Brother Daniel and the law of return

Oswald Rufeisen, later known as Brother Daniel, was a Jewish resistance hero during the Holocaust who converted to Catholicism and then fought for the right to immigrate to Israel as a Jew. His case, Rufeisen v. Minister of the Interior, forced Israel to confront a defining question: is Jewish identity a matter of religion, nationality, or something more complex?

Essential Questions

1. Who gets to define identity — the individual, the community, or the state?
2. What obligations does a nation have toward those who sacrificed for its people?
3. What defines Jewish identity — religion, ethnicity, nationality, or something else?

Big Ideas

1. Laws struggle to keep up with human complexity. 
2. Personal identity and legal identity are not always the same.
3. Individual stories humanize history in ways that statistics cannot.