By Jeremy Sharon
(NOVEMBER 1, 2021 / JERUSALEM POST) Later this week, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who became a Catholic priest in Poland, moved to Israel and served the Christian community here for nearly four decades, will be buried in Poland as a Jew alongside his mother and sister who were murdered by the Nazis.
Having grown up in a religious Jewish household, Father Gregor Pawlowski, born Jacob Zvi Griner, was saved during the Holocaust by dint of papers he obtained stating he was Catholic, and he eventually was baptized and ordained as a priest.
He eventually moved to Israel stating that he was part of the Polish people but that he was part of another nation first, the Jewish people, with whom he felt an ongoing attachment and among whom he wished to live.
Many years later, Rabbi Shalom Malul, dean of the Amit Ashdod Yeshiva in Israel was on a trip to Poland with his students, and noticed a headstone Pawlowski had made for himself at the mass grave where his mother and sisters had been murdered by the Nazis, and made contact with the priest upon his return to Israel and formed a friendship.
Malul will this week fly out to Poland with several of his students, give Pawlowski a Jewish burial at that site and recite kaddish, the mourners' prayer, in accordance with the priest’s wishes that he be buried as a Jew.
Jacob Zvi Griner, as he was originally named, was born in 1931 to a religious Jewish family and lived with his parents, brother and two sisters in the city of Zamosc, in the Lublin region in eastern Poland.
In October 1939, the Nazis occupied Zamosc and eventually transferred the Jewish population to a ghetto and pressed them into forced labor, during which time Griner’s father was taken away and presumably murdered.
Griner’s brother Chaim had moved to Russia while the Soviet Union temporarily controlled the area before handing it to the Germans.
