Aunt Edith – Jewish Heritage of a Catholic Saint

Description

Second Edition
Susanne M. Batzdorff

“Edith Stein was the proud daughter of a German Jewish family. After a spectacular academic career with a summa cum laude doctoral degree wh became the principal associate of Edmund Husserl, the father of phenomenology. In 1922 to the anguish of her family and many friends she became a Roman Catholic. More astonishingly, in 1933 she becomes a cloistered Carmelite nun. In 1942 the Nazis took her from her convent in the Netherlands and deported her to Auschwitz where she and her sister Rosa perished in the gas chambers. In 1998 she was declared a saint of the Roman Catholic Church.

“This second edition contains two new chapters featuring details of St. Edith’s canonization in October 1998 and a complete translation of the letter released but he Vatican in February 2003 that Edith Stein wrote to Pope Pius XI expressing her burning concern about what was happening in Germany under the new Hitler regime in the spring of 1933.

“Susanne Batzdorff, an observant Jew, is Edith Stein’s niece and lives in Santa Rosa, California. She gives us here an intimate and vivid portrait of her aunt in her formative years as well as a living memoir of a closely knit Jewish family facing the horror of life under constant threat of Nazi terror.”