On October 12, 1981, Edith Stein was born in Breslau, Germany (present day Wroclaw, Poland) into a committed Jewish family. Edith's pursuit to expand her vast wealth of knowledge was notable from an early age and she later went on to say in her autobiography that her mother was fond of the Sabbath and Jewish festivals. In 1904, Edith disowned Judaism and instead became atheist. On the quest to find her religious faith, Edith became fascinated by both Spanish mysticism and the Catholic Church.
Edith went on to study philology at philosophy at the Universities of Breslau and Göttingen. Edith's first actual encounter with Roman Catholicism was at Göttingen. During her studies at the University, she met Edmund Husserl, who was the founder of phenomenology. This study was one that spoke of phenomena…show more content… On October 11, 1998, she was also canonized and declared a martyr-saint.
In 1955, The Edith Stein Guild for aiding converts was founded in the United States and in Leuven, Belgium the Archivum Carmelitanum Edith Stein was built. A Carmelite monastery was also built near Auschwitz in the 1980s, mostly in her memory.
At the time of the canonization of Stein, Abraham H. Foxman, who was a national director of the Anti-Defamation League at the time wrote about how the Carmelite monastery by Auschwitz ignored the reality that the main purpose for the camp was the extermination of Jewish people. The point contradicting was that it wasn't just a place for Christian martyrdom, as the monastery portrays it to be, despite the truth that many Christians, specifically Polish priests, died in Auschwitz. Furthermore, controversy still persists around Stein's canonization because some critics target how she was killed because of the "Jewish blood" in her veins, regardless of her conversion. This example portrays the Nazi view that the racial identity of the Jews could not be changed even by
