In November 2023, a month after the Hamas attack on October 7, Karin Prien posted a photo of herself wearing her mother’s Star of David necklace, writing: “Mom, today I’m wearing your Star of David necklace over my dress. For decades, you wore it hidden under your clothes. I thought your fear of revealing our Jewish roots was exaggerated, but now I realize that I was wrong – and you were right.”
For the first time siche the Holocaust, a politician whose two grandfathers are Holocaust survivors, is set to become minister in Germany’s federal government.
Karin Prien, currently the Education Mminister for the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, is set to be appointed Germany’s federal minister of Education, Family, Women, and Youth in the government led by Chancellor Friedrich Merz.
While Prien is not Jewish according to halakha (the 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 is a member of Merz’s center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party. She often speaks about her personal history and the influence of Jewish culture and traditions on her life, as her grandparents survived the Holocaust. She chairs the Jewish Forum within her political party.
Born in the Netherlands, 60-year-old Prien learned German and obtained German citizenship, although she has said that her mother had mixed feelings about this process, describing it as “a big deal” that she did not fully support.
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.”
Prien has been a strong defender of Israel. In November 2023, a month after the Hamas attack on October 7, she posted a photo of herself wearing her mother’s Star of David necklace, writing: “Mom, today I’m wearing your Star of David necklace over my dress. For decades, you wore it hidden under your clothes. I thought your fear of revealing our Jewish roots was exaggerated, but now I realize that I was wrong – and you were right.”