NEW YORK – In the summer of 1941, when the German occupation of Lviv unleashed terror on the city’s residents, Kurt Lewin, the son of a prominent rabbi, made his way to St. George’s Cathedral, the seat of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. There he met with Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, the church’s leader.
Lewin hoped Sheptytsky could help save not only manuscripts and documents owned by his father, who had earlier been killed in the city’s violence against the Jews, but the rest of his family as well.
Writing in his 1994 memoir, A Journey through Illusions, Lewin recalled meeting Sheptytsky for the first time.
“Learning that I was the son of Rabbi Dr. Ezekiel Lewin, he put his arm around me and hugged me to his powerful chest. He gently stroked my hair and repeatedly whispered …‘Poor child.’… I briefly described the tragic situation of the dying Jewish community and the death camp in Belzec. The old man, looking like an Old Testament patriarch, listened carefully, tears streaming down his wrinkled cheeks,” Lewin wrote. “When I finished, he again embraced me, reflected a while and suggested that I return in two days. ‘Son, your father was my friend. You can rest assured that I will do all I can. Bring with you the manuscripts and I will place them in a safe place. However, I have in mind to find a way to save you.’”
Sheptytsky, who lived from 1865 to 1944, kept his word. Under false papers supplied by the church, Lewin, a Jewish boy from Lviv, survived the war’s Nazi terror by living with monks.
Seven decades after this and other acts of benevolence, the Anti-Defamation League last week posthumously honored Sheptytsky for his heroism in saving Jews from the Holocaust.
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