80 years after the Holocaust: Germany nominates female minister with Jewish roots

On Monday, 60-year-old German politician Karin Prien was named the next Education Minister, making history as the first woman of Jewish background and only the second Jewish-background minister overall to serve in Germany since the end of World War II.

Prien is currently serving as the education minister in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, co-chair of the National Board of the center-right Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU), and heads the party’s Jewish Forum.

She is among the most well-known representatives of the party’s liberal, left-leaning wing, and will be part of the government under future chancellor Friedrich Merz, who is seen as a strong friend of Israel.

While Prien is not Jewish according to halakha (Jewish law), as her Jewish background comes from her two grandfathers, her family’s fascinating and tragic history during the Holocaust has strongly influenced her, she said.

Prien was born in the Netherlands, where her parents had fled during the war, and only learned German after her family moved back when she was young. She received German citizenship at age 26, and started to openly discuss her Jewish background in 2016.

“My mother was simply afraid. For her, we lived in the land of the perpetrators. And so it was clear that we wouldn't talk about it,” she said.

In Germany, only some 0.1% of the population, between 100,000 and 200,000 people, are Jewish. There are barely any well-known Jews in German society, and they have a much smaller public presence than in the U.S. or the UK, for example.

Before the Holocaust, there were some 525,000 Jews, around 0.75% of the total population. Germany's most prominent Jewish politician to date was Walter Rathenau, who served as the Foreign Minister of the Weimar Republic before being murdered by right-wing extremists in 1922.

In an interview with the Zeit magazine, Prien explained, “You have to imagine: your father came from a Jewish department store family from Krefeld and survived Nazi persecution in Amsterdam with great difficulty. His mother was murdered in an extermination camp. My father's grandmother also died in Theresienstadt.”

“When my parents met in Amsterdam in the 1950s, there was already a vibrant Jewish community there again. They had Jewish friends, and they went to bar and bat mitzvahs; it was normal.”

However, Prien's family then moved to a small town in the state of Rheinland-Pfalz.

“In such a small town, there were no Jews. It was a completely different social climate than in Amsterdam: Declaring one's Jewishness wasn't something that was taken for granted, and it wasn't something one did without trepidation. The third Auschwitz trial had just ended, and the confrontation with the perpetrators was just beginning,” Prien explained.

While she wasn’t raised religiously, she read a lot of American Jewish literature growing up, including Chaim Potok, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Philip Roth, she said.

“Or the film Exodus, about the creation of Israel, that was my absolute favorite. That was my inner world. But that didn't happen outside the door.”

At age fifty, a visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Israel prompted her to open up about her Jewish heritage in public.

Now, Prien is set to become the first Jewish-background minister since Gerhard Jahn, who served as Justice Minister from 1969-1974.

Prien has been a strong defender of Israel and has increasingly spoken out against antisemitism and the rise of the far right in Germany since Oct. 7, 2023.

Last year, she strongly criticized as “definitely anti-Semitic" some of the comments made at the Berlinale 2024 awards, including those by the Jewish Israeli moviemaker Yuval Abraham, who said Israel was an “apartheid state,”

“When such vocabulary is used by an Israeli Jew, it does not make things any better,” Prien said.

A month after the Hamas invasion of Israel, she wrote on 𝕏: “Mom, today I'm wearing your little Star of David over my dress. For decades, you only wore it hidden under your clothes. You were afraid to admit you were Jewish in Germany. I thought that was exaggerated, and I was wrong. You were right.”