at the Jewish hospital and the Jewish old age home, and consoled and taught people in her home when there were few other places for the Jews of Berlin to meet. Jonas's calling was to be “with” and “among” her community. She had correctly argued in her ordination thesis that Israelite and Jewish spiritual leaders “worked/or the entire community and also sometimes in and with the entire community.