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Reuel Abraham is or was a former Luftwaffe pilot who was born as Karl Heinz Schneider in Germany in 1924, according to A Treasury of Jewish Anecdotes and a 1966 article in The Miami News. These sources report that as a young boy he was involved with the Hitler Youth. In 1942 at age 18, Karl Heinz voluntarily joined combat forces in the Luftwaffe and soon became a dive bomber pilot flying a Ju 87 Stuka.He was stationed in Poland, where 3 million Jews were in the process of being killed as part of the Holocaust.
Once Schneider walked past a synagogue in a small Polish town, where his squadron was stationed. Schneider happened to witness Nazi storm troopers killing a group of Jews in a courtyard of the synagogue. The sight of the synagogue's rabbi, who did not let go of the Torah even in his death made a great impression on Karl Heinz. He became a changed man; from then on he used all means to disobey orders.
He faked illness to avoid flying, he dropped bombs into lakes and forests, where no people could have been hurt, and even altered bombs' detonators to prevent them from exploding. Even so, Schneider still felt he should pay somehow for the harm he brought to innocent people. After the end of the war, he decided to work as a coal miner for twenty years. During those years, as self-imposed penance, he anonymously donated two-thirds of his wages to organizations that helped Jewish war orphans, and Jews who survived concentration camps.
After his penance ended, he sold the land he owned in Germany, and bought a farm in Galilee, Israel. He then went to rabbis in Haifa, told them his story and asked to be converted to Judaism. Rabbis who investigated the story, permitted the conversion, in spite of the fact that the applicant had years of service in Hitler's army. Karl Heinz Schneider changed his name to Reuel Abraham, studied Judaism, and became a citizen of Israel. He was circumcised in Haifa's hospital.
References
- ^ Lawrence Jeffrey Epstein (1989). A Treasury of Jewish Anecdotes. p. 5. Retrieved 2010-04-03.
- ^ "Ex-Nazi bomber pilot converts to Judaism". The Miami News. April 21, 1966. Retrieved 2011-04-08.