The Yiddish Book Center's

Wexler Oral History Project

A growing collection of in-depth interviews with people of all ages and backgrounds, whose stories about the legacy and changing nature of Yiddish language and culture offer a rich and complex chronicle of Jewish identity.

"Michalina, Daughter of Israel": My Great-Aunt's Abduction by the Catholic Church

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Michel Araten, banking/operations researcher by profession, recounts the story of his father's sister Michalina, who was kidnapped at thirteen by Catholic clergy and lived her life as a pious Catholic woman for nearly sixty years before being reunited with her family and choosing to go live with them in Israel as a Jew.

This is an excerpt from an oral history with Michel Araten.

This excerpt is in English.

Michel Araten was born in Casablanca, Morocco in 1940.

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Other video highlights from this oral history

Speaking Hebrew in My Sleep

1 min 15 sec

They Spoke What I Swore was German: Growing Up in a Multilingual Home

1 min 29 sec

Fleeing the Vichy Government in Morocco to Manhattan: My Father, the "Undocumented Alien"

2 min 20 sec

Explaining Baseball to an Egyptian General, and Other Encounters From My Travels in the Middle East in 1947

1 min 54 sec

Witnessing the Aliyah of Soviet Jewry

1 min 46 sec

More information about this oral history excerpt

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